Russia's baseless claims about secret American biological warfare labs in Ukraine are taking root in the U.S. too, uniting COVID-19 conspiracy theorists, QAnon adherents and some supporters of ex-President Donald Trump.
Despite rebuttals from independent scientists, Ukrainian leaders and officials at the White House and Pentagon, the online popularity of the claims suggests some Americans are willing to trust Kremlin propaganda over the U.S. media and government.
“The labs are not secret,” said Filippa Lentzos, a senior lecturer in science and international security at King’s College London, in an email to the Associated Press. “They are not being used in relation to bioweapons. This is all disinformation.” Many of the accounts posting the claim are citing Russian propaganda outlets as sources. When Kremlin officials repeated the conspiracy theory on Thursday, saying the U.S. was developing bioweapons that target specific ethnicities, it took a few minutes for their quotes to show up on American social media.
Television pundits and high-profile political figures have helped spread the claim even further. Fox News host Tucker Carlson devoted segments on his shows on Wednesday and Thursday to promoting the conspiracy theory. On Wednesday, Donald Trump Jr. said conspiracy theories around the labs were proven to be a “fact” in a tweet to his 7.3 million followers.
While the disinformation poses a threat on its own, the White House warned this week that the Kremlin's latest conspiracy theory could be a prelude to a chemical or biological attack that Russia would blame on the U.S. or Ukraine. Milton Leitenberg, an arms control expert and senior research associate at the Center for International & Security Studies at the University of Maryland, noted that Russia has a long history of such disinformation. In the 1980s, Russian intelligence spread the conspiracy theory that the U.S. created HIV in a lab.
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