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A Polish court on Friday rejected Germany’s request to extradite a Ukrainian suspected of blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines carrying Russian gas to Germany, after politicians in Warsaw had called for the case to be dropped.
The judge ruled that Germany had provided insufficient evidence to justify extradition. He ordered the release of the suspect, identified as Volodymyr Z, who was detained in Poland last month under a European arrest warrant issued by Germany.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk welcomed the ruling in a post on X. “The problem with Nord Stream 2 was its construction, not its blowing up, no matter how brutal these words may sound and may upset some Germans,” he told reporters earlier on Friday.
The pipelines were seriously damaged by underwater explosions in 2022, months after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Russia had halted supplies through Nord Stream 1, which had carried gas to Germany for a decade, before the blasts. Nord Stream 2, which had been opposed by Poland and others for deepening Europe’s dependence on Russian energy, never entered service.
Swedish and Danish investigations into the sabotage were closed last year, but German prosecutors subsequently issued international arrest warrants for a group of Ukrainian divers they alleged to have sailed from Germany to plant the explosives in international waters.
Politicians from across Poland’s divided political spectrum opposed Germany’s extradition efforts. Last week, Sławomir Cenckiewicz, head of Poland’s national security bureau and a key adviser to rightwing President Karol Nawrocki, told the Financial Times that Germany should drop its prosecution if it wanted its Russia policy to align with Warsaw and other Nato allies.
“If Germany is prosecuting someone based in Poland who destroyed the source of income of the Russian war machine, then we see a clear contradiction in interests between Poland and Germany, especially when it comes to how we perceive the reality after [Russia’s invasion in] 2022,” Cenckiewicz said.
A second Ukrainian suspect arrested in Italy over the Nord Stream attacks also won a temporary reprieve against being extradited to Germany this week. The man, named by prosecutors as Serhii K, was detained near Rimini in August. He will not be handed to German authorities for now after Italy’s top court annulled an extradition order and ordered the case be reheard.
In the Polish case, Judge Dariusz Łubowski said Friday’s ruling also reflected the fact that the explosions occurred in international rather than German waters, that Ukraine was fighting a “just war” against Russia and that, if the sabotage was organised by the Ukrainian state, Kyiv should be held accountable rather than the individuals involved.
Cenckiewicz said that he had no knowledge on whether Poland assisted Ukrainians in the sabotage operation, but added that “the interest of the Polish state is to protect all who potentially took part in damaging Nord Stream 2, which we treat as part of the war machine of Russia”.
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