Italian police have arrested a Ukrainian national who German investigators believe coordinated the undersea bombing in 2022 of two gas pipelines that directly linked Russia to Germany, the German authorities said on Thursday.
It was the first arrest in the act of sabotage that occurred as the war in Ukraine raged, a technically sophisticated attack that had initially stumped investigators and led to much speculation about who had carried it out. Western investigators and intelligence officials later concluded that the attack was carried out by a pro-Ukrainian group.
“The federal prosecutor’s office has achieved a very impressive investigative success: It has identified and arrested a suspected mastermind behind the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines,” Stefanie Hubig, Germany’s justice minister, said in a statement.
The man, whom German prosecutors only identified as Serhii K. in accordance with strict privacy rules, was arrested early Thursday by Italian officers in Misano Adriatico, a small seaside resort on Italy’s east coast. The prosecutors said the suspect was a Ukrainian national.
It’s likely to take some time before the suspect is extradited to Germany, where he would face a German judge, an indictment and ultimately a trial, according to Ines Peterson, the spokeswoman for Germany’s federal prosecutor’s office.
Prosecutors said they believed that the arrested man coordinated the bombing, which was carried out by a crew of divers who planted explosives on two sets of undersea pipelines, known as Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2. The crew chartered a sailboat in Rostock, a German port city on the Baltic Sea, by using a shell company and fake identity papers and boating licenses, prosecutors said.
On Sept. 26, 2022, a patrol noticed a concentration of bubbles that turned out to have resulted from the massive underground explosions that damaged three of the four pipes.
The pipelines were not operational at the time of the explosion.
Germany had refused to use the recently completed Nord Stream 2 in the lead-up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, fearing that Moscow would use it to exert its influence over Western Europe. Russia had cut off gas flowing through Nord Stream 1, a move European officials believed was made to punish Europe for its opposition to the war in Ukraine.
The explosions promoted widespread speculation about who was behind the attack, with many blaming Russia, Poland or even the United States. It took investigators months to conclude that the crew behind the attack was working for Ukraine, which had the most to gain by ensuring that Russia could not easily export gas to Europe.
The Ukrainian government has denied that it ordered or coordinated the attack.
The arrest on Wednesday came more than a year after German prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for another Ukrainian man in the case. That suspect left Poland before the police could arrest him.
Christopher F. Schuetze is a reporter for The Times based in Berlin, covering politics, society and culture in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
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