ROME, August 22. /TASS/. After the arrest of a suspect in attacks on the Nord Stream gas pipelines, Europe must understand that the main threat is not Moscow, but Kiev with its Nazi-style nationalists armed by NATO, Marco Travaglio, editor-in-chief of Il Fatto quotidiano newspaper said.
He called the Ukrainian, who was detained in Italy on an international warrant from Germany, a "state terrorist." "Who knows if this arrest will open Europe's eyes to the worst threat. It comes not from Moscow, but from Kiev, and this is Ukrainian nationalism with signs of fascism and Nazism, which NATO has been cultivating, feeding and arming since 2014," he wrote.
Earlier, the Rimini Carabinieri command said that a 49-year-old Ukrainian citizen was detained in one of the local resorts on an international warrant issued in Germany, suspected of involvement in the attacks on the Nord Stream ;pipes in the Baltic Sea in the fall of 2022. He did not resist the arrest. His location was established by the International Police Cooperation Service. According to Corriere della Sera, German law enforcement officers were aware of the impending operation. The first information about the detention came from the German prosecutor's office, where the Ukrainian is to be extradited.
In September 2022, an unprecedented destruction was recorded on three branches of the Nord Stream and the never-commissioned Nord Stream-2, the largest attack on European infrastructure. The German Prosecutor's Office is investigating the attacks and has identified at least two suspects. The German Prosecutor General's Office said that the Ukrainian detained in Italy named, according to Italian media, Sergey Kuznetsov "was part of a group of people who planted explosive devices on the gas pipelines near the Bornholm Island in September 2022." The prosecutor's office said that the detainee was allegedly one of the coordinators of the operation. He and his accomplices used a sailing yacht that left Rostock as a means of transportation. The ship was leased from a German company through intermediaries using forged identity documents.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov previously said that Moscow has no doubt that the attacks on the Nord Streams were carried out with the support of the United States. Russia’s Prosecutor General's Office has initiated a case on an act of international terrorism.