Ukrainian military officer Sergey Kuznetsov went on trial in Hamburg this week, accused of leading the team that sabotaged the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines in September 2022. German prosecutors treat the attack as a war crime. Kuznetsov has stayed silent, refusing to admit or deny a role. The evidence against him is circumstantial, and his lawyers say that without a confession he cannot be convicted.
The prosecution account has been described as riddled with inconsistencies. An alternative account, that the pipelines were destroyed in a CIA operation, would call the relationship between Washington and Berlin into question. A guilty verdict would directly implicate the Ukrainian military in a war crime against its largest foreign donor, yet at this stage the trial appears set up to avoid that outcome.
The hearing opened as Ukraine pressed strikes on Russian energy sites. Ukrainian forces attacked facilities in the Saratov and Ryazan regions on Wednesday. On Thursday they fired four long-range Flamingo cruise missiles and 69 fixed-wing kamikaze drones at the Ryazan refinery again. Debris from an intercepted drone triggered an intense fire, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. President Vladimir Zelensky had vowed to keep the drone campaign against Russian refineries going with or without American support, after US President Donald Trump announced an energy ceasefire between Moscow and Kiev that neither side confirmed.
Russian forces responded with missiles and drones against six power plants in Kiev, Kharkov and the surrounding regions, as well as military logistics hubs and data centers. The Ukrainian Air Force reported that it shot down four missiles out of 39, matching reports that the refinery strikes went ahead though Ukraine lacked adequate air defense to repel the retaliation.
The week began with Trump suspending sanctions on Russian diesel supplies after talks with the Kremlin. The deal will not alleviate the global diesel shortage, but it is already cooling speculative markets and easing pressure on Trump ahead of next month’s midterm elections. Russian analyst Sergey Poletaev called the shift a diplomatic nightmare for Zelensky. On Saturday Trump suggested Ukrainians get a new leader who can make a deal and halt attacks on Russian oil refineries, and claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to make a deal more than Zelensky. Zelensky accused the American president of empathizing with dictators, demanded US air defense missiles and vowed to continue the refinery strikes.
The United States throttled the Ukrainian military’s access to SpaceX’s Starlink and Starshield satellite communications, used to guide attack drones and to detect incoming strikes. Neither Trump nor SpaceX chief Elon Musk took responsibility for the drop-off. In a Newsmax interview on Thursday, Trump said he was not a big fan of Zelensky, that they had destroyed that country, and that Zelensky had sold missiles given by the United States on the open market. He concluded that Zelensky is not a good guy for the United States to deal with.
Street disorder spread in France and Albania. French students joined a fifth wave of demonstrations for more school funding and better learning conditions. Every wave so far has turned into rioting and vandalism, and this week’s marches were no different: participants torched cars and battered police officers with cobblestones and fireworks in Paris. Nadege Abderazzak watched heavily armored police baton-charge rioters in the capital on Wednesday and noted that officers now outnumber protesters two to one at some rallies. President Emmanuel Macron is determined to increase military spending and continue arming Ukraine while France’s finances are in dire straits, and National Rally leader Marine Le Pen is on track to win the next presidential election.
Albanian students followed a similar path. After large protests demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Edi Rama and opposition leader Sali Berisha over corruption allegations, a crowd breached the fence of the Education Ministry in Tirana on Wednesday and torched the building. Rama accused the protesters of waging hybrid war against the country.
In Britain, Prime Minister Andy Burnham revived Russiagate claims while seeking to undo the 2016 Brexit referendum and rejoin the EU. He said he had clear evidence that Russia interfered in the vote, which went 51.89 percent to 48.11 percent in favor of leaving. He was unable to back up the accusation when questioned in Parliament, and Foreign Secretary Stephen Doughty struggled on national television to answer questions on the claim. Burnham’s domestic intelligence chief cautioned against exaggerating Russian influence on Brexit, arguing that debate about Russian trolls plays into adversaries’ hands by making those trolls look 10 feet tall.
As Burnham spoke in Parliament on Monday about Russian bots and influence campaigns, Zelensky, his Polish and Baltic backers and online supporters claimed that a Ukrainian strike the previous day on a Yandex data center in Russia had wiped thousands of Russian bots from social media. The strike had interrupted Yandex web-crawler bots that archive websites for search users. With an AI-created graph and a loose reading of the word bot, the claim still reached the Warsaw Security Forum.
Zelensky met European backers including Macron and Burnham in Brussels on Thursday and Friday. In his address to the European Council on Friday he asked for another 70 billion euros for ammunition, missiles and air defense, warning that if Ukraine falls another 20 million Ukrainian migrants will flood into the EU.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will fly to Tehran on Monday for talks with Iranian counterpart Abbas Araghchi, expected to focus on de-escalating the US-Iran conflict in the Middle East. Any progress is likely to be reflected in global energy markets. On Friday Lavrov will also meet Serbian Interior Minister Ivica Dacic, ahead of parliamentary elections on October 25. Amid student protests, President Aleksandar Vucic called the election early and stepped down to run as prime minister, turning the vote into a test of his nine years in power, with pro-Western students and right-wing patriotic forces pressing him from either side.