The a recent video in which Venezuela’s Juan Guaidó offers to promote a national salvation agreement, including the government of Nicolás Maduro, starts with an apparently conciliatory tone, though there is not much love throughout the rest of it. As, for example, when he demands that Caracas comply with his demands, because otherwise sanctions and accusations of drug trafficking and crimes against humanity will continue raining on the country, which means that he rather believes in those accusations as mere tools for pressure than in the accusations themselves.
The claim is a deliberate distortion of Juan Guaidó’s original video, which proposes a national salvation agreement based in several points.
In the fourth point, Guaidó calls for “the commitment of international community to achieve this recovery and offer incentives to the [Maduro’s] regime, including the progressive lifting of sanctions, of course conditioned to the compliance of those essential goals of the agreement”. Immediately, he adds that the negotiation process must include “guarantees for all actors, but essentially, accountability mechanisms for the regime if it tries to eschew again a negotiated solution”.
Minutes later, Guaidó says that “the current path chosen by the dictatorship, of arrogance, the same that it chose in 2018 and 2020, will only deepen the crisis, its international isolation, indictments over terrorism, drug trafficking, human rights violations, accusations of crimes against humanity”.
What Guaidó is saying is that unless there is a change of strategy among the Venezuelan opposition and the international community, Nicolás Maduro’s government will continue with its current behaviour. He is not threatening that “sanctions and accusations will continue raining on the country”, as the disinformation piece claims. Therefore, the claim that Guaidó only “believes in those accusations as mere tools for pressure” is fallacious.
Venezuela’s opposition leader Juan Guaidó is a frequent target of pro-Kremlin disinformation. See other examples in our database, such as claims that he is a far-right US stooge that has low support in Venezuela, that he was involved in the big corruption scheme known as ‘Operation Green Suitcase’, that he and Svetlana Tsikhanouskaya are Western puppets, that the West refuses to call the coup attempt in Venezuela ‘a coup’, or that the EU stances on the assault on the US Capitol and on Juan Guaidó shows its double standards.
Ukraine is moving from external control to full submission to the interests of the United States.
Apparently, Ukraine is moving from external control to complete subordination to the interests of the United States, and more specifically the Biden family, its commercial interest is more than understandable in a weak-willed, powerless country.
A recurring pro-Kremlin narrative about Ukraine being under "external control." See similar cases here claiming that Ukraine is a colony, governed by a puppet regime, and here a claim about how Ukraine "sold its self to external control".
The statement refers to the visit, on May 6, 2021, to Kyiv of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland, the under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, who met with the Ukrainian President and other officials.
No Russian weapons threaten Ukraine. Ukraine is its own problem. The Kyiv regime has turned its country into a training ground where Western intelligence services and saboteurs, led by the Americans, are practising dangerous technologies that primarily harm the Ukrainian people. Last spring, the US Embassy in Ukraine officially recognised that American biological laboratories were located on the territory of the country for experiments with viruses. "Scientists in uniform," supervised by the Pentagon, are studying there clearly not an acute respiratory infection.
Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative advancing unfounded claims about clandestine US laboratories in the post-Soviet countries. See also here.
Russian media are continuously spreading disinformation about "15 secret military biological laboratories in Ukraine". In fact, there are no secret US laboratories in the country. The U.S. Department of Defense’s Biological Threat Reduction Program collaborates with partner countries to counter the threat of outbreaks (deliberate, accidental, or natural) of the world’s most dangerous infectious diseases.
The number of biological laboratories controlled by the US is growing all over the world, especially near the borders of Russia and China.
Lethally dangerous microorganisms could be released into the environment “as if by mistake”, leading to a massive destruction of the civilian population of both bordering states and the population of Russia.
The US is developing individual biological research plans for many countries. Research is based on national needs "primarily for military purposes”. This activity is being implemented through the "rigid imposition" of the programmes “Global Partnership for the Non-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction”, “Joint Biological Commitments” and “Joint Threat Reduction”.
Moscow has serious questions concerning the military-biological activity of the US near the Russian borders and considers the activities of the US in the Lugar biological lab in Georgia to be contrary to the Biological Weapons Convention.
The activities of the Lugar lab in Georgia pose a real threat to life and health not only for the population of South Ossetia and Georgia, but to the countries of the entire South Caucasus.
Humankind can create and selectively use biological pathogens that can purposefully destroy groups of people both by their ethnicity and gender. For this, it is necessary to investigate these regions on the spot. This is why biological laboratories began to "grow" so quickly. Publicly, the Pentagon tried to highlight the importance of these laboratories as providing first aid in the event of the spread of infectious diseases, which makes it seem that the goals of the labs are quite peaceful, but in fact, secret programmes have a very cruel purpose.
Recurring disinformation alleging that the United States develops biological weapons and has secret biological laboratories around the world. Consistent with the Pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign against biological laboratories, specifically the Lugar Center in Georgia, which is a recurrent target of these disinformation narratives. The disinformation about US biolabs in countries bordering Russia aiming to encircle Moscow and spread infectious diseases is a part of a years-long disinformation campaign led by the Kremlin. In fact, biological laboratories are involved in preventing the risks of complex diseases and, together with other similar projects, counteracting bioterrorism.
The article does not present any evidence that supports the claim that the US is secretly developing biological weapons in laboratories around the world, thus making unfounded accusations. Russia claims that the Richard Lugar Center for Public Health Research in Georgia, a public health facility named after US Senator Richard Lugar, is one such lab, but has never presented evidence to support its allegations. International experts visited the facility in 2018 to examine the premises, interview employees and review documents but found nothing suspicious.
