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Polish authorities have this week acknowledged they failed to arrest a Ukrainian man wanted by Germany on suspicion of blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipelines in September 2022.
The explosions were for a long time a mystery, with Russia and the west blaming each other for the incident, which occurred a few months after Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
But the details of the German investigation go some way to explaining who might have been behind one of the most spectacular cases of sabotage in recent European history.
What happened in the Nord Stream attacks?
Both Nord Stream 1 and 2 connected Germany directly to Russia via the Baltic Sea, circumventing Poland and Ukraine. The parallel pipelines were ruptured by a series of explosions that occurred on September 26 2022 near the Danish island of Bornholm.
The blasts caused leaks on three of the four Nord Stream pipelines that were so powerful that they were picked up by seismic monitors in Sweden, and led to huge patches of gas bubbles forming on the surface of the Baltic Sea.
The incident immediately triggered a complex blame game, with Russia, the US and Ukraine all named as possible culprits.
What did investigators find out?
There were competing theories about who was responsible for the attacks.
The investigations in Sweden and Denmark are believed to have focused on the suspicious movements of Russian military vessels in the area ahead of the explosions. Yet in the end the Swedes and Danes dropped their case, saying they lacked sufficient evidence to charge anyone.
But for the German authorities, all evidence pointed to Ukraine. The CIA had warned in the summer of 2022 that a group of Ukrainian saboteurs was planning to blow up the pipelines, using a rented sailboat and divers.
In the months following the blasts, investigators made a breakthrough. They came across a 15m-long yacht, the Andromeda, in north-east Germany which had been chartered around the time of the explosions.
Witnesses had seen five men and a woman aboard the vessel. When officials searched it they found traces of the explosive octogen, which can be used underwater.
When did authorities act?
This June, German authorities issued an arrest warrant for a 44-year-old Ukrainian national living in Poland. He was named as Volodymyr Z by Polish authorities, but Swedish newspaper Expressen has fully identified him as Volodymyr Zhuravlov, a diving instructor living in the Polish town Pruszków.
He was suspected of “anti-constitutional sabotage and causing an explosion”.
The man worked for a diving school run by a couple from Kyiv who are also suspected by German investigators of involvement in the explosions.
What gave Zhuravlov away?
According to a joint investigation by German media, including the public broadcaster ARD, a key clue was provided by the driver of a white van that had been caught in a radar speed trap on the island of Rügen, off the northeastern coast of Germany.
The van was allegedly used to transport diving equipment later deployed in the subsea attack.
Its driver identified Zhuravlov as one of the passengers. He is believed to be the person sitting next to the driver in the speed camera photo.
Why wasn’t he arrested immediately?
Germany sent its European arrest warrant against Zhuravlov to the Polish authorities in June — but they didn’t detain him.
Instead he was able to cross the border from Poland into Ukraine at the start of July, according to a spokesperson for the Polish prosecutor’s office. She said he had not been listed as a “wanted person” in the relevant database.
But media reports said Warsaw has shown little interest in bringing the culprits to justice and had questioned leads provided by German police pointing to Ukraine. Poland, as well as the Baltic states, had been vocally opposed to the Nord Stream project, which was seen as a Kremlin plot to deepen Europe’s dependence on Russian gas.
Has Russian gas kept flowing to Europe since the sabotage?
Before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it accounted for 46 per cent of gas imports into the EU.
That fell to 16 per cent last year, as EU governments — with the exception of Hungary, Austria and Slovakia — scrambled to wean themselves off Russian gas and find alternative suppliers.
While Russian pipeline imports dropped, the EU continued to import liquefied natural gas from Russia, though the US is now the main LNG supplier to the continent.
In May, Russian-piped gas and LNG shipments accounted for 15 per cent of total supply to the EU, UK, Switzerland, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia, according to data from ICIS.
Additional reporting by Richard Milne
Data visualisation by Cleve Jones
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