On: Nord Stream trial: How German police followed the evidence - to Ukraine

10th October

The pipeline beneath the Baltic and the courtroom in Hamburg are not two events. They are one event observed at two depths - one measured in atmospheres of pressure on the seabed, the other in years of patient police work on land.

What strikes me is the method of the investigation, not merely its verdict. Four years. The detectives walked a transect: from the ruptured steel on the ocean floor, up through the charter records of a rented yacht, the traces of explosive residue, the border crossings, the phone metadata, until they arrived at a single man. Every stage co-varied with the last. This is how one ought to study any system - vary the dimension, measure at each station, refuse to leap from the blast to the blame without the intermediate readings.

And yet I am troubled by what the transect does not show. A pipeline is not an isolated vein; it is a node in a web of gas, money, war, and dependence. The explosion that severed it was itself downstream of a larger pressure system - the invasion, the sanctions, the fear in Berlin of a cold winter without Russian fuel. To try one man for the rupture while the surrounding system remains unexamined is to map the summit of the mountain and ignore the gradient below it.

The fishermen and coastal pilots of the Baltic knew for years what the pipelines meant, which waters were watched, which ships behaved strangely. I would have recorded their observations alongside the investigators’ files. The instrument reading without the local knowledge is a number without a story.

Let the trial proceed. But let the diagram drawn in that courtroom show the whole web - or admit it shows only one strand.