The Nord Stream Paradox: Law, War and the Price of European Dependence
By Matthew Parish
Thursday 15 October 2026
There are moments in international affairs when an apparently straightforward criminal prosecution exposes contradictions so profound that they threaten to undermine the political assumptions of an entire continent. The destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipelines beneath the Baltic Sea in September 2022 was one such moment. What appeared initially to be a spectacular act of industrial sabotage has become a legal and diplomatic controversy of exceptional complexity, involving allegations against Ukrainian military personnel, the political credibility of Germany, the limits of international humanitarian law and the uncomfortable question of whether the destruction of civilian infrastructure may sometimes be justified as an act of national self-defence. Beneath these immediate controversies lies a more disturbing observation: Europe spent decades constructing an economic relationship with Russia that became a source of strategic vulnerability, and now finds herself confronting the consequences of that dependency in a criminal courtroom.
The proceedings commenced in Hamburg in October 2026 against Serhii Kuznetsov, a former Ukrainian special forces officer accused of participating in the operation that destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipeline strands, have brought these tensions into sharp focus. German prosecutors allege that a Ukrainian military team, operating under instructions from Ukrainian state authorities, used a civilian yacht and sophisticated underwater explosives to destroy infrastructure carrying Russian natural gas towards Germany. The accused denies involvement, and no determination of his criminal responsibility has yet been made. Nevertheless, the prosecution raises questions extending far beyond the personal culpability of one individual. It requires consideration of the relationship between military necessity and civilian property, the distinction between economic warfare and conventional military operations, and the increasingly precarious position of European states whose security interests do not always coincide with their commercial interests.
To appreciate the significance of these events, it is necessary to understand the peculiar history of Nord Stream itself. The pipelines represented the culmination of several decades of German strategic thinking based upon the proposition that economic interdependence could moderate political antagonism. This philosophy, associated with the traditions of Ostpolitik, assumed that expanding commercial relationships with Moscow would create mutual incentives for stability and cooperation. Natural gas appeared particularly suitable for this purpose because of the substantial infrastructure investments required and the reciprocal commercial dependency they created. Russia needed European customers for her enormous natural resources, while Germany needed reliable energy supplies to support her industrial economy. The resulting arrangement appeared economically rational, commercially profitable and politically sophisticated, at least to those who believed that commercial self-interest would ultimately prevail over imperial ambition.
There was, however, a fundamental flaw in this reasoning. Economic interdependence does not necessarily produce political moderation where the parties possess different strategic objectives and unequal capacities to absorb disruption. Germany regarded natural gas as a commodity whose regular delivery could be secured through contracts, while Russia increasingly regarded energy exports as an instrument of geopolitical influence. The relationship was therefore not simply one of mutual dependence, but one in which commercial infrastructure could become a mechanism of political coercion. The distinction was particularly apparent to Ukraine, which recognised long before the full-scale Russian invasion of February 2022 that the development of direct gas connections between Russia and Germany threatened to diminish her strategic importance as a transit country. By circumventing Ukrainian territory, Nord Stream reduced Moscow’s dependence upon Ukrainian infrastructure and potentially made Russian military pressure against Ukraine less economically costly.
From Kyiv’s perspective, the pipelines therefore represented something considerably more sinister than an engineering achievement beneath the Baltic Sea. They were physical manifestations of a European security order in which Ukrainian interests had been subordinated to the commercial preferences of more prosperous western neighbours. Germany might celebrate the arrival of inexpensive Russian natural gas, but Ukraine was entitled to wonder whether the price of that gas included a degree of acquiescence in the erosion of her sovereignty. The political architects of Nord Stream maintained that commercial engagement would encourage peace, yet the eventual Russian invasion demonstrated that the existence of extensive trading relationships did not prevent Moscow from embarking upon a war of territorial conquest. Indeed, the very revenues generated by energy exports contributed to the financial resources available to sustain Russian military expenditure.
It is against this background that the destruction of the pipelines acquired its extraordinary symbolic significance. On 26 September 2022, underwater explosions ruptured three pipeline strands near the Danish island of Bornholm, producing enormous releases of natural gas and rendering the affected infrastructure unusable. At that moment, however, the operational position was more complicated than the dramatic images of bubbling seawater suggested. Nord Stream 1 had already ceased supplying gas following Russian restrictions and interruptions, while Nord Stream 2 had never entered commercial operation because Germany had suspended its certification. The explosions therefore did not interrupt a substantial volume of gas then flowing towards German consumers. Instead, they removed the immediate prospect of restoring those particular energy routes and imposed enormous costs upon their owners. This distinction between destroying an operational supply system and eliminating an option for future commercial restoration is central to understanding both the strategic purpose of the attack and the legal arguments surrounding it.
