Celia Hatton

When a second suspect was detained in Poland on a German arrest warrant...

The Polish judge refused to extradite him, arguing that Russia's war on Ukraine had made the pipeline a legitimate target.

Neither of the suspects nor any officials in Kyiv have admitted to involvement in the deep-sea sabotage.

Our Eastern Europe correspondent Sarah Rainsford has been following the case throughout the year.

This autumn, TV crews crushed into a Warsaw courthouse to capture the moment when a Ukrainian man was led past in handcuffs for an extradition hearing.

I shouted a question, but he kept his head lowered and walked on in silence.

Vladimir Zhuravlov was accused of attacking the Nord Stream pipelines from Russia.

Before the invasion of Ukraine, Germany got almost half of all its gas through Nord Stream.

But in September 2022, it was blown up in Europe's biggest act of sabotage in decades.

For a while, Russia itself was the prime suspect.

Vladimir Putin had been threatening to cut off the energy flow to Europe, trying to force governments to stop supporting Kiev.

But the evidence soon began to point towards Ukraine.

Three years on, German prosecutors tracked Vladimir Zhuravlov to Warsaw, and they issued an arrest warrant.

His wife, Yuliana, told me what happened next.

had left Kyiv before Russia began its all-out invasion.

Vladimir began selling air conditioning units, but investigators believe he had another life.

They say in September 2022, he was part of a group of Ukrainians who used fake passports to hire a boat, sail out into the Baltic Sea and plant explosives on the pipeline far beneath the surface.

That day in court in Warsaw, the Polish judge made a passionate speech about Russia's genocidal war, as he called it, and Ukrainians' right to defend themselves.

Even if Vladimir had blown up Nord Stream, he said, the pipeline was helping to fund Russia's war economy, and so a legitimate target.

In a ruling that was very popular in Poland, he refused to extradite Vladimir.