“A former Ukrainian military officer suspected of leading a team that sabotaged the Nord Stream gas pipelines in 2022 was detained in Italy on Wednesday under an international arrest warrant issued by German prosecutors, said investigators and people familiar with the case.
The officer, identified by German police as Serhii K., allegedly headed a team of two soldiers and four civilian divers covertly recruited by a special Ukrainian military unit to lay explosives that damaged the undersea pipelines, investigators said.
He is the first to be arrested among the crew suspected of carrying out the daring operation using a small sailboat they rented in Germany. The development marks a breakthrough in the international manhunt for the alleged culprits of the attack, which is thought to be among the largest acts of modern-day sabotage.
Italian police detained the suspect near the seaside town of San Clemente while he was accompanying his son to a local university, the people said. German prosecutors had issued international arrest warrants for him and several other suspects this year following a nearly three-year German investigation into the attack.
"Serhii K. was part of a group of individuals who placed explosives on the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines," Germany's federal prosecutor general said Thursday.
Prosecutors said they suspect the accused coordinated the operation. He was arrested on suspicion of jointly causing an explosion, anti-constitutional sabotage and the destruction of infrastructure, they said.
German investigators tracked down the suspect, who traveled with his wife and two of their children to Italy via Poland from Ukraine. When the suspect and his family arrived in the north of Italy on Aug. 18, the German police issued an arrest warrant and notified their Italian counterparts, said German prosecutors and Italian police.
The family then moved south to a village on the Adriatic coast, where the suspect used his passport to check into the accommodation, triggering an alert with Italian police, who dispatched the gendarmerie known as Carabinieri to arrest him, investigators said. The man didn't resist arrest, the Carabinieri said.
On Thursday afternoon, the suspect was being held in a prison in the coastal town of Rimini, the Carabinieri said. It wasn't possible to reach him or the lawyer who was assigned to him for comment. An appeals court in Bologna will rule whether to extradite the suspect to Germany.
Serhii K., a now-retired captain in Ukraine's armed forces, previously served in Ukraine's secret service SBU, as well as in an elite unit that defended Kyiv in 2022. He commanded a small unit that was involved in aerial defenses, said his former commanders.
In May that year, he and two fellow servicemen were recruited, along with civilian divers, for a mission to destroy the $20 billion Nord Stream pipeline, which funneled Russian gas to Europe across the Baltic Sea, said people familiar with the matter.
The plot was developed by senior Ukrainian military and secret service officers under the command of a senior special forces general commanding the elite army unit.
No one was killed, injured or captured during the Ukrainian attack, which ultimately caused energy prices to remain high, and left Moscow with only one main avenue for channeling gas to Europe: pipelines traversing Ukraine. Despite the conflict, Ukraine was collecting, until January 2025, lucrative transit fees for Russian oil and gas estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.” [1]
Germans are suffering immensely from high gas prices caused by Nord Stream attack. Politically that is costing a lot for German government eagerly supporting Mr. Zelensky. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is waiting to get political power in the country soon. AfD has gained popularity in recent years, reaching historic highs in the 2025 election and in recent polls.
The AfD has taken Russia-friendly positions and opposes weapons aid to Ukraine, aligning with the views of some segments of the German population who are critical of the government's approach to the conflict. Poor Merz…
1. World News: Nord Stream Sabotage Suspect Held --- Ukrainian is accused of heading team that allegedly blew up pipeline system. Pancevski, Bojan. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 22 Aug 2025: A7.
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