Russia has complained to Germany about its investigation into the 2022 sabotage of the multibillion-dollar Nord Stream gas pipelines that run between the two countries, accusing Europe’s top economic power of having little interest in finding those responsible.
The head of a European department at the foreign ministry, Oleg Tyapkin, said Russia had “raised the issue of Germany and other affected countries fulfilling their obligations under the UN anti-terrorist conventions”, RIA news agency reported in remarks cited by Reuters.
“We have officially made corresponding claims on this matter bilaterally, including to Berlin,” Tyapkin said.
The criticism came after it was reported last week that German prosecutors had issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian diving instructor as a prime suspect.
Polish prosecutors said they had received the warrant against the suspect identified as Volodymyr Z, but that he was able to slip across the Ukrainian border in early July because Germany had failed to include him in a shared wanted persons database.
Volodymyr Z, who lived in Poland, is alleged to have dived 80 metres down to the seabed to place the explosive devices. At the time of the blasts, seven months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the pipelines were not in operation but contained gas.
German media have identified two other suspects, also Ukrainian diving instructors – a man and a woman – but no further arrest warrants have been issued. Prosecutors and the German government have declined to comment on the investigation.
Tyapkin was quoted as saying that Moscow believes German authorities will close the investigation prematurely, before identifying those behind the sabotage operation, which embarrassed Berlin.
A German foreign ministry spokesperson, Sebastian Fischer, dismissed Tyapkin’s claims and said German prosecutors were “in contact with Russian authorities” and that the investigation was still in progress.
“We exchange the information that we can without endangering the investigation,” he told reporters.
The Nord Stream project, which carried natural gas under the Baltic Sea, was made unusable by a series underwater blasts for which no one has claimed responsibility. Western countries have accused Russia for explosions; Russia has blamed the US, Britain and Ukraine.
US media in recent months reported that Ukraine was behind the attack, a charge Kyiv has repeatedly denied.
Berlin’s allies had long criticised Nord Stream for deepening German energy reliance on Russia, even after it annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014.
Over the weekend Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, angrily hit back at German allegations that Warsaw may have abetted the sabotage, saying German officials had no standing to point the finger.
“To all the initiators and patrons of Nord Stream 1 and 2. The only thing you should do today about it is apologise and keep quiet.” Tusk wrote on X.
He appeared to be responding to comments by Germany’s former foreign intelligence chief August Hanning, who said that the attack on the pipelines must have had Warsaw’s backing.
Hanning, who served when Gerhard Schröder was chancellor and later became a Gazprom lobbyist and close friend of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, told Die Welt last week that Germany should consider seeking damages from Poland and Ukraine.
Before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, about a quarter of Germany’s energy supply relied on gas, of which half was provided by Russia. Russian gas had later been seen as a key “bridge” in German energy strategy as it halted nuclear power and transitioned to renewables.
Days before Moscow’s attack on its neighbour, Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, announced that Berlin was stopping the certification process for Nord Stream 2, which was approved under his predecessor, Angela Merkel.
In the ensuing months, Russia throttled gas supplies via Nord Stream 1, citing necessary repairs, which deepened a German energy crisis, sent inflation soaring and slashed economic growth.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Nord Stream sabotage was carried out by a small Ukrainian team in an operation that was initially approved by Volodymyr Zelenskiy and then called off, but which went ahead anyway.
A spokesperson for the Ukrainian president denied the claims.
German police and prosecutors are reportedly focusing their investigation on senior Ukrainian military officials, which would raise awkward questions for Berlin, Europe’s top supplier of arms to Ukraine as it seeks to fend off the Russian invasion.
Senior German officials have continued to advance the theory that the sabotage was a Russian “false flag” operation designed to drive a wedge between the west and Kyiv.
Denmark and Sweden dropped separate criminal inquiries in February without identifying a suspect.
