‘Shame on the builders, not the saboteurs’: Polish prime minister calls on Germany to drop its Nord Stream bombing case
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Germany should drop its prosecution of suspects in the 2022 bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines.
“Those who built this pipeline should be ashamed, not those who shut it down,” Tusk said on August 20, referring to the detention in Croatia of one of the bombing suspects under a German warrant.
The Polish broadcaster TVP reported that Tusk noted Poland had long opposed the pipeline’s construction, saying it would deepen Europe’s dependence on Russian gas. “At the time, Germany held a different view,” Tusk said. “They changed their minds, but too late.”
On August 21, journalists asked Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov to comment on Tusk’s remarks. Those who built Nord Stream “made a real contribution to ensuring energy security on the European continent,” Peskov said, according to the Russian news agency Interfax. Those who blew up the pipeline, he said, “committed an act of terrorist sabotage against Europe’s critical energy infrastructure.”
“If Mr. Tusk is in favor of such acts of terrorist sabotage and supports them, it can prompt nothing but astonishment and bewilderment,” Peskov said.
Volodymyr Zhuravlev, a Ukrainian citizen, was detained in Croatia in mid-August on suspicion of involvement in the Nord Stream bombing. He had been detained in Poland in 2025 under a German warrant, but a Polish court refused to extradite him. Tusk said at the time that the court had acted “correctly.”
German authorities say Zhuravlev, a diving instructor, was directly involved in the Nord Stream bombing. He denies it.
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