Understanding the Ukraine Bioweapons Lab Myth
With any major news story comes a slew of conspiracy theories; the past two years of prevalent COVID-19 conspiracy theories circulating the airwaves should make this plain. But a more insidious myth you may not have heard of that pertains to the war in Ukraine is the QAnon-germinated yarn that would, in the minds of believers, justify Russia’s invasion.
In the hours following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, the now-suspended Twitter account @WarClandestine tweeted that “China and Russia indirectly (and correctly) blamed the US for the [COVID-19] outbreak, And are fearful that the US/allies have more viruses (bioweapons) to let out.” The person implied that Russia’s invasion was in response to roughly 30 U.S.-funded bioweapons labs in Ukrainian sovereign territory.
The Kremlin has been pushing this narrative since around 2011, according to Scott Radnitz, an expert on Post-Soviet Russia. It’s a bogus theory based on “U.S.-funded laboratories that in fact do research on diseases,” he says.
“They're part of a Defense Department program to support public health research in post-Soviet countries. And Russia has always been suspicious of these labs — putting out misinformation, asking insinuating questions through official channels.”
The labs themselves do exist, but they are set up to conduct surveillance on emerging infectious diseases. The United States’ claim that it does not fund biological weapons in Ukraine is well proven, and Russia’s use of this tactic can be traced back to the Soviet Era and the 1980s HIV/AIDS crisis.
Despite this evidence, the theory showed up on Tucker Carlson’s segment on Fox News. 3 million Americans (per night, on average) were beholden to the idea that the U.S.A. was “funding the creation of deadly pathogens,” using footage of state spokesmen from China and Russia as evidence. The sheer level of exposure that the people of the United States have received to a piece of Russian propaganda dating back to the 1980s caused NPR to dub Moscow as “[notching] a win in the information war.”
"What it did do was it gave the Kremlin a taste of a propaganda win in a conflict where it had astonishingly few of them," Jared Holt, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, said. "The concern would be that this could be kind of a model or a teachable moment for them to be more effective in their propaganda going forward."
The same thing happened when the Russian Defense Ministry claimed that both Hunter Biden and billionaire George Soros were tied, somehow, to the alleged “biolabs.” That evening, Carlson was spreading the same story. Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has played clips of Carlson’s show and has praised Fox News for its “independence.”
"We understood long ago that there is no such thing as an independent Western media. In the United States, only Fox News is trying to present some alternative point of view," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.
Journalists often have to wade through disinformation to get to the root of a story and report confidently and accurately. Unpacking this conspiracy theory and understanding its origins will help journalists avoid disseminating propaganda designed to obfuscate the realities behind the ongoing invasion.
