Putin beordrar styrkor att gå in i Ukraina - INVASION NU (2022-02-24)

By Tuesday morning, an official channel for Sputnik, a Kremlin-owned propaganda outlet, posted to Telegram: “Here are some of the documents on US biolabs in Ukraine,” posting documents from the U.S. government. (While they do not show anything nefarious or unusual, the documents appear to be offline as of Tuesday afternoon.) The idea has also returned to the fringes of Chinese state media, not heavily promoted but present in coverage.

Mention of these biolabs and the missing documents were seen hundreds of thousands of times across an array of Russian-language Telegram accounts, including several that have had a particularly large role in spreading pro-Kremlin propaganda since the war began and that were, immediately prior, sharing information complimentary of anti-vaccine convoys in the United States and Canada. One concluded that “the United States was engaged in the creation of a deadly virus in a biolaboratory in Kharkov”—the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv has been subject to a particularly brutal bombing campaign, with at least nine civilians dying in airstrikes on Monday.

The premise of the theory is baseless. Ukraine has no labs labeled as “BSL-4,” the highest grade that allows them to work on the most dangerous pathogens, and only one BSL-3 lab. American support for the facility is not secret and has funded science on a number of zoonotic diseases in Ukraine: Washington also funds facilities in Georgia and even Russia-friendly Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. The United States has been engaged in a program known as the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which cooperates on reducing epidemiological risk in Ukraine and elsewhere: Some of the Russian reporting has mistranslated this as the “Special Defense Weapons Agency.”