BERLIN (AP) — A Ukrainian man wanted in Germany in connection with the 2022 undersea explosions that damaged the Nord Stream gas pipelines was arrested on a European warrant in Croatia on Wednesday, Germany’s federal prosecutor said.
The German prosecutors said that the suspect was a “trained scuba diver” who belonged to a group of people who “planted explosives” on the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea near the Danish island of Bornholm.
The undersea explosions on Sept. 26, 2022, damaged the pipelines, which had been built to carry Russian natural gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea. The damage added to tensions over the war in Ukraine as European countries moved to wean themselves off Russian energy sources after the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor.
The suspect was “strongly suspected of jointly causing explosions, anti-constitutional sabotage, and destruction of buildings and structures," the prosecutors' statement said. It said he was arrested in the Croatian seaside city of Pula and would be brought before an investigating judge at Germany’s federal court of justice after his extradition.
The German prosecutor's office identified the suspect only as Vladimir Z. in its statement announcing his arrest. A spokesperson, however, confirmed to The Associated Press that it was the same man who was arrested in Poland last year but was later released when a Polish court refused to extradite him to Germany. Polish authorities identified him as Volodymyr Zhuravlov.
Poland has long opposed the Nord Stream pipelines, viewing them as an attempt by Russia to use its vast energy resources to gain leverage across Europe. Prime Minister Donald Tusk said at the time of Zhuravlov's extradition hearing that it would not be in Poland’s interest to hand him over.
It was not immediately clear why Zhuravlov left Poland given the arrest warrant that was out for him.
“Volodymyr knew that the ruling applies only on the territory of Poland,” his Polish lawyer, Tymoteusz Paprocki, told the AP, adding that Zhuravlov's wife was also surprised that her husband was detained in Croatia.
The German government welcomed the arrest on Wednesday.
“We’re simply glad that the federal prosecutor’s office is making progress in these investigations, because it’s important that the bombing of the pipelines be clarified as well,” Justice Ministry spokesman Nicholas Limmer told reporters in Berlin.
Last month, German federal prosecutors filed charges against a former Ukrainian army officer in connection with the same explosions.
The suspect, identified only as Serhii K., faces charges of causing an explosion, damaging property, disrupting public service and being an “accomplice to war crimes” by attacking civilian objects.
Serhii K. was detained in August 2025 in an Italian village, where officers raided a bungalow where he was staying with his family. Police said he surrendered without resistance. He was extradited to Germany in November.
The suspects allegedly used a yacht that set off from the German port of Rostock. The yacht had been rented from a German company using forged IDs and intermediaries.
The explosions ruptured the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which was Russia’s main natural gas supply route to Germany until Moscow cut off supplies in August 2022. They also damaged Nord Stream 2, which never entered service because Germany suspended its certification process shortly before Russia’s invasion.
Initially some officials in the West suspected that Russia might have carried out the explosions. But German investigators later pointed to suspected Ukrainian involvement.
Russia has accused the U.S. of staging the explosions, a charge Washington has denied. The pipelines were long a target of criticism by the U.S. and some of its allies, which warned that they increased dependence on Russian gas.
Claudia Ciobanu in Warsaw, Poland, and Fanny Brodersen in Berlin contributed reporting.
FILE - Ukrainian defendant Volodymyr Zhuravlov, right, listens as a judge announces the decision not to allow for extradition to Germany in courtroom of Warsaw's Regional Court in Warsaw, Poland, Friday, Oct. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski, File)
FILE - In this picture provided by Swedish Coast Guard, a leak from Nord Stream 2 is seen, on Sept. 28, 2022. (Swedish Coast Guard via AP, File)
AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 9, 2026--
Certinia today unveiled the System of Action for services businesses, which understands context, applies judgment, and then acts on trusted data and reasoning, so that every decision drives toward real business outcomes.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260909879512/en/
According to the 2026 Global Service Dynamics Report, an independent survey of 1,000 services and IT leaders worldwide, nearly all (98%) have deployed AI in their organization, but only 20% say it has exceeded expectations. Among those reporting success, 70% describe their operations as aligned or fully integrated across sales, delivery, finance, and customer success. Certinia's System of Action is built for exactly that kind of connectivity — uniting the data, the judgment, and the ability to act so that services organizations can run their businesses with certainty.
Certinia's System of Action powers modern services organizations through three integrated components. The first is foundational context: Certinia brings together professional services, customer success, financial management, and CRM data with the unstructured reality of daily work — calls, threads, meetings — into one unified source of truth, closing the gap between what's happening on the ground and what the business needs to know in real-time. The second is compounding intelligence; built on more than 17 years of Certinia's services domain expertise, drawn from the breadth of real projects, timecards, resourcing decisions, and estimates processed across its workflows, so judgment sharpens with every decision. The third is agentic action, which carries that judgment out exactly when and where it's needed, bringing the right knowledge and reasoning to every action across the services lifecycle.
