Russia has asserted numerous justifications for its invasion of Ukraine, and one of them is finally gaining traction with some observers: the allegation that the United States …
Russia has asserted numerous justifications for its invasion of Ukraine, and one of them is finally gaining traction with some observers: the allegation that the United States was developing bioweapons at labs in Ukraine to use against Moscow. It’s true that there are bioresearch facilities in Ukraine, some of which are partnered with the Department of Defense, as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland admitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week. But there is no evidence that the labs were being used to develop biological weapons, or that Russia was under such direct threat from them that they needed to invade Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin used the Kremlin’s media machine to try to justify his war in Ukraine in multiple ways. First, Moscow said it needed to protect ethnic Russians in the Donbas region who were facing a “genocide” from Kyiv. They also claimed that they needed to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, a country led by a Jewish president and home to more than one million Holocaust victims. There was also the claim that the war was really about NATO expansion, as well as an alleged false flag attack to frame Ukraine as the aggressors against Russia. Those narratives, with some exception for the NATO complaint, largely failed to gain traction in the West. However, after the war had already began, Putin pivoted to the bioweapons claim. According to the Kremlin, the United States wants to use bioweapons created in Ukrainian labs to attack Russia, including by infecting birds with them and releasing them into Russian territory. The narrative isn’t new. The same Russian Ministry of Defense spokesman who said the U.S. is creating chemical weapons to selectively target Slavs said years ago that the U.S. was funding bioweapons research in Georgia, which Russia invaded in 2008. In 2005, the United States and Ukraine reached an agreement to work together to dismantle or secure Soviet-era bioweapons left behind at facilities in Ukraine. The Pentagon’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Program (CTR) has been working with former Soviet republics for 30 years to clean up biohazards left behind in their countries, from places like Ukraine to Uzbekistan. The day after Russia invaded Ukraine, Robert Pope, the head of the CTR, did an interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. This occurred before Moscow’s propaganda campaign about Ukrainian labs ramped up again.
