The explosions cut off a key source of natural gas for Europe when leaders were facing an energy crisis triggered by Russia’s war, although Moscow had suspended supplies through the Nord Stream 1 pipelines, and Nord Stream 2 never started operation.
German prosecutors investigating the attack issued their first arrest warrant in August 2024, naming the man as Volodymyr Z. Reports at the time said he was a diving instructor living in Pruszkow, south-east of Warsaw, but authorities had been unable to find him.
However he was not the first suspect to be detained in the case. Another Ukrainian national called Serhii K was picked up by Italian authorities in the province of Rimini last month.
In a statement on Tuesday, German prosecutors said the suspect held by Polish police “belonged to a group of individuals who placed explosive devices on the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines” which detonated on 26 September 2022.
He had “participated in the dives required for this”, they said, adding that he was strongly suspected “of jointly causing an explosion with explosives… anti-constitutional sabotage… and destruction of buildings”.
A spokesman for the Warsaw district prosecutor’s office, Piotr Antoni Skiba, told the BBC that proceedings had begun against a suspect from Pruszkow named as Volodymr Z.
“He is currently being investigated for the execution of a European Arrest Warrant,” the prosecutor said.
The man’s lawyer said he had been detained in the early hours of Tuesday and said his extradition to Germany would be challenged as the war in Ukraine made the warrant inadmissible.
“The attack on Nord Stream infrastructure concerns one of the pipeline’s owners, Gazprom, which directly finances the military operations in Ukraine,” Tymoteusz Paprocki told Reuters.
