DISINFO: The US has resumed its biolab program in Ukraine under ‘dual use’ disguise
DISINFORMATION CASE DETAILS
  • Outlet: sputniknews.lat ( archived) *
  • Date of publication: April 10, 2023
  • Article language(s): Spanish
  • Countries / regions discussed: Ukraine, US, Russia

DISINFO: The US has resumed its biolab program in Ukraine under ‘dual use’ disguise

SUMMARY

The US has resumed a program to build biolaboratories in Ukraine and is widening the training of Ukrainian biologists. Despite a forced pause due to the special military operation, these activities restarted again.

The facts revealed by Russia’s Ministry of Defence about the Pentagon’s military-biological activities forced Washington to make an effort to hide the real nature of this work, so it changed the name of the Joint Biological Investigation program, whose real goal is to develop components of biological weapons.

[...] Washington sees the post-Soviet space as a launching pad for the deployment of NATO military units.

RESPONSE

Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative which pro-Kremlin outlets and Russian authorities continue promoting despite repeated debunking.

Ukraine has dozens of civilian public health laboratories that work to research and mitigate the threats of dangerous diseases, some of which receive financial and other support from the US, the EU and the World Health Organization (WHO), which pro-Kremlin disinformation falsely portrayed as military sites, deliberately blurring the line between biological weapons and biological research.

Russia’s claims about a US-funded biological weapons program in Ukraine have been widely refuted -including by the UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs Izumi Nakamitsu and by Russian biologists who examined Moscow’s “proofs”. This particular disinformation claim aims to push back against those debunks by falsely claiming that civilian research programs in Ukraine have a “dual use”.

See other examples of similar disinformation narratives in our database, such as claims that Russia presented evidence of US biolabs in Ukraine at the convention on biological weapons, that new evidence of US military-biological activity emerged in Ukraine, that disease outbreaks in Ukraine are linked to the activity of US biolabs, that Zelenskyy ordered the destruction of evidence regarding the development of biological weapons, or that bio-experiments in US labs turned Ukrainian soldiers into ‘most cruel monsters’.

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Disclaimer

Cases in the EUvsDisinfo database focus on messages in the international information space that are identified as providing a partial, distorted, or false depiction of reality and spread key pro-Kremlin messages. This does not necessarily imply, however, that a given outlet is linked to the Kremlin or editorially pro-Kremlin, or that it has intentionally sought to disinform. EUvsDisinfo publications do not represent an official EU position, as the information and opinions expressed are based on media reporting and analysis of the East Stratcom Task Force.

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