Moscow earlier dismissed “ridiculous” claims that a small group of divers could have carried out the attack
Several Italian outlets on Friday released an image purportedly showing the Ukrainian man arrested a day earlier over his alleged involvement in the Nord Stream pipeline bombing.
The man, identified by the media as 49-year-old Sergey Kuznetsov, is suspected of leading the team that sabotaged the pipelines in September 2022.
The image – published by La Stampa and Open Online – appears to be either a police photofit or a photo from identity documents. Neither outlet disclosed its origin.
Kuznetsov was detained near Rimini on Thursday under a European arrest warrant issued this month by German prosecutors. Investigators allege he helped plant explosives on the pipelines near Denmark’s Bornholm Island, which disabled three of the four Nord Stream lines. The man allegedly oversaw divers placing the explosives from a sailing yacht rented using forged document in Rostock, Germany.
According to Italian media, the suspect entered Italy under the alias Serhii Kulinic with his family on a tour booked through Booking.com. The authorities reportedly tracked his movements until his name, which had been recorded in a local hotel’s guest database, triggered an Interpol alert. He reportedly offered no resistance and handed over documents, phones, computers, tablets, and credit cards upon arrest.
Kuznetsov faces charges under German law for causing an explosion, anti-constitutional sabotage, and destruction of infrastructure – offenses that could carry a 15-year sentence. He is expected to appear at the Bologna Court of Appeal later on Friday for a hearing to validate his arrest and set a date for extradition to Germany. However, La Stampa also reported that he is being investigated in a separate case by the Genoa prosecutor’s office over a February bombing that damaged the Seajewel, a Maltese-flagged tanker off the coast of Savona.
The Nord Stream explosions were seen at the time as an attack on critical energy infrastructure and a stark example of the rising economic fallout of the Ukraine conflict.
Speaking in February 2022 in Washington, then-US President Joe Biden declared that in the event of an all-out military conflict between Russia and Ukraine “there will no longer be a Nord Stream. We will bring an end to it.”
In 2023, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a report claiming that Biden had given the order to destroy the gas connectors,a claim dismissed as “complete fiction” by the White House.
According to an informed source who talked to the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, the explosives, which reportedly caused blasts of 2.3 and 2.1 on the Richter scale, were planted by US Navy divers months previously under the cover of NATO exercises.
Swedish engineer Erik Andersson, who led the first and only independent forensic investigation at the blast sites, told an Italian journalist: “The more I look into this, the more I feel that the Nord Stream attack is just a part of a bigger scheme to cut off Russia from Europe.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov earlier also has laughed off claims that a small group of divers could have carried out the attack, calling them “ridiculous.”
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