Hamburg. The Hamburg trial against one of the suspected perpetrators of the attack on the Nord Stream Baltic Sea pipeline is continuing. The Hanseatic Higher Regional Court rejected a request from the defense to stop the proceedings on Tuesday. “According to German law, the defendant is not restricted in his defense,” said presiding judge Anne Meier-Goering in her statement.
The accused Ukrainian officer Serhii Kuznetzov is said to have led a secret commando operation with seven Ukrainians in September 2022, in which the two Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines between Russia and Germany in the Baltic Sea were blown up. He is accused of committing a war crime by attacking civilian infrastructure. The criminal trial in Hamburg has been running since mid-October.
The defense had requested that the proceedings be discontinued on the grounds that the defendant, as an officer in a Ukrainian special forces unit, was subject to a duty of secrecy. There can therefore be no fair trial.
Two affidavits from his superiors were read out in court. Both declared that they would not release Kuznetzov from his duty of confidentiality and that he would face up to eight years in prison in Ukraine if he betrayed secrets.
However, the court followed the arguments of the Federal Prosecutor's Office. Their representative Stefan Schmidt said that the right to an effective defense of the accused enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights had not been violated. There is no evidence that this is actually subject to a duty of confidentiality.
Judge Meier-Goering said the trial did not violate the principle of fair trial. There are doubts about the private statements of the two superiors who may have been involved. If things were as assumed by the defense, every defendant from another country could invoke their duty of confidentiality, for example in the case of espionage crimes. According to German law, Kuznetzov could testify, she emphasized. He has it in his own hands to “remove the executive tension complained about”.
After the decision on further proceedings, the judge called in expert Thomas Forster from the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA). He wrote the first crime scene report in autumn 2022 and was now supposed to provide an “impact assessment”. He used a Powerpoint presentation to show what happened on September 26, 2022 near the Danish island of Bornholm.
At 2:03 a.m. there was the first explosion on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline at a depth of 77 meters. The explosive device tore a hole in strand A from which the gas in the pipeline escaped. Strand B was only damaged externally; there was no leak.
Russia had already stopped operating the two pipelines months before. But they were still filled with gas. According to Forster, the pressure in Nord Stream 2 was 103 bar. The escaping gas jet generated thrust comparable to a rocket engine, said Forster. The enormous force caused individual segments of the pipeline, each twelve meters long, to snap.
The pipeline wall is made of 26.5 millimeter thick steel. Above this there is a corrosion layer and a concrete jacket. Forster expressed the suspicion that the explosive devices were placed at the seams between the individual segments because the steel pipe underneath was not protected by concrete.
The first explosion site was around 160 kilometers from Germany and 1000 kilometers from Russia. Craters of different depths were created in the seabed. The gas escaped from the shorter part of the pipeline on the German side within hours, said Forster. On the Russian side it was released for five days. The crater there was correspondingly deeper.
According to the BKA report, 17 hours later there were further explosions a few kilometers further north. Both strands of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline were torn open over a length of 250 meters and 290 meters respectively. Some of the craters on the seabed were 90 meters wide. However, according to Forster, only a single explosive device was required for the massive destruction, which, in combination with the escaping gas, had this resounding effect.
There were a total of six explosions on the two pipelines, said Forster. Four resulted in leaks, two only caused external damage to the concrete shell. Investigators were able to secure metal parts with traces of explosives from the two failed explosions. This indicates that the pipelines were “blasted up” with steel containers filled with explosives, said the BKA expert. According to his calculations, even a smaller amount of explosives would have been sufficient to achieve the same effect.
