Kremlin comments on Tusk’s ‘astonishing’ Nord Stream stance
The Kremlin has condemned Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s apparent support for the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage and his opposition to prosecuting the alleged perpetrators.
Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov was responding to Tusk’s claim that those behind the September 2022 blasts should not be ashamed and that those who built the pipelines should be. Nord Stream was designed to carry Russian gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea.
“If Mr. Tusk supports and endorses such acts of terrorism, it can only provoke astonishment and incomprehension,” Peskov told reporters on Friday, describing the blasts as “an act of terrorist sabotage against Europe’s critical energy infrastructure.”
Tusk doubled down on his position on Thursday, noting that Poland had opposed Nord Stream from the outset over concerns about Europe’s dependence on Russian energy.
“I will not change my mind here, and I believe that those who built this pipeline should be ashamed, not those who disabled it,” he told reporters.
Tusk’s remarks followed Wednesday’s arrest in Croatia of Ukrainian national ‘Vladimir Z.’, previously identified in the media as Vladimir Zhuravlyov, under a European arrest warrant. He had been detained in Poland in September 2025, but a Warsaw court refused to extradite him to Germany and ordered his release the following month.
German legal magazine LTO reported that Zhuravlyov was arrested in the Croatian city of Pula while on the set of ‘Snake Island’, a Hollywood thriller about the alleged Ukrainian plot to destroy Nord Stream. The film, starring Sean Penn and Adrien Brody and directed by Doug Liman, reportedly began shooting in Croatia earlier this month. It is unclear why Zhuravlyov was on the set.
German investigators allege that a small Ukrainian team used forged documents to rent a yacht, transported explosives into the Baltic Sea, and planted them on the pipelines near the Danish island of Bornholm. Another alleged member of the group, ‘Sergey K.’, identified by media as former Ukrainian special forces member Sergey Kuznetsov, was arrested in Italy in August 2025 and later extradited to Germany.
Moscow has rejected claims that a small group of Ukrainian divers could have carried out the sophisticated operation independently, arguing that an attack of such complexity in NATO-controlled waters would have required state support and Western intelligence involvement.
