Rachel More and Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk |REUTERS| BERLIN| Poland received a European arrest warrant from the Germans in Berlin, concerning the 2022 attack on Nord Stream pipelines. Still, Polish prosecutors told Reuters that the suspect, Volodymyr Z, has already left Poland.
The prosecutors added that he was able to leave because Germany had failed to include his name in a database of wanted persons.
The multi-billion dollar Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines transporting gas under the Baltic Sea were ruptured by a series of explosions in September 2022, seven months after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
German investigators believe Volodymyr Z, a Ukrainian diver, was part of a team that planted the explosives, the SZ and Die Zeit newspapers reported alongside the ARD broadcaster, citing unnamed sources.
Polish National Public Prosecutor’s Office spokeswoman Anna Adamiak said German authorities sent a European arrest warrant to the District Prosecutor’s Office in Warsaw in June for Volodymyr Z concerning proceedings conducted against him in Germany.
“Ultimately, Volodymyr Z was not detained because at the beginning of July, he left Polish territory, crossing the Polish-Ukrainian border,” she wrote in an emailed statement in reply to Reuters questions.
“Free crossing of the Polish-Ukrainian border by the above-mentioned person was possible because German authorities … did not include him in the database of wanted persons, which meant that the Polish Border Guard had no knowledge and no grounds to detain Volodymyr Z.”
The law in Poland does not allow for the publication of the full names of suspects in criminal investigations.
Germany said the Nord Stream inquiry did not strain its relationship with Ukraine.
“The procedures have no bearing on what the Chancellor (Olaf Scholz) has described as the support of Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s illegal war of aggression, as long as necessary,” the spokesperson added.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The German federal prosecutor’s office declined to comment on the media reports.
A married couple—a man and a woman—also Ukrainian diving instructors—have been identified in Germany’s investigation into the sabotage, but according to newspapers SZ, Zeit, and ARD, no arrest warrants have been issued for them so far.
The woman told broadcaster Welt on Wednesday that neither she nor her husband were involved and that she was in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, at the time of the pipeline attack.
The blasts wrecked three out of four Nord Stream pipelines, which had become a controversial symbol of German reliance on Russian gas in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Russia blamed the United States, Britain and Ukraine for the blasts, which largely cut Russian gas off from the lucrative European market. Those countries have denied involvement.
Germany, Denmark, and Sweden all opened investigations into the incident, and the Swedes found traces of explosives on several objects recovered from the explosion site, confirming the blasts were deliberate acts.
The Swedish and Danish investigations were closed this February without identifying any suspect.
(Reporting by Rachel More and Alexander Ratz in Berlin, Ludwig Burger in Frankfurt and Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk in Warsaw; editing by Miranda Murray, Raju Gopalakrishnan, Crispian Balmer and Mark Heinrich)