The German prosecution rests upon allegations that the attack was deliberately organised by individuals associated with the Ukrainian military and directed against infrastructure that retained civilian protection under the laws of armed conflict. If those allegations are established, the court must still determine whether the operation constituted an unlawful attack against civilian property, an otherwise criminal act of sabotage or a permissible military operation undertaken in the context of Ukraine’s defence against Russian aggression. These possibilities cannot simply be collapsed into one another. The fact that an operation involves explosives, deliberate concealment and extensive property damage does not automatically make it a war crime, just as the fact that its supposed perpetrators belong to the armed forces of a state defending herself against invasion does not automatically render it lawful. International humanitarian law exists precisely because the justice of a country’s cause cannot be allowed to determine the legality of every means employed in its pursuit.
This distinction is frequently neglected in public discussion of contemporary warfare. International law differentiates between the legal justification for resorting to force and the rules governing the conduct of hostilities. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine constitutes an unlawful use of force, while Ukraine enjoys the inherent right of self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. Yet this does not mean that Ukrainian military personnel possess unlimited discretion to attack property associated with Russia or to conduct covert operations against infrastructure serving third countries. The laws of war regulate the conduct of aggressors and defenders alike, however uncomfortable that proposition may appear when one side is fighting for national survival and the other is attempting to destroy an independent state. Were the position otherwise, every government could invoke the righteousness of its political objectives as justification for whatever destruction it considered convenient.
The particular difficulty surrounding Nord Stream concerns the legal definition of a military objective. Under Article 52 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, civilian objects generally enjoy protection from deliberate attack unless their nature, location, purpose or use makes an effective contribution to military action and their destruction offers a definite military advantage in the circumstances prevailing at the time. Infrastructure serving both civilian and military purposes may therefore become a lawful military target, but the distinction cannot be resolved merely by identifying the nationality of its owners or the political character of the government receiving its revenues. A railway transporting military ammunition may be a legitimate target even if it also carries civilian passengers, although the consequences for civilians must still be considered. A commercial facility that generates taxation revenue for an aggressor state presents a more difficult question, because the financial contribution it makes to warfare may be remote and indistinguishable from the economic activity of society generally.
If every commercial undertaking producing revenue for a hostile government could be classified as a military objective, much of the protective structure of international humanitarian law would become meaningless. Factories, banks, telecommunications systems, agricultural enterprises and transport networks all contribute indirectly to the financial capacity of a state to maintain its armed forces. To permit their destruction simply because taxes and commercial revenues eventually support military expenditure would allow belligerents to attack almost the entirety of an adversary’s civilian economy. Some states have advocated relatively expansive interpretations of military objectives encompassing economic assets sustaining an enemy’s war effort, but this approach remains deeply controversial. The narrower and more protective interpretation requires a sufficiently direct connection with military action and a concrete military advantage from the particular attack. It is this distinction that makes the Nord Stream controversy much more legally intricate than the proposition that depriving Russia of gas revenues necessarily constituted a legitimate act of warfare.
An additional complication arises from the identity of the state allegedly injured by the operation. Nord Stream was not simply a Russian military installation situated on Russian territory. It was an international energy project involving substantial investment, contractual interests and infrastructure connections extending into Germany and passing through maritime areas subject to a complex framework of international legal rights. Germany was not a belligerent in the Russo-Ukrainian armed conflict, even though she was providing substantial assistance to Ukraine. The destruction of the pipelines therefore potentially affected the rights of a third state whose government had not consented to the operation. A country defending herself against aggression may possess extensive rights to employ force against the aggressor, but those rights do not necessarily authorise the destruction of infrastructure serving other sovereign states. This is particularly important in an era when energy networks, communications cables and digital infrastructure routinely cross international boundaries.
The geographical position of the pipelines introduces further legal uncertainty. The explosions occurred outside Germany’s territorial waters, in maritime areas governed by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The relationship between jurisdiction over conduct at sea, the rights of states connected to submarine pipelines and the domestic criminal consequences of damaging infrastructure situated beyond national territory is complex. Germany’s highest criminal court has already considered arguments relating to the immunity of foreign state officials and the consequences of covert violence affecting German sovereign interests. Such questions are not merely procedural technicalities. If a foreign military officer acts on the instructions of his government, the extent to which he may be prosecuted by another state depends upon difficult principles concerning official immunity, the nature of the alleged acts and the relationship between sovereign authority and individual criminal responsibility.
