New Delhi, July 3 -- HAMBURG - The gas stopped flowing years ago. But the legal reckoning for who destroyed Europe's most politically contested pipeline arrived at a Hamburg court on Thursday, when German prosecutors charged a former Ukrainian army officer with war crimes for personally leading the team that bombed Nord Stream.

The accused, identified only as Serhii K under German privacy rules, is a former Ukrainian military officer who, prosecutors say, assembled a team of divers, a ship captain, and an explosives specialist, transported military-grade charges to the Baltic Sea floor near Denmark's Bornholm island, and set time fuses on the infrastructure that once carried Russian gas to Germany. Both Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 we...