Previous Subchapter → 6.7. Proxy War
The last main narrative we’ve heard to justify the war is what we could call the “Biolabs Narrative”, it’s the second component of Russia’s so-called “WMD clause” justifying their invasion of Ukraine, the first being the nuclear weapons claims we discussed earlier.
The claim is essentially that secret biolabs, sponsored by the West, were stationed in Ukraine, potentially to be used for attacks on Russia, justifying Russia’s narrative that their attack on Ukraine was self-defence.
To look into these allegations, we turned once again to Richard Medhurst, to discuss the biolabs claims, Medhurst published a video featuring Bulgarian journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva.
The first allegation Dilyana made was that the US embassy in Ukraine had deleted documents referring to the biolabs from their website, this is also a claim she made on Twitter, just 2 days after the invasion began she claimed that the embassy had removed documents related to 11 Pentagon funded biolabs from their website, posting screenshots of the documents under the tagline “These are the documents which the US Embassy does not want you to see”.
The US Embassy in #Ukraine has just deleted from its website all documents about 11 Pentagon-funded biolaboratories in Ukraine. I have published all these documents (now deleted by the Embassy) here https://t.co/Odc0ermmZe and in the thread below pic.twitter.com/benFmDwguI
— Dilyana Gaytandzhieva (@dgaytandzhieva) February 26, 2022
These are the documents which the US Embassy does not want you to see: pic.twitter.com/gEEBLFXRdW
— Dilyana Gaytandzhieva (@dgaytandzhieva) February 26, 2022
We checked the embassy website itself and here’s what we found, the biolabs and the documents do indeed exist, that much is true, but the claim that the embassy tried to delete them from their website is not, the embassy has a page specifically dedicated to their biological program in Ukraine, and the documents Dilyana mentioned are attached as PDFs on the side, labelled as “fact sheets”, when we clicked on the PDF links, they were all accessible and free to read, detailing the laboratories and the Pentagon’s involvement in them.
The documentation refers to the biolab program as a “bio-threat reduction mission”, where “pathogens and toxins of security concern” would be consolidated and secured, as well as the use of mobile labs for COVID-19 prevention. So, far from being hidden smoking guns revealing a plot to unleash pathogens as weapons, these documents refer to a program to prevent disease and study viruses to help prepare for future pandemics.
But despite these documents not really following the implication of the narrative, Dilyana turns to suggestion to imply these labs are used for weaponisation, asking leading questions such as:
what is the purpose of the pentagon funding such a military program in ukraine?
why would the us government spend 2.5 billion dollars on the health of foreign citizens instead of on the health of its own citizens?
what is the pentagon doing? why have so many deaths been indicated in the documents as unknown?
why is the pentagon funding these projects abroad, not on its own territory? why in ukraine, why in georgia, why in armenia or in azerbaijan or in kazakhstan or uzbekistan all countries bordering on russia?
why were us officials associated with the labs given diplomatic immunity by host countries?
She then states that “these are bioagents which, if developed, could be used as bioweapons”, and that there are other labs near “pentagon rivals” like China and Iran, to which Medhurst says “that speaks volumes on its own” and “you don’t need to be a genius to figure this one out”.
Again, the power of suggestion at play, because they don’t have proof for their narrative, Dilyana and Richard rely on questions and speculations that don’t outright claim these labs are a bioweapons plot by the US against their enemies, but they make the implication very obvious.
When we looked into the locations of these labs however, the picture looked different, while some of the facilities are located around the former Soviet Union, others are not, for example several of these Pentagon labs are located in Africa, which if you know your geography is quite far from Iran, China and Russia.