The defence of the accused presents a related paradox. His lawyers contend that his military status restricts his ability to disclose information potentially relevant to his defence, while the prosecution alleges that the operation was undertaken pursuant to Ukrainian state instructions. Yet the Ukrainian government has denied responsibility for the destruction of the pipelines. If a covert military operation is officially unacknowledged, the individuals suspected of participating in it may find themselves in a particularly precarious position. They cannot necessarily invoke an express acknowledgement of governmental authority, and they may be constrained from explaining the circumstances of operations in which they are alleged to have participated. Such difficulties do not extinguish the right of a state to prosecute suspected criminal conduct, nor do they establish the innocence of an accused person. They nevertheless demonstrate why criminal proceedings involving intelligence operations and covert military activities often become entangled with questions that ordinary criminal courts are poorly equipped to resolve without access to classified evidence.
There is also a historical irony in Germany’s position. For decades, her political and industrial establishments defended the construction of Nord Stream against objections from Poland, Ukraine and other eastern European states that regarded the project as a strategic error. The eventual destruction of the pipelines was widely welcomed by those who considered the infrastructure an instrument of Russian geopolitical coercion, although the identity of those responsible remained uncertain. Germany now finds herself prosecuting an alleged participant in an operation that eliminated a project whose underlying political assumptions have been substantially discredited by subsequent events. The contradiction is not that Germany should refrain from investigating serious offences because their alleged perpetrators come from a friendly country. Rather, it is that the protection of a legally recognised commercial interest may coexist with a widespread political recognition that the commercial enterprise itself was strategically disastrous.
This distinction deserves to be preserved. It would be a serious mistake to suggest that Germany’s support for Ukraine obliges her judiciary to disregard evidence of potentially criminal conduct by Ukrainian nationals. The independence of the courts is one of the central characteristics distinguishing European constitutional democracies from the arbitrary systems against which Ukraine is defending herself. A court that acquitted a defendant because the government considered his prosecution diplomatically inconvenient would be no more admirable than one that convicted him to satisfy a hostile political constituency. At the same time, the prosecution ought not to become an opportunity for political forces sympathetic to Moscow to rehabilitate the strategic assumptions of the pre-war German energy relationship. Judicial examination of alleged sabotage cannot reasonably be transformed into an argument that Russia should once again be entrusted with the power to determine the conditions under which German industry receives its energy supplies.
The political exploitation of the affair may nevertheless prove as significant as its eventual legal outcome. Within Germany, parties advocating rapprochement with Moscow have used the destruction of Nord Stream to question the wisdom of continued assistance to Ukraine. The argument possesses an obvious emotional appeal: why should German taxpayers finance the defence of a country whose citizens are accused of destroying valuable infrastructure connected to the German economy? Yet this formulation obscures the larger historical sequence. The Russo-Ukrainian war did not arise because of the Nord Stream explosions; the explosions occurred because Europe was already confronting the consequences of Russian aggression. Whatever the responsibility of any Ukrainian individuals, the fundamental reason for Germany’s present security dilemma remains Moscow’s decision to launch a war against her neighbour. To invert that sequence is to confuse a possible unlawful response to aggression with the aggression that created the underlying crisis.
Nor should the extraordinary scale of the environmental consequences be overlooked. The ruptured pipelines released immense quantities of methane into the atmosphere, producing an environmental disaster quite separate from the immediate damage to commercial property. Methane is a particularly powerful greenhouse gas, and the emissions illustrated the destructive environmental consequences of warfare against energy infrastructure. Although military necessity may sometimes justify attacks upon installations carrying hazardous substances, environmental damage is not rendered irrelevant merely because it occurs during armed conflict. The Nord Stream explosions consequently invite a broader reconsideration of the relationship between military operations, the protection of critical infrastructure and the increasingly fragile environmental systems upon which modern societies depend. The fact that an underwater explosion causes no immediate civilian fatalities does not necessarily mean that its wider consequences are insignificant.
The affair also illustrates the increasingly ambiguous boundary between conventional warfare and clandestine state activity. The twentieth century was characterised by numerous covert operations in which governments sought to damage the economic or military interests of adversaries while avoiding formal acknowledgement of responsibility. Such operations were often undertaken by intelligence services, special forces or ostensibly private intermediaries, and their political advantage lay precisely in the difficulty of attributing responsibility. The contemporary world has multiplied the opportunities for such conduct. Undersea cables, pipelines, satellite networks, electricity grids and digital communications systems represent strategic vulnerabilities that may be exploited without crossing a conventional military frontier. A handful of individuals equipped with specialised technical knowledge may now possess the capacity to inflict economic damage that once required a substantial military formation.
