
The Latin Dance Teacher Directing Russia's Sabotage in Europe
In 2024 a wave of arson and sabotage hit Europe: a construction-supply business burned in Poland, suspects were arrested in Czechia and Romania for similar fires, and Lithuanian investigators broke up a plot to torch military equipment. The people caught were Spanish-speaking, not Russian, which is what makes this DW investigation worth following. Reporters from four European broadcasters spend more than a year tracing the attacks back through recruitment networks to Russia's secret services, and ultimately to Oemis Romagoza Durruthy, a Cuban dance teacher living in Russia who allegedly helped organize the campaign. The film lays out how low-level operatives, often with no ideological stake in the conflict, were drawn into acting as proxies for a state intelligence operation, and how investigators pieced together the connections across borders. Interviews with investigators and documentary evidence from the separate national cases build a picture of a deliberately diffuse network designed to be hard to trace back to Moscow. It is a compact, well-sourced piece of cross-border investigative journalism.