Russia changed its story about bioweapons. Then Russia and China opened the disinformation floodgates.

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China and Russia play the greatest hits of disinformation

Russia has been promoting its false bioweapons narrative from official accounts, likely to reach people in many countries like Turkey and Japan. In some cases, the posts led from one social media platform to another, which may have advantages if certain features are inaccessible to state-controlled accounts on one platform and not another.

The themes in this disinformation are reminiscent of narratives that Russia and China both spread in 2020 and 2021. The tweet embedded below is from May 2020.

Russian accounts defended China from calls for an investigation after China delayed sharing information about its outbreak with the world.

Russia and China running the same misleading story.

What differs in 2022 is the apparent degree of collaboration, which seems much more overt. Axios reported on March 9, 2022, that China had been purchasing ads on Meta—formerly known as Facebook—promoting pro-Kremlin talking points that downplayed the atrocities Russia is committing.

Russian state-controlled outlets RT and Sputnik News are now blocked in the EU in response to Russia’s unprovoked aggression. Putin responded by blocking Facebook in Russia, although Kremlin affiliates do still have access to the platform, and authors that write for multiple Russian outlets can still share RT and Sputnik content published via other websites that aren’t blocked.

China boosted Russian disinformation on March 8, 2022.

Axios also reported that China has censored what is happening in Ukraine within China. Censoring Russian aggression toward Ukraine domestically may protect the Chinese government from the public backlash against its support of Russia. An example of a Russian diplomatic account promoting the bioweapons narrative is below.

Accounts associated with Russia and China surged messages at the same time with similar messages

On March 6, state-controlled accounts belonging to Russia and China increased the posts they published referencing a Ukraine-US bioweapons conspiracy. Russia had changed its story from knowing the weapons were there before and saying the US wanted to maintain control (Mar 3) to a story where the Russians discovered a sensational plot (Mar 9).

The combination of closely timed increases, mirroring articles in state-controlled outlets, use of diplomatic and outlet social media accounts, and nearly identical messaging may suggest Russia and China have coordinated their information operations. All posts have been attached to the end of this report in image format.

Russia

(136 tweets—March 6 to March 9)
(4 tweets—March 1 to March 5)

China

(50 tweets—March 6 to March 9)
(4 tweets—March 1 to March 5)

Both countries posted four times between March 1 and March 5 messages that included the word “biological.” This keyword was sufficient to surface the tweets making false claims.

Articles show Russia changed its story.

On March 3, an Arabic RT channel posted that the Pentagon was concerned about biological weapons—something that is true. The U.S. was concerned because laboratories in Ukraine held Soviet-era bioweapons. These exist because the Soviets continued to develop despite signing a treaty saying they would not.

The article doesn’t mention who created the biological weapons, nor cites this as a reason Russia invaded Ukraine. As a reason for the invasion, the article says it was the threat of Ukraine attacking them first, although Ukraine has never attacked anyone offensively. Putin has also claimed to the Russian people that he is “denazifying” Ukraine, a false statement that builds on revisionist history.

On the threat of biological weapons, Arabic RT says:

The Russian Foreign Minister revealed that Moscow has information that the Pentagon is concerned about the situation around chemical and biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine, and the possibility of losing control over them. Lavrov said: “For us, there is no escalation for the sake of escalation, as Western analysts are trying to attribute to us. Talking about nuclear war is now underway. I ask you to consider very carefully the statements made and the personalities who made these statements,” noting that Talking about a third world war and about nuclear weapons was initiated by the West.

Here the Kremlin asserts that the West doesn’t want to lose control of the weapons, and this is not the justification Russia cites for invasion. By March 9, 2022, Russia had changed its story. Now Russia claims the U.S. is afraid of being caught in violation, although everything in Ukraine is public knowledge and has been for decades.

The video in the tweet comes with an English translation that says the United States government financed the programs. The U.S. biological weapons program was terminated by executive order under U.S. President Nixon on November 25, 1969.

