The charge sheet, July 2 -- For nearly four years, the men who blew a hole in the Baltic Sea floor and the officials who might have ordered them to do it stayed just out of reach of a courtroom. That changed on Wednesday, when Germany's federal prosecutor's office in Karlsruhe filed the first formal indictment in the Nord Stream sabotage case, charging a Ukrainian war veteran with war crimes over an operation that severed gas supplies Europe once depended on and detonated a diplomatic fuse still burning today.

not whether Ukrainians carried out the attack, but who in Kyiv, if anyone, gave the order.

Federal prosecutors allege the 49-year-old commanded a six-member team that rented the sailing yacht Andromeda out of the northern German p...