Ukrainian Soldier Faces Trial for Nord Stream Sabotage

The Ground Wire in Hamburg

The energy moved from producer to consumer through a pair of steel tubes on the floor of the Baltic, carrying Russian gas to German furnaces, kitchens and chemical plants. The circuit broke in September 2022, and the court in Hamburg proposes to find the man who broke it. Before it does, it should notice that the circuit was already dead when the charges went off.

This is the point the prosecution’s framing cannot accommodate. A pipeline is a conductor; it is valuable only while something flows through it. By the autumn of 2022 the flow had been stopped by the two governments at either end. Moscow had throttled deliveries as an instrument of pressure. Berlin had declined to certify the second line and was hurrying to replace the first with anything that floated. Each government had cut the wire at its own terminal. Whoever placed explosives on the seabed did not interrupt a working transmission. They destroyed the possibility that the two governments might one day reconnect it. That is a real act with real consequences, but its nature is different from what the word “sabotage” suggests.

The strongest objection deserves its full weight. A crime is a crime. Somebody dived to that depth with charges and a plan, and the political condition of the pipeline does not license the destruction of property. German prosecutors are right to pursue it, and a court is exactly where such a thing belongs. I accept every word of this. A court is one of the few mechanisms that civilisation has built to carry responsibility from an act back to an actor along a path anyone can inspect. It runs on evidence, cross-examination, and the defendant’s right to say no. Serhii Kuznetsov is saying no, and the circuit is designed to test that denial.

The difficulty is the load placed on the court, not the court itself.

Consider what the Hamburg proceeding is being asked to carry. Officially it carries a charge against one Ukrainian soldier. Unofficially it carries the question of who wanted the pipelines gone, which government knew, which allies suspected and said nothing, and whether Germany’s support for Ukraine can survive a finding that Ukrainians blew up German infrastructure. That second load is political, and it has no proper conductor of its own. No parliament has traced it, and no foreign ministry will. So the current goes where current always goes, along the path of least resistance to ground. The ground in this case is a single defendant in a single courtroom, who carries a charge that several capitals generated and none will accept.

The comedy in this, and there is some, is that every government involved is better served by this trial than by its absence. Moscow gets a Ukrainian in the dock. Kyiv gets a defendant who denies everything and a chain of command that can stay unexamined so long as the inquiry stays at the level of the man on the boat. Berlin gets to demonstrate the rule of law without having to explain why its energy policy for two decades depended on a conductor that ran through the territory of its principal security threat. A verdict either way closes the file. Each party has an interest in the proceeding, and none has an interest in what the proceeding cannot reach.

Here is the downstream effect that nobody proposing the trial intends. A criminal court answers a narrow question by design: did this person do this act. The question was always going to be narrow, and that is its virtue. When a narrow answer is taken as the settlement of a wide question, the wide question stops being asked. A conviction would be read as “the Ukrainians did it”, and an acquittal as “nobody knows”. Neither reading is what the court will have found. In either case the decisions that actually blocked the circuit will drop out of view. Those decisions were the political dependence, the weaponised supply, and the refusal of certification. They will vanish behind a verdict on a seabed operation. The next blockage will then be attributed, as blockages invariably are, to whoever happened to be standing nearest the break.

None of this tells us whether Kuznetsov is guilty. The court must decide that, and it should decide it on the evidence and nothing else. It does tell us what the verdict will not explain.

Somewhere in a Hamburg courtroom a man will sit with a headset translating German into Ukrainian, listening to the record of a dive he says he never made. Two tubes lie on the Baltic floor behind him. They are flooded with seawater, and the ministers who emptied them of gas are not in the room.