Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Tuesday it's not in Warsaw's interests to hand over to Germany a man suspected of involvement in 2022 Nord Stream pipeline explosion.
Speaking to reporters, Tusk said that although the ultimate decision lies with the court, Poland continues to oppose the pipelines, maintaining its longstanding view that they have made Europe excessively reliant on Russian energy. "The problem of Europe, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Poland is not that Nord Stream 2 was blown up, but that it was built. It is certainly not in the interest of Poland to hand over this citizen to a foreign country," Tusk said.
A Ukrainian man named Volodymyr Z. was detained in central Polish city of Pruszkow last month on a European arrest warrant issued by German authorities and was transferred to prosecutors in Warsaw.
Last month, another Ukrainian man was detained in Italy in relation to the blasts that damaged the undersea pipelines designed to transport Russian natural gas to Germany via the Baltic Sea. "Given the full-scale war in Ukraine and the fact that Nord Stream is owned by the Russian firm Gazprom, which funds such operations, the defense currently sees no grounds for bringing charges against anyone involved in these incidents," Volodymyr Z.'s lawyer, Tymoteusz Paprocki, told Polish radio RMF FM. The lawyer stated that it remains unclear whether his client had any involvement in the sabotage and that he was still waiting for official clarification from German authorities regarding potential charges. He added that the defense would contest any attempt to extradite his client from Poland.
Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which takes Russian gas to Germany bypassing transit countries like Poland and Ukraine, was exploded in a major act of sabotage Near Bornholm Island, in the Baltic Sea in September 2022. The explosion rendered the pipeline inoperable. The attack occurred during a period of heightened tensions between Russia and the West following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
