Nord Stream on Trial: war crime, or act of war?

Four years after the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up at the bottom of the Baltic, a former Ukrainian army officer, Serhii Kuznetsov, is on trial in Hamburg. German prosecutors say he led the team that did it, on orders from the Ukrainian state, and their main charge is a war crime: an attack on civilian objects. He denies it. His lawyers call the pipeline a Russian weapon.

We go out to sea on the rented yacht Andromeda, back to the pipeline Poland once compared to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and through the courts of Europe, which have answered the same case in opposite ways. Agata Łoskot-Strachota of the Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW) in Warsaw explains what Nord Stream meant for Poland, Germany and Russia, and what losing it changed.

Everything in this episode comes from reporting already published and the public record. Where people disagree, you'll hear who says what.

Reporting: Pollar (pollar.news/en/event/nord-stream-trial-starts-14-october), Germany's Federal Prosecutor General, the Federal Court of Justice, Legal Tribune Online, AP, Reuters, Interfax, PAP, Rzeczpospolita, Notes from Poland, Meduza, The Kyiv Independent, The Wall Street Journal, Novaya Gazeta Europe, RFE/RL, Liga.net, Militarnyi, The Moscow Times, The Sunday Telegraph, Al Jazeera, CBS News, CNBC, EUobserver, Courthouse News Service, UNI, Clingendael Spectator, Roll Call Factbase.

Archive sound: Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Poland (7 October 2025), kremlin.ru (30 September and 12 October 2022, CC BY 4.0), The White House (7 February 2022 and 11 July 2018).

Interview: Agata Łoskot-Strachota, Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW), Warsaw, recorded on 23 October 2026.

Cover photo: Ajepbah, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de), cropped and toned by Pollar. The cover is shared under the same licence.