A Colombian national who set fire to Prague public transport buses in June 2024 was recruited online by a Cuban man working for Russia's intelligence services, a joint investigation by Germany's Deutsche Welle and three partner European broadcasters has found. The recruiter, described as a dance instructor, did not stop at one target: DW's reporting says he approached several other people online who went on to carry out or plan sabotage operations elsewhere in Europe.

The pattern mirrors what German investigators have pieced together about the August 4 explosive-drone incident at Leipzig/Halle Airport, where a device carrying roughly 1.8 kilograms of Semtex was found near a Ukrainian Antonov cargo plane and failed to detonate, according to Euronews. Prosecutors have traced the logistics to a Russian identified only as Oleg Le., linked to the GRU, who reportedly entered Germany via Turkey and later left through Berlin-Brandenburg airport for Russia. A Belarusian, Andrei Ka., is suspected of carrying out the attack, with DNA tying him to earlier incidents in Finland and Lithuania.

HYPOTHESIS: Prague and Leipzig fit the same Russian playbook — recruiting non-Russian nationals, often through personal or online contact rather than formal tradecraft, to carry out sabotage at arm's length from Moscow. Supporting this: both operations used foreign proxies with no obvious ideological tie to Russia, both hit transport infrastructure in a NATO and EU state, and in both cases the organizers left before or after the act. Against it: nothing in the DW or Euronews reporting names a direct link between the Cuban recruiter and the Leipzig GRU handler — these read as two cells running a shared model, not evidence of a single network.

Germany has already attached a diplomatic cost to the Leipzig case, closing the Russian consulate general in Bonn and the Russian House in Berlin; Moscow retaliated by shutting Germany's consulate in St Petersburg, per Euronews. What remains open: whether the Cuban recruiter DW identified faces prosecution anywhere in Europe, and how many more cells he built are still unaccounted for.