Judge Lubowski holds that Germany has no jurisdiction over a sabotage that took place in international waters.
On Friday, Dariusz Lubowski, a judge at a Warsaw court, denied Germany’s request to extradite Volodymyr Zhuravlev, a Ukrainian citizen suspected of involvement in the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines.
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Volodymyr Z. was arrested near Warsaw on Sept. 30 under a German warrant. The German Federal Prosecutor’s Office suspects he was part of a group affiliated with Ukraine’s armed forces that rented a sailboat, sailed from the German port of Rostock, and worked as divers to place explosives.
Since his detention, Volodymyr Z. had been held under a 40-day provisional detention order. Judge Lubowski also lifted that measure.
The Polish judge declared that the German request does not deserve to be granted because German courts “have no jurisdiction” over the attack, which occurred in international waters in the Baltic Sea, and because the attacked pipeline is owned “one hundred percent by Russia, by the state company Gazprom.”
Lubowski said the issue before his court was not whether the accused committed the act but only whether the act could serve as a basis to execute the European arrest warrant against the Ukrainian. He added that the Polish court lacked originating evidence in the case, asserting that the information provided by Germany was so general “that it could fit on a single A4 sheet of paper.”
The judge went even further, stating that the Nord Stream explosion in September 2022 — which damaged three of the four lines of the two pipelines — was not sabotage but “a rational and just war operation.”
On Friday, Volodymyr Z.’s lawyer again rejected the charges and said “no Ukrainian citizen should be accused or convicted for actions directed against Russia.”
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk reacted to the ruling on X: “A Polish court has refused to extradite to Germany a Ukrainian suspected of the Nord Stream 2 explosion and has released him.”
“With good reason. The case is closed,” Tusk declared, having previously implied that the authorization of Nord Stream struck him as more illegitimate than its destruction.
The development comes one day after Italy’s Supreme Court halted extradition of Sergii K., another Ukrainian detained in August in connection with the Nord Stream sabotage investigation. The German Prosecutor’s Office has named him as the mastermind behind the operation.