Dilyana’s reports of deaths allegedly caused by this biolab program are also rather dubious, in a report on her website she claimed that 20 Ukrainian soldiers were killed and 200 hospitalised in the Kharkiv region, the location of one of the Pentagon backed labs, the source for this claim was an outlet called the “Donbass News Agency”, which published the allegations in an article called “Deadly virus leaked from US laboratory in Donbass”; It turns out that the original source for the allegation comes from a “situation report” issued by the “Vice-Commander of the Donetsk Army”, Eduard Basurin, no evidence is provided, it’s just a quote from a press conference.
Another claim from Dilyana’s website was that a “bioterrorism agent” from the Pentagon Labs was a “prime suspect” in botulism cases in Ukraine, this claim didn’t even have a source, and Dilyana admitted that the local authorities had actually mentioned food poisoning as their explanation for the cases.
It turns out these dodgy claims are far from new either, when we looked further into Dilyana and her alleged biowarfare research we came across this article from the “BBC Monitoring” outlet, as far back as 2018 Dilyana has been making these claims of Western countries meddling with bioweapons, in an interview with “Russia 1”, one of the main state TV channels in Russia, Dilyana accused the Pentagon of funding a secret test exposing commuters on travelling on London’s Underground rail network to chemical gas.
“Chemical gas was released on thousands of unsuspecting commuters during a military experiment on the London Underground, documents reveal. These chemical tests were performed in 2013 by scientist [sic] from Porton Down,” Gaytandzhieva’s article, which was published on 28 March, said (https://bit.ly/2E3t4P1).
“Thousands of people were exposed to chemical gas without their knowledge,” it added.
But BBC Monitoring revealed that this test was far from secret, and in fact it was publicly announced in advance, with a list of all the stations the test would take place in included in the announcement, the article explained that the test involved “non-hazardous materials”.
So we have suggestions, unreliable claims and outright lies, these are the supposed pieces of “evidence” Pro-Russia commentators have to support the biolabs narrative.
But these narratives don’t just come from reporters like Dilyana, the Russian Defence Ministry has directly promoted these claims in its press conferences, in August 2023 the head of the Ministry’s Bioweapons Defence forces claimed in a press conference that there was a possible plot by Big Pharma and USAID, a US government agency, to spread a new coronavirus, the Minister further implied that these groups were behind the previous COVID pandemic and other outbreaks like Bird Flu and African Swine Plague.
And that’s the key word, “possible”, it wasn’t stated as a fact, because facts require a pesky thing called “evidence”.
To support their claims, the Defence Ministry linked 2 US government documents on their article, but as with Dilyana’s embassy documents, they don’t tell the story the Kremlin wants them to tell, one document is the “US National Biosecurity Strategy”, the other is a document referring to “PREDICT”, a program related to virus detection that was extended to help combat the COVID pandemic, neither of these papers are smoking guns proving some kind of conspiracy to use bioweapons against US rivals.
So Dilyana and the Kremlin essentially follow the same strategy, take the real documents and stories related to biolabs and virus research, and then enhance them into sinister conspiracies with the power of speculation.
That’s not to say we should never speculate, we often have to, it’s rare that we have all the facts when dealing with complex topics like these, but when you don’t have evidence in front of you, just theories, consider how much of a leap you’re being asked to make.
Is it possible the Pentagon has hidden bioweapons we don’t know about? Secret labs producing them and documents detailing every last detail of plans to kill and poison? Hypothetically? Sure, but hypothetically a lot of things could be true, we went from the known fact of these labs existing, to them being used to develop weapons, to these weapons being involved in a plot against Russia, justifying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a defensive strike against a Western conspiracy, and we were encouraged to make these leaps all without any actual proof of it!
This all comes back to a lesson we mentioned in the original Ukraine Narratives documentary, focus on what you are being shown, not what you are being told, Dilyana shows the biolab documents and tells you they’re what the US government doesn’t want you to see, in reality they’re on a public website that’s free to access. The Kremlin shows these Biosecurity and Pandemic prevention documents and tells you that the US might be behind all of the world’s recent outbreaks, but that’s not the story the documents tell.
So remember to be careful, because suggestion can be a powerful thing.