By EU vs Disinfo
The Kremlin liar-in-chief announces his regime will continue and his stooges find US biolabs wherever they look.
At a staged event, Putin mumbled out an announcement to veterans and the wider public that his regime would continue to rule over Russia after an orchestrated ritual not to be confused with an event known as an ‘election’ in the free world.
Following this non-event, the pro-Kremlin information manipulation ecosystem went into overdrive in pushing out ‘evidence’ of the gifts the Kremlin master strategist’s enlightened rule has presented to Mother Russia. According to pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets, among other things, not only is Russia with Putin at the helm creating a truly democratic world, but it is becoming a new global growth centre as well. The war in Ukraine is also about to end in Russia’s inevitable victory, if Peskov is to be believed.
All being this fine and dandy, no wonder ordinary Russians are preparing for the coming celebrations by queueing, Soviet-style, for eggs that have skyrocketed in price, and some being forced to hand over their passports for foreign travel. Moreover, when it comes to the West that is, according to pro-Kremlin sources, suffering from ‘Ukraine fatigue’, the US President Joe Biden had a clear message – “we need to be sure that they [Ukraine] win the war.”
If the only tool that you have is a hammer, everything looks like a biolab
We have reported numerous times before (see an example here) on one of the Kremlin’s all-time favourite bogeymen it created, the US biolaboratories and the biological agents allegedly created in them.
Related to this topic, we have more than 300 disinformation cases, together with their disproofs, listed in our database. We have also published a thorough debunk article, produced an infographic, and released a video covering this topic, dedicated to shooting down the wild claims spread by Kremlin manipulators.
Nevertheless, and not surprisingly, despite the work we and others have done (see also this open letter by Russian biologists), the biolabs and weapons related disinformation spread by the Kremlin continues to run rampant. This time around, the Kremlin propagandists are targeting Finland and Kazakhstan with unfounded claims about US run biological laboratories on their soil.
Taboos in the service of manipulation both home and abroad
In the case of Finland, the biolabs disinformation narrative has been tied to the Defense Cooperation Agreement (DCA) between Finland and the United States that is currently being prepared. Kremlin disinformation attempts to frame Finland as losing its sovereignty and offering its land for the US biolaboratories – both claims lacking any factual basis and credibility. The Kremlin aim is try to prop up a hostile image of Finland to their home audiences, a job that they clearly have been busy with lately.
In addition to Finland, the Kremlin information manipulators have been busy spreading false information about the alleged US activities in Kazakhstan. According to this disinformation, Kazakhstan is about to become an experimental base for the United States to produce bacteriological, biological and genetic weapons of mass destruction – which is a mouthful, to say the very least.
Yet again, these disinformation narratives targeting Finland and Kazakhstan, not forgetting the latest one having Ukraine in its crosshairs, aim at invoking taboos and psychological reactions related to pathogens, while at the same time upholding the image of Russia as encircled by devious enemies under US rule.
In the case of Ukraine, Ukrainians infected with pathogens in Kremlin-manipulated versions of real news stories are an attempt to influence foreign audiences and their views of Ukrainians, and diminish the continued Western support for Ukraine, as a part of an on-going multipronged disinformation campaign.
Also blinking on the EUvsDisinfo’s Disinformation radar last week:
- The Baltic states are not capable of being independent and sovereign. True to their colonialist and chauvinist attitudes, the pro-Kremlin disinformation peddlers at Sputnik are grossly misrepresenting historical facts related to the utter devastation and repression that the decades under Soviet occupation brought to the Baltic states and their peoples. At the same time, this recurring disinformation narrative attempts to deny the Baltic states their unique identify, statehood, and national sovereignty, echoing the toxic pro-Kremlin disinformation targeting Ukraine.
- The ICC is preparing charges against Davyd Arakhamia for selling weapons to Hamas. This piece of disinformation is false and a debunked forgery. The pro-Kremlin disinformers attempted to mislead their audiences with a fake video stealing authority and credibility from well-known and trusted organisations, in this case the BBC and Bellingcat. This fake video was yet another fabrication promoting a recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about Western military aid for Ukraine ending up in the wrong hands.
- Ukraine’s allies provide it with toxic chemicals to conduct a biological provocation. Another example of the pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets’ continued global barrage of disinformation, this time in Arabic on RT’s Arabic version. The pro‑Kremlin disinformation ecosystem attempts yet again, as it has done for years already, to push a narrative where Ukraine is using, or preparing to use, chemical agents as part of its operations. Additionally, they try to tie the US and other allies into the picture by suggesting they are supplying the toxic agents to Ukraine. All this while we well know that Russia has a history of both using chemical agents against the opponents of Putin’s regime, and attempts to undermine the international norms and institutions, which prohibit the use of chemical weapons.
By EU vs Disinfo
