Prosecutors have declined to comment on the investigation, which concerns explosions that damaged the pipelines built to bring Russian gas to Germany.
German prosecutors issued the first arrest warrant in their investigation into the undersea explosions in 2022 that damaged the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, according to media reports on Wednesday.
German public broadcaster ARD, the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung and the weekly Die Zeit said in a joint report that federal prosecutors obtained an arrest warrant in June against a Ukrainian national who was believed to have been living, until recently, in Poland.
The reports, which did not cite sources, identified the man as Volodymyr Z and suggested he had recently returned to Ukraine.
Polish authorities have since revealed they attempted to arrest Volodymyr Z at his address in a town near Warsaw in July but that he had already gone back to his native country.
He wasn’t stopped at the Polish-Ukrainian border because German authorities failed to enter his name in the wanted database, the Polish prosecutor’s office said.
The German federal prosecutor’s office said it doesn’t comment on media reports or arrest warrants.
Explosions on 26 September 2022 damaged the pipelines, which were built to carry Russian natural gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea.
The damage added to tensions over Moscow’s war in Ukraine as European countries moved to wean themselves off Russian energy sources.
No clear motive, no clear culprit
It remains a mystery who was responsible for the sabotage, and investigators have been tight-lipped about their findings so far.
Swedish and Danish authorities closed their investigations in February, leaving the German prosecutors’ case as the sole probe.
The blasts happened as Europe attempted to cut itself off from Russian energy sources following the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
They ruptured the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which was Russia’s main natural gas supply route to Germany, until Russia halted supplies at the end of August that year.
They also damaged the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which never entered service because Germany suspended its certification process shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine in February of that year.
Suspicions that Russia was behind the attacks grew as Gerhard Schindler, the former head of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, alleged that Russia sabotaged the gas pipelines in order to justify halting gas supplies to Europe.
In December 2022, The Washington Post newspaper reported that following months of investigation, there was no conclusive evidence that Russia was behind the attack.
Russia has accused the US of staging the explosions, a charge Washington denies. The pipelines were long a target of criticism by the US and some of its allies, who warned that they posed a risk to Europe’s energy security by increasing dependence on Russian gas.
The Kremlin never provided any evidence for its claims.
In March of last year, German media reported that a pro-Ukraine group was involved in the sabotage. Ukraine rejected suggestions that it might have ordered the attack, and German officials voiced caution over the accusation.
Officials said last year that investigators found traces of undersea explosives in samples taken from a yacht that was searched as part of the probe.
