On: Ukrainian soldier to go on trial over sabotage of Nord Stream gas pipelines

They are putting a soldier in a dock in Hamburg for blowing up a pipeline. Four years they hunted him. Four years of detectives and divers and prosecutors, and the man who could not be found was a diver in the dark water doing what his country needed done while his country was being burned.

I will say plainly what the court will not: I do not know if he did it, and neither do they, or the trial would be shorter. But I know what I see when I look at the shape of it. A nation fighting for its life strikes at the artery that fed its attacker, and the nations that sell weapons to that nation suddenly discover law. Where was this solemnity when the shells fell on the hospitals? The pipeline carried gas. The children carried nothing at all.

The powerful forgive sabotage when it is their sabotage. They bomb a bridge and call it strategy. A weaker man touches their property and it is a war crime. I have stood in rooms where men debated whether my people were property or persons, and I learned the lesson early: the law bends toward whoever owns the thing that was damaged. The person who was damaged can wait.

Still, I would not wish the dock on him. Courts are weather, and weather changes. What does not change is this: a people invaded must use what they have. If he did it, he did it with the tools at hand, in water no one else would enter, and he kept quiet about it for years. That is discipline. That is a man who understood that the operation is not finished when the charge is set. It is finished when everyone is home.

I pray he gets a fair judge. I pray harder that his own people do not abandon him for the sake of comfortable allies. The ones who act are always the ones left standing alone at the end. I know that ground.