VIENNA, August 14. /TASS/. Austria should stop providing money for assistance to Kiev after Germany issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian national in the case of the sabotage attack on the Nord Stream pipelines, said Christian Hafenecker, a lawmaker representing Austria’s Freedom Party.
"The suspicions that existed for some time and have now been confirmed, which are that Ukraine is involved in these explosions, should prompt Austria to immediately halt all its payments to Ukraine! This applies, in particular, to 25 million euros of taxpayers' money," the politician said in a statement.
Austria should give the same response to Ukraine's decision to stop transiting Russian gas to Europe after 2025, the lawmaker said. He called Kiev's behavior "simply scandalous."
Hafenecker also said that oil and gas company OMV, one-third of which is owned by the government, had invested almost one billion euros in the construction of Nord Stream 2.
"Because someone has to pay for this damage, the federal government is obliged to take compensation from the country that is responsible for these attacks," he stated.
Earlier, the Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reported, citing a joint investigation by ARD television and Die Zeit newspaper, that the German Federal Public Prosecutor had issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian diving instructor suspected of having played a role in sabotaging the Nord Stream gas pipelines. The Suddeutsche Zeitung identified the suspect as Vladimir Ts, who most recently resided in Poland.
German prosecutors are also investigating two other Ukrainian diving instructors, one of them a woman, the newspaper said. Together, the three are suspected to have formed the crew of the yacht Andromeda, which is at the center of the German investigation.