OREANDA-NEWS  The first trial in the case of the explosion of the Nord Stream and Nord Stream-2 pipelines began in Germany four years after the terrorist attack. It is being held under conditions of increased security measures at the Hamburg Higher Land Court, a TASS correspondent reports.

The suspect in the case is a citizen of Ukraine Sergey Kuznetsov. He was escorted to the courtroom. The court has scheduled 24 meetings by the end of January. In addition, additional meetings are scheduled for February, and their coordination is still ongoing. More than 100 journalists have been accredited for the trial.

Earlier, the court allowed the charges against the Ukrainian to proceed to the proceedings on the merits and opened proceedings on the case. The judges concluded that there was "enough evidence" to consider Kuznetsov a suspect "of a war crime, the use of prohibited methods of warfare, consisting of attacking civilian targets, carrying out an explosion, destroying construction structures and disrupting the work of public enterprises."

The German Prosecutor General's Office believes that Kuznetsov, who was allegedly the head of a sabotage group, and his accomplices developed a plan to blow up pipelines on behalf of the state structures of Ukraine. Another Ukrainian was recently detained in Croatia. The investigation believes that the saboteurs, using forged documents, rented a sailing yacht from one of the German companies and used it to deliver explosives to the Nord Streams. Kuznetsov was detained in August 2025 in Italy and extradited to the German side.