A Ukrainian citizen suspected by German authorities of involvement in the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline fled Poland after a European arrest warrant was issued, the top Polish prosecutor said.
The National Public Prosecutor’s office confirmed a media report that it received the warrant from Germany in June and pursued the suspect, identified as Volodymyr Z., but that he had fled to Ukraine last month.
The suspect “was not detained because at the beginning of July this year, he left Polish territory and crossed the Polish-Ukrainian border,” a spokeswoman for the prosecutor, Anna Adamiak, wrote in an e-mailed response to a Bloomberg query.
The suspect had been identified by Germany’s Federal Prosecutor as a skilled diver suspected of being involved with the explosion that destroyed part of the natural-gas link between Russia and Germany, according to an investigative report by the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, broadcaster ARD and Die Zeit weekly.
Germany’s federal prosecutor declined to comment. German government spokesman Wolfgang Buechner reiterated that the investigation into the Nord Stream attack is a priority, but declined to comment further.
The German prosecutors identified a Ukrainian man and woman who are also believed to be part of a five-member crew suspected of launching the attack from a sailing vessel, the Andromeda, though no arrest warrant has been issued for them, according to the report.
After an investigation into the blasts, Danish authorities concluded in February that there was “deliberate sabotage of the gas pipelines,” but found no “sufficient grounds to pursue a criminal case.”
The undersea link to Germany via the Baltic Sea was the main route for Russian pipeline gas flows before the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The explosions damaged both channels of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline as well as one of two for Nord Stream 2 in the waters near the island of Bornholm in eastern Denmark. The blast demonstrated the vulnerability of seabed infrastructure and prompted an increased military presence in the Baltic Sea.
The Polish prosecutor said German authorities failed to add the suspect’s name to a database of wanted individuals, allowing Z. to cross the border unhindered. For their part, German investigators expressed frustration with a lack of cooperation from Polish counterparts, according to the report.
A spokesman for Poland’s security agencies under the Interior Ministry, Jacek Dobrzynski, described cooperation with German counterparts as “very good.”