Strengthening the System of Action is the largest expansion of Certinia's Veda AI suite to date, delivering an unprecedented solution purpose-built to operate businesses and accelerate sales & delivery across the entire services lifecycle. This includes new agents, a doubled library of Veda Intelligent Actions (VIAs) that bring Certinia's services expertise directly into existing workflows, and deployment options that provide the flexibility for organizations to use the AI in ways that best fit their stack, strategy, and requirements.
"AI can only move the needle for our customers when it's grounded in real business context and judgment they can trust — a system that understands the business, reasons through it, and acts with little to no margin for error," said DJ Paoni, Chief Executive Officer, Certinia. "That's what our System of Action delivers. Only Certinia can combine a trusted, unified data foundation with our breadth of services expertise and deep business reasoning to meet the accuracy standards services businesses require — and it's why our latest agentic capabilities help customers unlock stronger margins, faster time-to-outcome, and greater customer value."
“Organizations that connect management efficiency gains to delivery quality improvements achieve the strongest overall ROI. The key design principle: AI must be integrated across the full life cycle, not deployed as isolated tools in individual functions,” said Mickey North Rizza, Group Vice President, Enterprise Software and Agents, IDC ¹.
New Veda Agents to Run the Business and Accelerate Sales & Delivery
Certinia's expanded suite of agentic capabilities introduces a lineup of 14 new out-of-the-box Veda agents to accelerate sales and delivery.
Each agent turns the unstructured context of daily work into organizational memory, so automation gets sharper, capturing best practices with every project instead of starting from zero each time.
Using Veda's new agentic capabilities, services teams are able to:
Expanded Veda Intelligent Actions and Capabilities to Streamline Workflows
Certinia has more than doubled the library of Veda Intelligent Actions (VIAs) from 64 to 135. Veda Intelligent Actions are bite-sized, reusable capabilities that bring Certinia's deep domain expertise directly into a customer's workflow and whatever tools their teams already use.
New VIA capabilities offer benefits across every part of a services business:
AI Your Way Provides a New Level of Deployment Flexibility
Most vendors force customers to either adopt their proprietary AI or bring their own and lose depth. With Certinia’s new AI Your Way features, service firms no longer have to compromise. These capabilities provide flexibility across the Veda AI suite, letting organizations use the AI and agentic framework that fits their stack, strategy, and requirements.
Certinia's AI Your Way capabilities give services organizations the option to:
Whether an organization is standardized on Agentforce, building on Claude or Microsoft Copilot, or wants Certinia's own native AI platform to do the heavy lifting, every path draws from the same library of trusted, governed actions grounded in the right context and judgment.
Committing to 100% Agentic Capability Coverage by Year End
Today’s release accelerates a broader trajectory that will culminate in 100% agentic capability coverage across Certinia’s System of Action by year-end, comprising 40+ agents and 300+ VIAs across the services lifecycle. Every professional services, customer success, and financial workflow will be able to be executed by an agentic capability or a human, giving organizations total flexibility in how they operate.
The Advantage That Compounds
As AI models become increasingly interchangeable, competitive advantage will shift to organizations holding the specific data and judgment those models depend upon to act. While every services organization will soon have access to roughly the same AI intelligence, they will not have the same underlying data, institutional judgment, or track record of decisions made and outcomes fed back into ongoing judgment.
That is the unique advantage Certinia has that no other PSA vendor built on siloed functionality can replicate. Certinia's depth of proprietary context and intelligence is what makes Veda the most complete and trustworthy agentic solution built on real business judgment, and it is why Certinia is the durable advantage the world's leading services organizations are built upon to help them protect margins, shorten time-to-outcome, and grow customer value with certainty.
To learn more and see the System of Action in practice, register for Certinia's live webinar Insight to Impact: Introducing the System of Action for Modern Services on September 30, 2026, as product experts demonstrate the system and how it can benefit your organization.
¹ IDC, Operationalizing AI in Professional Services: Practical Steps Toward an Intelligent Operating Model, #US54625226, June 2026
About Certinia
Certinia is the leading System of Action for services businesses, powering organizations with the unified source of truth, services expertise and reasoning, and agentic action to bring the right knowledge and judgment to every decision across the entire services lifecycle. Purpose-built for professional services, customer success, and financial management, the world’s leading services organizations rely on Certinia to maximize margins, deliver faster time-to-outcome, and grow customer value with certainty. Certinia is backed by Haveli Investments, TA Associates, General Atlantic, and Salesforce Ventures. For more information, visit www.certinia.com.
Certinia's System of Action architecture, spanning Professional Services, Customer Success, and Financial Management.
