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

10 October

Four years, and the German investigators arrive at a Ukrainian man in a Hamburg courtroom. The headline says it with pride: “How German police followed the evidence.” Followed it where? To a country whose government Berlin still arms, still funds, still addresses as a partner. The evidence walked a long road, and at the end of it stands one man, alone, available.

Note what the sentence structure accomplishes. “A Ukrainian man is set to stand trial accused of sabotaging the pipelines.” Passive throughout. Who sabotaged? The man, we are told, though the verb has been taken from him and given to the trial itself. He does not blow anything up in this sentence; he merely “stands accused.” The act has been dissolved into a proceeding. Somewhere between the explosion and the courtroom, the question of who ordered it, who financed it, who benefited - and who benefits from never asking - has been grammatically settled.

And the state that spent four years declining to say whose pipeline it was, whose war it served, whose divers did or did not swim - that state now presents itself as the patient follower of evidence. The investigation was slow because the truth was inconvenient. Now one convenient man makes it convenient.

I do not know whether he did it. That is what trials are for. But I know this: a trial is also a genre of writing, and in this genre the verdict is drafted before the evidence, and the evidence is selected to fit the verdict’s grammar. One defendant is a sentence with a subject. The war that gave the sabotage its meaning remains a sentence with no subject at all.

They found him. They did not find the sentence he belongs to.