A Second Arrest in the Mystery of the Nord Stream Pipeline Bombings
Croatian authorities have arrested a Ukrainian man in the seaside town of Pula in connection with the September 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, and Germany is seeking his extradition to face trial at the federal court in Karlsruhe (The Guardian; BBC).
The suspect is identified by German prosecutors as Vladimir Z and named in Polish court proceedings as Volodymyr Zhuravlev. He is a trained scuba diver whom German prosecutors allege was directly involved in planting explosives on the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines near the island of Bornholm (The Guardian; DW).
The explosives detonated on 26 September 2022, causing severe damage to both pipelines, according to the German prosecutor's indictment press release of 2 July 2026 (Generalbundesanwalt). Three of the four Nord Stream pipelines were damaged in the blasts. These pipelines were built to carry Russian gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea. The bombings occurred months after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine (The Guardian).
This is the second arrest in the case. German authorities had previously announced an arrest connected to the suspected sabotage on 21 August 2025 (Generalbundesanwalt). That suspect, identified as Serhiy K, was arrested in Italy and extradited (formally handed over) to Germany in November after unsuccessful appeals in Italian courts (The Guardian). Both the newly arrested man and the suspect already in German custody are Ukrainian nationals (CBC; DW).
German prosecutors allege that Vladimir Z belonged to a group that included Serhiy K and that together they planted the explosives on the pipelines (The Guardian). German authorities state that the newly arrested suspect is strongly suspected of jointly causing the Nord Stream pipeline explosions (DW).
This is not the first time Vladimir Z has been detained. He was previously arrested by Poland, which released him after a Polish court ruled against sending him to Germany (The Guardian). Germany had issued a European arrest warrant, a tool that lets one EU country ask another to arrest and transfer a suspect. The Polish court's reasoning was twofold: it argued that Germany had no jurisdiction (legal authority) in the Nord Stream case, and it asserted that the destruction of Nord Stream could be seen as a justified action by Ukraine as part of a defensive war (The Guardian).
The broader context here matters for several reasons. The Nord Stream bombings have been the subject of multiple national investigations since September 2022, with Sweden and Denmark both conducting probes before closing them, and Germany pursuing its own parallel investigation that has now produced two arrests and a formal indictment. The case sits at the intersection of international criminal law, EU judicial cooperation, and the politics of the Russia-Ukraine war. Germany's assertion of jurisdiction over sabotage of pipeline infrastructure that was, at the time of construction, a bilateral German-Russian energy project raises questions about which country's laws govern the destruction of cross-border energy assets during an active war. The Polish court's defensive-war rationale, if echoed by Croatian courts, would introduce the argument that sabotaging energy infrastructure can be a lawful military action during wartime, a position with implications well beyond this single case.
Berlin's extradition request will test whether the Polish ruling was an outlier or the first example of a judicial reasoning that could complicate Germany's efforts to bring both suspects to trial in Karlsruhe. With Serhiy K already in German custody following Italy's willingness to extradite, the Croatian proceedings will determine whether the two alleged perpetrators of the Nord Stream sabotage face trial together in a German federal court, or whether the case fractures along the jurisdictional and doctrinal fault lines that Poland's court identified.
