On April 11, Igor Kirillov, the head of the Russian Armed Forces’ Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Troops, claimed that the United States clandestinely developed biological weapons in Ukraine.
Kirillov is a regular purveyor of disinformation. He previously spread the baseless claim that the U.S. is seeking “to develop bio-agents capable of targeting various ethnic groups.”
Now, ramping up the “U.S. bioweapons” disinformation, Kirillov said this type of work has been conducted in parts of Ukraine currently occupied by Russia — namely Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk.
“We have no doubt that the United States, under the guise of ensuring global biosafety, conducted dual-use research, including the creation of biological weapons components in the immediate vicinity of the Russian borders,” he said.
That is false.
There is no evidence the U.S. has ever developed or attempted to develop biological weapons near Russia’s borders.
Russia has regularly conflated “biolab” with “bioweapons lab,” painting the U.S. threat reduction efforts in Ukraine as a nefarious plot.
But The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists wrote in March that the current U.S. efforts to counter biological threats are observably different “from past examples of offensive biological programs designed to develop weapons.”
