In the early hours of Feb. 24, 2022, as Russia conducted what Ukrainian leaders described as a “full-scale attack” on Ukraine, the hashtag #USBiolabs started to trend on Twitter as dozens of accounts repeated a piece of Russian propaganda, claiming that the actual focus of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was secret U.S. biolabs where deadly diseases (such as COVID-19) were supposedly being produced.
The claim that the U.S. is operating secret biolabs in Ukraine is one that has been repeatedly spread by Russian propagandists since at least 2018. In May 2020, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) released a statement calling on politicians to stop spreading false information about the existence of foreign military biological labs in Ukraine:
“Recently, ‘fake news’ about the alleged activities of American military biological laboratories in Ukraine has been spread in the media and social networks … No foreign biological laboratories operate in Ukraine. Statements recently made by individual politicians are not true and are a deliberate distortion of the facts.”
In February 2022, during the invasion of Ukraine, this false rumor started trending on Twitter after @WarClandestine posted a thread claiming that a map of Russia’s missile attacks lined up with the locations of these biolabs:
The thread ended with a comparison of two maps, one supposedly showing missile strikes and the second supposedly showing U.S. biolab locations.
Before we get into the factual details that disprove...
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