A Polish court is to rule on Friday whether a Ukrainian should be extradited to Germany for trial in relation to the 2022 Nord Stream gas pipeline blasts, his lawyer Timoteusz Paprocki confirmed to dpa on Wednesday.
Volodymyr Z was detained by Polish authorities in Pruszkow near Warsaw on September 30 and has been held in custody ever since. A Polish court gave the authorities 40 days to take a decision on his extradition.
Poland’s ABW domestic intelligence agency had searched his apartment in the course of the investigations being conducted by prosecutors since 2022, an ABW spokesman told the PAP news agency.
The case has political ramifications, with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk also weighing in. “It is certainly not in Poland’s interest, nor in the interest of decency and justice, to prosecute this citizen or extradite him to another country,” Tusk said recently, although he also said it was for the courts to decide.
From the start, Warsaw opposed the construction of the underwater pipelines carrying natural gas from Russia directly to Germany, arguing they would increase Europe’s dependence on Russian energy.
According to German federal prosecutors, Volodymyr Z is a 46-year-old trained diver who is suspected of being part of the group that planted explosives on the pipelines near the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea in September 2022.
He is charged with jointly causing an explosion and sabotage directed at the state.
Nord Stream 1 supplied Russian gas to Germany, while Nord Stream 2 had not yet become operational due to Russia’s all-out war in Ukraine launched in February 2022. Both have been offline since the blasts.
