dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

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https://thebulletin.org/2022/02/russian-media-spreading-disinformation-about-us-bioweapons-as-troops-mass-near-ukraine/amp/

The labs at issue are part of a network of facilities with links to the Biological Threat Reduction Program, an element of a US government effort that began in the 1990s to reduce the threat of the former Soviet Union’s weapons of mass destruction programs, including in countries like Ukraine that had once been a part of the communist country. The Soviet Union maintained a massive bioweapons program and part of the role of the US-linked labs is to take custody over left-over supplies, as is the case with a central reference laboratory in Kazakhstan. Disease surveillance and public health have since become the major focus of labs in the network.

For years, Russia was an active participant in the US effort, which has also repurposed facilities and scientists for peaceful pursuits. But more recently, the labs in former Soviet states have become targets of disinformation in Russian media campaigns that sometimes coincided with periods when Russia faced intense international scrutiny. That seemed to be the case in 2018 when accusations against a US biological threat reduction affiliated lab in Tbilisi, Georgia, the Lugar Center for Public Health Research,“significantly ramped up after Britain identified Russia as the perpetrator of a botched March 2018 murder attempt in Salisbury, England using the nerve agent [N]ovichok,” biosecurity expert Filippa Lentzos wrote in the Bulletin.

The Georgia lab faced similar allegations to those facing the Ukrainian facilities now, namely that it was a bioweapons research facility and was conducting harmful experiments on the local citizenry. Lentzos, as part of an international team that visited the lab, had “access to all areas of the site, examined relevant documentation, and interviewed staff.” She found the site operating with “significant transparency” and saw “nothing out of the ordinary.”