Nord Stream Sabotage Trial Opens in Hamburg — Serhii Kuznetsov Silent, Defence Moves to Dismiss
Hamburg, 14 October 2026
Key points
- The trial opened on 14 October before the state-security senate of the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court; the court admitted the indictment on 2 September, finding Serhii Kuznetsov sufficiently suspected as co-perpetrator of a war crime by attack on civilian objects, causing an explosion, destroying structures and disrupting public utilities, and set 16 hearing days to 17 December with more in January and February 2027
- Kuznetsov, 50, a former Ukrainian officer accused of leading the group that placed the charges from the yacht Andromeda, denied involvement and exercised his right to silence; his lawyer Nicola Canestrini moved to dismiss, calling the pipeline a Russian weapon: "Is it unlawful to destroy an aggressor's infrastructure without a person coming to harm?"; Kyiv denies any role
- At the end of September the senate refused Nord Stream AG and Nord Stream 2 AG standing as co-plaintiffs: repair costs of a mid-nine-figure sum against initial investments of EUR 7.4 to 9.5 billion gave no special need of procedural protection
- A second accused, Volodymyr Z., a diver, was arrested in Pula on 19 August on a European arrest warrant after Poland released him in October 2025 rather than extradite; Croatia holds him pending extradition
Three years after the Baltic explosions a German court has begun hearing the only Nord Stream case to reach trial, against a defendant who will not speak and a defence that says there was no crime.
The indictment of 2 July rested on a December 2025 ruling of the Federal Court of Justice, in a detention appeal, that neither state immunity nor combatant privilege would shield the accused even if he had acted on a foreign state's orders, because covert acts by soldiers in civilian guise fall outside the privilege and the pipelines were civilian objects. Canestrini's motion asks the trial senate to decide the same question on the merits and the other way: that a pipeline financing an aggressor is a military object, and that a soldier of the attacked state who destroys it without killing anyone commits no crime. He also argues his client cannot defend himself while bound by Ukrainian state secrets. The federal prosecutor names no Ukrainian body as principal, no witness has yet spoken, as Signal No. 167 recorded of the opening day, and the court has fixed a calendar that runs past the fourth anniversary of the explosions.
The ruling on the motion to dismiss will fix, before any evidence is heard, whether this senate treats the pipelines as civilian objects. The Federal Court of Justice's view was given on detention, not guilt, so the trial court decides the characterisation afresh, and a dismissal would end the only prosecution in Europe while Poland's refusal of October 2025 stands as the opposite answer. The operators are outside the room: the senate's refusal of co-plaintiff status leaves the companies that lost the pipelines as spectators, and their loss, a mid-nine-figure repair bill, is on the record only as the reason they were excluded. Croatia's extradition decision is the one event on the horizon that could put a second account of the Andromeda before the court.
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