Courtroom 237 of the Hamburg criminal courthouse opened the Nord Stream case on 14 October and resumes this morning. The defendant, Serhii Kuznetsov, is fifty and a former officer of the Ukrainian army. He sat through the opening day in headphones, listening to an interpreter render the charges in Ukrainian, and he has not spoken. His lawyers argue that a soldier’s secrecy obligation prevents him from mounting a defence; the court rejected that argument on 27 October and the trial continues into February.
The case is narrow and technical: four explosive devices of up to twenty-seven kilograms, planted eighty metres down near the Danish island of Bornholm, detonated on 26 September 2022. It is also, unavoidably, a case about what the rest of us believed. Four years ago the question of who destroyed the pipelines was answered with confidence in a great many places, by people who had no evidence at all and a strong sense of who benefits.
Jeffrey Sachs was the most credentialed of them, and he has not changed his mind.
A bet, then a fact
In the first week of October 2022, with gas still rising through the Baltic, Sachs went on Bloomberg Television and said he would bet the explosions were an American action, possibly with Polish participation. He called it speculation at the time, which is the correct word for what followed. He offered three supports: radar data he said showed American helicopters circling, President Biden’s February warning that if Russia invaded there would be no Nord Stream 2 (as quoted by UnHerd, 15 February 2023), and Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s remark that the destruction was an opportunity for Europe to end its dependence on Russian gas.
Five months later he sat for an interview with UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers and the speculation had hardened. Asked whether a Ukrainian group might have done it, he dismissed the idea as “absurd”, and the summary UnHerd published carries his reasoning in his own words: the United States was “basically the only country with the motive, the means” (UnHerd, 15 February 2023). The same page concedes that “no argument has, as of yet, found a smoking gun”.
Last month the certainty was intact and had widened. In an interview with World News Monitor, republished on his own site on 13 October 2026, Sachs explained what Germany should have done differently: “If Germany had rejected the plan by America and Ukraine to blow up Nord Stream, the German economy would still be healthy and the war would not have unfolded as it did” (Jeffrey Sachs, 13 October 2026).
Read that sentence twice. It is dated thirteen days before the Hamburg trial opened. It names a joint American and Ukrainian plan as an established fact, in the same month that German federal prosecutors put a Ukrainian officer in the dock over it. Whatever one thinks of either account, they are not the same account, and only one of them is being tested under oath.
What the inference rested on
Sachs’s argument, stripped of its learning, is this: the United States had a motive, the United States had the capability, the United States said things that sounded like threats and things that sounded like relish, therefore the United States did it.
Each element is real. Biden did say in February 2022 that if Russia invaded, “there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2,” adding “I promise you, we will be able to do it.” Blinken did describe the ruptured pipelines as an opportunity to end European dependence on Russian gas, a sentence that reads badly from any angle. American naval aviation does operate in the Baltic. These are facts, and a serious analyst should weigh them.
But motive and capability are where an investigation begins, not where it ends. They are consistent with a dozen perpetrators. The step Sachs skipped is the only step that converts a suspicion into a claim: evidence of the specific act, by specific people, on a specific night. He did not have it in 2022, he did not have it in 2023, and the sentence he published in October 2026 suggests he has never felt its absence.
The tell is in the phrasing from 2023: motive and means, assigned to one country, with Ukraine absent from the list of candidates. A country whose gas transit revenue and Western support both depended on those pipelines never being reopened had motive. Whether it had the means was the precise question the German investigation spent four years answering. Sachs answered it in advance, by assertion, and called the alternative absurd.
What the record did instead
The investigations did not vindicate him. They did something more interesting, and slower.
Sweden closed its inquiry on 7 February 2024, concluding that Swedish jurisdiction did not apply and that nothing had emerged to indicate Swedish involvement; it handed its material to Germany (the prosecutor closes the Swedish investigation, 7 February 2024). Denmark closed its own on 26 February 2024, having concluded that there was deliberate sabotage and that the grounds to pursue a criminal case in Denmark were not sufficient (Copenhagen Police and PET, 26 February 2024). Neither named a perpetrator. Those two closures are the closest thing the record offers to the opacity Sachs complained of, and he was not wrong that it existed.