The history of outbreak disinformation

The U.S., Russia, and other countries then signed a treaty in 1972 where countries agreed not to pursue these weapons of mass destruction. The biological weapons and research that now reside in Ukraine were illegal weapons produced by the Soviet Union. Russian President Boris Yeltsin admitted having allegedly downsized the Soviet biological weapons program in 1992.

The US-funded program is a successful, now-30-year endeavor to secure Soviet bioweapons in Ukraine that also helped Soviet scientists, over 60,000 had worked in the program, to transition into peaceful work.

One scientist who worked for two decades on biological weapons for Russia gave testimony to Congress in 1999. He stated that the original Soviet program included tularemia, epidemic typhus, and Q fever, but they expanded after World War 2 and added:

smallpox
plague
anthrax
Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis
Glanders
brucellosis
Marburg infection

Russia examined a range of diseases for potential use as a bioweapon, including:

Ebola
Junin virus (Argentinian hemorrhagic fever)
Machupo virus (Bolivian hemorrhagic fever)
yellow fever
Lassa fever
Japanese encephalitis
Russian spring-summer encephalitis

Biological weapons disinformation about the U.S. dates back to 1949

Soviet agents planted stories in newspapers around the world. In the 1980s, those stories were about HIV. This tradition of false claims has continued until today. An example is the false claims about Mongolia recently. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency Public Affairs told Hoaxlines:

Our Agency has no current, active, or planned engagements with Mongolia. We are not aware of any relationship between Ukraine and Mongolia to move pathogens.

False stories about the U.S. were popular in the 1980s. Russian disinformation, placed in newspapers around the world, suggested the U.S. created HIV. Nearly 40 years later, this belief is still believed.

Translation:
“We are conducting a series of [active] measures in connection with the appearance in recent years in the U.S.A. of a new and dangerous disease, “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome – AIDS”…, and its subsequent, large-scale spread to other countries, including those in Western Europe.”
—handwritten letter by Soviet KGB agent, September 1985

Disinformation efforts continued after the fall of the Soviets in the early 1990s. While not all headlines reflect active measures, how they build upon one another over time is remarkable.

2002 to 2003

2005

2009

2012

2016

Russia Accuses Bill Gates Of Engineering The Zika Virus To Depopulate The World

The article, Bill Gates was involved in the artificial creation of the Zika epidemic to reduce the world’s population, appeared in Geopolitica.ru—Italian in 2020.

Globalist governments engineered the staged Zika pandemic to justify the aerial bombardment of awakening populations with toxic chemicals.
The Zika virus and the NWO depopulation agenda
The war on fertility via the Forced Vaccination agenda: Enter the Zika Virus

2017

The narrative spread by Russian and Chinese accounts in March 2022 first appeared in 2017. A pro-Kremlin hacking collective called CyberBerkut (recognized as a GRU front organization) published the story, as did Russian state media. Later, in 2018, the FSB-controlled outlet South Front published this false narrative.

Zero Hedge, recently called out by the U.S. government for boosting Kremlin content, also ran the story in 2018—although it has since been deleted. A more detailed report about this instance can be found here: U.S.-Ukraine ‘biolabs story’ likely authored by Russian intelligence

Soviet legacy of illicit biological weapons

Besides the Kremlin’s history of spreading false bioweapons claims, the other inaccuracy concerns existing laboratories in Ukraine that were created in cooperation with the United States. Far from creating bioweapons, these laboratories were created to secure the Soviet Union’s biological weapons, which it developed in violation of a treaty the Soviets had signed.

Indeed, these clear violations on the convention were only admitted after the totalitarian regime collapsed and duplicity in politics was abandoned … The remnants of the offensive programs in the area of BW (biological weapons) were still around as recently as 1991. It was only in 1992 that Russia absolutely stopped this work.
General Kuntsevich, 1992¹

The Soviet Union was the nation that created the bioweapons that Russia’s actions now threaten to unleash—however small that risk may be—by indiscriminately bombing and attacking Ukraine. Russia both created and now risks unleashing the threat.

Appendix

Appendix A: Ukrainian bioweapons disinformation campaign

Russia changed its story about bioweapons. China followed Russia’s lead.