HAMBURG, October 27. /TASS/. The German Federal Prosecutor’s Office has rejected a motion to dismiss the case against Ukrainian citizen Sergey Kuznetsov, who is accused of participating in the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines.
"The defense’s motion cannot be granted," a TASS correspondent quoted senior public prosecutor Stefan Schmidt as saying at a hearing of the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg. The prosecutor rejected the arguments of Kuznetsov’s defense that it was allegedly impossible to ensure the defendant’s "effective defense" because he is a Ukrainian special forces officer and is prohibited by Ukrainian law from disclosing military secrets.
The trial on the merits began in Hamburg on October 27 in the case involving the sabotage of the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines. The first court hearing took place on October 14. At that hearing, the defense requested that the case be dismissed. According to the defense, a fair trial cannot be guaranteed because the defendant is a former military officer who allegedly has no right to disclose the contents of orders, who issued them, or other information - not even to his own defense attorneys. Neither the prosecution nor the defense has questioned his involvement in the sabotage during the trial.
The German Federal Prosecutor’s Office charged Kuznetsov with war crimes, including carrying out explosions, destroying buildings, and disrupting public utility operations. Investigators believe he and his accomplices devised a plan to blow up pipelines on behalf of the Ukrainian government. Another Ukrainian was recently detained in Croatia. Prosecutors assume that the saboteurs used forged documents to rent a sailboat from a German company to transport explosives to the Nord Stream pipelines. Kuznetsov was detained in Italy in August 2022 and extradited to Germany.
On September 27, 2022, Nord Stream AG reported "unprecedented damage" on three strings of the offshore gas pipelines of the Nord Stream system. Later, Swedish seismologists said they had identified two explosions on the route of the Nord Stream pipelines on September 26, 2022. Following the incident, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office initiated a criminal case on charges of international terrorism. Russian Ambassador to Germany Sergey Nechayev stated that all of Moscow’s initiatives to investigate the sabotage of the gas pipelines are being ignored, and numerous requests essentially remain unanswered.