It started as a fringe belief. Now it’s an official stated reason for Russia’s invasion
More than a quarter of Americans polled at the end of March said they believe that the United States has been developing bioweapons in labs across Ukraine — a conspiracy conceived, crafted and amplified by QAnon and the Russian government.
Five weeks ago, that conspiracy theory was little more than a fringe belief. Today, it is an official stated reason for Russia’s brutal invasion. And it could be a sign of what President Vladimir Putin is plotting next.
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No evidence to back unproven Russian claim of Ukraine bioweapons program, UN says
“There’s zero basis in fact for doing anything in bioweapons or any kind of research like that at all,” said Robert Pope, a senior official at the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency. He says this pattern goes back to Soviet propaganda, trying to establish that America has been developing weapons to destroy the Russian people.
“This is purely a Russian propaganda effort to try and undermine the work the United States is doing,” said Tom Moore, a non-proliferation expert who has worked in the U.S. Senate and at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“The smoking gun isn’t even a mushroom cloud in this case. It’s not even a provable vial of anthrax anywhere. We’ve gotten rid of all that. This is purely political.”
It started with a tweet
Bioweapons remain a firm red line in international war. During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union weaponized agents like anthrax and smallpox — which could be deployed against an enemy once, then spread through person-to-person contact among military personnel or civilians — but never deployed them on any large scale.
The U.S. shuttered its bioweapons research program in the late 1960s, while the Soviets continued their development right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fears of bioweapons research have continued, however.
On Feb. 24, in the hours after Russian airstrikes began hitting military and civilian targets across Ukraine, a theory emerged that Moscow was out to destroy a clandestine U.S. weapons program in “biolabs” across Ukraine.
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