Germany kept working. Prosecutors traced a chartered sailing yacht, the Andromeda, rented in Rostock with falsified identity papers, and reported traces of subsea explosives aboard (BBC News, 14 October 2026). On 30 June 2026 the Federal Public Prosecutor filed an indictment alleging that the accused, then an officer in the Ukrainian army, “and other military personnel conceived a plan, acting by order of Ukrainian state agencies, to destroy the ‘Nord Stream 1’ and ‘Nord Stream 2’ gas pipelines” (Generalbundesanwalt, 2 July 2026). A second Ukrainian suspect was arrested in Pula, Croatia, on 19 August 2026 (Generalbundesanwalt, 19 August 2026). The Hamburg court admitted the charge on 2 September and set sixteen hearing days.
None of this establishes that Ukraine ordered the operation. The charge is a prosecution case, not a verdict. The defence told the court there is “no DNA, no fingerprints” and nothing but circumstantial evidence, and that argument may yet succeed. The German Federal Court of Justice has already ruled the pipelines civilian objects and rejected a wartime justification (Kyiv Post, 3 November 2026), which tells us something about the law and nothing about the facts.
The honest state of the question in 2023 was the one UnHerd printed: unknown, with several plausible authors. Sachs could not tolerate that sentence. He replaced it with a different one, and he has been repeating it ever since.
Why this one matters
It would be easy to file this as a hobbyhorse, one economist’s fixation on one explosion. It is not. The Nord Stream claim is the cleanest available test of a method that runs through everything else Sachs says about the war.
His defensible arguments rest on documents. The 1990 assurances to Moscow are real and declassified. NATO’s Bucharest declaration of 2008 was a genuine provocation that committed nothing and cost nothing to withdraw. The Minsk agreements were never implemented, by either side. A reader can check each of those and find that Sachs is largely right, which is why people who disagree with his conclusions still read him.
His indefensible claims rest on inference from motive, presented in the register of fact. Nord Stream is the pure case: no documents, no witnesses, no forensics, a single conclusion, and a confident voice. The 2014 “coup,” the claim that the Istanbul process was a deal sabotaged from Washington, the assertion that Ukraine would never act without American approval, all run on the same engine. Once you have watched him reach certainty about a crime scene nobody could see, you know how to read the rest.
There is a further cost, and it falls on his own side of the argument. Nord Stream is the item that gets him booked on Indian television and the item that lets a critic dismiss everything else he says. He has handed his opponents the cheapest possible rebuttal, and he renews it annually. The case against NATO enlargement, whatever its merits, does not need an American demolition team in the Baltic. It needs the memoranda, which exist.
What he got right
A fair accounting has to concede the parts that hold.
The Swedish and Danish files closed without public findings, and Sweden’s prosecutor said explicitly that secrecy prevented further comment. Sachs called that a cleaned crime scene; the accurate description is a jurisdiction declining to publish, which is not the same thing but is not nothing either. Germany’s investigation ran for four years before it produced a name. The pipelines were forty-nine per cent owned by European energy companies, including German ones, and the German government’s response was to depoliticise the case and keep funding Kyiv, which is either restraint or avoidance depending on your priors. His suspicion that states conceal what they do is not a pathology. It is a prior most journalists share.
What separates suspicion from accusation is the willingness to be wrong in public. Sachs made a bet in 2022, called it speculation, and then spent four years treating the bet as the finding. The Hamburg court, which must decide something narrow and will probably take until 2027 to do it, is doing the thing he did not: proceeding without knowing, and saying so.
The difference between a hypothesis and a conclusion is not the confidence of the person holding it. It is whether new evidence can move him. On this question, four years of it has not.
PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman