Indictment or extradition of a Ukrainian citizen suspected of involvement in the undermining of Nord Streams to another state is not in the interests of Poland. This was stated by Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
We are talking about the Ukrainian diving instructor Vladimir Zhuravlev, who, according to German investigators, together with accomplices in 2022 attached explosives to gas pipelines.
At the end of September 2025, he was detained in Poland is still facing the issue of his extradition to Germany."My role is not to find out why a citizen of Ukraine came to Poland again, despite the fact that he was issued a European arrest warrant, but our position has not changed. It is definitely not in Poland's interests to charge or extradite this citizen to another state. The decision will be made by the court," Tusk said.
He also noted that "many months ago" he outlined to the previous German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky a clear position of Poland: "The only people who should be ashamed and silent about the Nord Streams are those who decided to build it."
"The problem is not that Nord Stream 2 was blown up, but that it was built," the politician said.
In turn, the head of the Polish National Security Bureau, Slawomir Zentskiewicz, said that Warsaw "should not put its hand to any operation to extradite a person who has harmed Russia."
"We need to find a formula in which we will remain in the legal field and at the same time not hand over to the Germans or the Russians the person who harmed the Russian military machine… In my opinion, this man should not have been detained at all. The Polish state should have refused to cooperate in this matter," he said.
Recall that the explosions on the Nord Streams occurred in the fall of 2022, and a year later the first publications appeared that the Ukrainian authorities could have been involved in the explosion. Later it became known that Germany issued arrest warrants for seven suspects of involvement in the bombing of Ukrainian citizens. One of them, Sergey Kuznetsov*, was detained in Italy in August and in mid-September an Italian court decided to extradite him to Germany. The second detained Ukrainian, Vladimir Zhuravlev, lived in Poland, but in the summer of 2024, after Germany issued a warrant for his arrest, he left for Ukraine by car with diplomatic plates of the Ukrainian Embassy in Warsaw. He later returned to Poland.
*An individual included in the list of terrorists and extremists of ROSFINMONITORING