This creates an uncomfortable challenge for the existing international legal order. Much of the law governing armed conflict developed around relatively identifiable concepts of territory, combatants, military installations and civilian populations. Modern infrastructure warfare complicates each of these categories. An attack may originate in one country, be conducted through the territory or maritime jurisdiction of another, damage assets owned by companies incorporated elsewhere and produce economic consequences across an entire continent. Its immediate physical effects may be limited while its intended political consequences are immense. Questions of sovereignty, attribution, individual criminal responsibility and military necessity consequently become intertwined in ways that established legal categories do not always resolve satisfactorily. The Nord Stream affair may therefore acquire a significance extending well beyond the fate of the accused, particularly as European states reconsider the vulnerability of their maritime and digital infrastructure.
For Ukraine, meanwhile, the episode raises difficult questions about the proper conduct of a war for national survival. Ukraine’s defence against Russian aggression enjoys powerful moral and legal legitimacy, grounded in the fundamental principle that sovereign states should not be conquered by their neighbours. Yet the preservation of that legitimacy requires attention to the methods by which military objectives are pursued. The temptation to regard every asset associated with the aggressor as a legitimate target is understandable, particularly after years of Russian attacks against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. Nevertheless, the distinction between lawful military operations and indiscriminate destruction is essential to the very international order upon which Ukraine’s claim to sovereignty depends. Ukraine cannot successfully defend the principle that international law protects weaker states if that protection is understood to disappear whenever military expediency suggests a different course.
There is, however, a corresponding obligation upon Ukraine’s allies to acknowledge the strategic realities that have shaped the conflict. Western governments have sometimes approached the war through a framework of incremental assistance, calibrated sanctions and carefully limited military support designed to avoid escalation. From the relative security of Berlin, Brussels or Washington, such caution can appear statesmanlike. From Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia or the devastated towns of the Donbas, it may appear that Ukraine is being required to fight for her survival while simultaneously protecting the economic arrangements through which her enemy previously accumulated wealth and political influence. This difference in perspective does not establish the legality of any particular act of sabotage, but it helps explain why the destruction of Russian-linked energy infrastructure may be interpreted very differently in Kyiv and Berlin. International law cannot simply dissolve these competing political experiences, although it can provide principles by which particular conduct is judged.
The ultimate question is therefore not whether the destruction of Nord Stream was politically understandable, strategically useful or emotionally satisfying to those who opposed the pipelines. It is whether the individuals responsible, whoever they may be, acted within the legal limits governing the use of force, and whether the available evidence establishes the responsibility of those brought before the courts. These inquiries must remain distinct from the question of whether Nord Stream should ever have been constructed. The latter is principally a matter of historical and political judgement, and the verdict is hardly flattering to the European policymakers who imagined that an increasingly authoritarian Russia could be domesticated through commercial contracts. The former is a matter of law, requiring evidence, careful interpretation and respect for the rights of the accused.
The broader lesson is that European security cannot be founded upon the assumption that profitable economic relationships necessarily produce peaceful political relationships. Germany’s experience with Nord Stream demonstrates the dangers of confusing commercial rationality with strategic prudence, while Ukraine’s experience demonstrates the consequences of allowing powerful neighbours to construct economic arrangements that diminish the security of smaller states. Europe must now develop a conception of security in which energy networks, transport systems, financial infrastructure and digital communications are understood as potential instruments of geopolitical coercion rather than merely neutral facilities for commercial exchange. Such a conception need not imply the wholesale militarisation of the European economy, but it does require an appreciation that economic infrastructure is never entirely divorced from political power.
The courtroom in Hamburg may eventually determine whether a particular Ukrainian officer participated in the destruction of a particular set of pipelines and whether his alleged conduct constituted a criminal offence. It cannot, however, resolve the historical failure of European energy policy, the strategic miscalculations that facilitated Russian influence or the fundamental contradictions of a continent that attempted to purchase prosperity from an increasingly aggressive authoritarian power while assuming that its commercial arrangements would remain insulated from geopolitical conflict. Those questions must be answered elsewhere, through political judgement and the reconstruction of Europe’s approach to collective security. The Nord Stream pipelines were built upon the conviction that economic integration would restrain political violence. Their destruction demonstrated, with a rather brutal economy of expression, that pipelines can carry natural gas, profits and political illusions, but they cannot guarantee peace.
