Police have arrested a Ukrainian diving instructor in Poland under a German warrant for allegedly being involved in 2022’s Nord Stream pipeline explosion.
Tymoteusz Paprocki, the attorney for the detainee, named only as “Volodymyr Z,” told a news outlet:
“In general, considering the full-scale war in Ukraine and the fact that Nord Stream is owned by the Russian company Gazprom, which finances these activities, the defense currently does not see any possibility of bringing charges against anyone who participated in these activities.”
Paprocki also said his team would fight any attempt to extradite his client to Germany.
Accusations as to whom exactly blew up the pipeline have been bandied about everywhere, from Russia conducting a “false flag” operation to warn the West that it could engender mayhem wherever it wanted, to Russia blaming the United States and the UK, to independent journalist Seymour Hersh asserting on his blog two years ago that US Navy divers had conducted an operation to take out the pipeline.
In 2024, researchers found that some seismic signals coincided with the event and that the duration of these events was longer than you would expect from a single explosive source. The seismic events seemed more similar to an eruption of an underwater volcano or a natural gas pipeline venting gas.
The researchers theorized that due to the long-lasting seismic and infrasonic events, the likely culprit could have been vibrations from high-pressure gas being vented into the surrounding water.
According to Ross Heyburn of AWE Blacknest:
“May be dominated by energy generated by the rapid venting of high-pressure gas, which means it may be difficult to assess the source size and characteristics of any explosive charges used to rupture the Nord Stream pipelines…To the best of our knowledge, this was the first time that the IMS has recorded signals from an underwater event associated with a gas pipeline rupture…The events therefore provided an opportunity to observe the characteristics of signals, such as the long durations, generated by this type of source.”
