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.

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

China

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.

On March 3, an Arabic RT channel posted that the Pentagon was concerned about biological weapons—something that is true. The US 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:

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 US 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 US biological weapons program was terminated by executive order under US President Nixon on November 25, 1969.

The US, 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:

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

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:

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

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.

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 US 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: GRU published the US-Ukraine ‘biolabs story’ in 2017 as Cyber Berkut

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.

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.