In its increasingly batshit attempts to justify its war against Ukraine, Russia’s Defense Ministry on Thursday released a brightly colored diagram that claims to prove that Hunter Biden is secretly bankrolling Pentagon biolabs in Ukraine.
Titled “Coordination of Biological Laboratories and Scientific Research Centers of Ukraine and the U.S.,” the diagram also features an image of a smiling George Soros, as well as a tab representing the Democratic Party, and depicts them all as the masterminds behind what Russian officials claim are American attempts to work on an “especially dangerous pathogen of anthrax.”
The diagram purporting to reveal the scheme was accompanied by several slides featuring additional maps and “biolabs” breakdowns. All of the information included was supposedly gleaned from documents obtained by Russian soldiers in Ukraine.
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(It was not immediately clear if these were the same documents Russia presented this month at a United Nations Security Council meeting, where they were ultimately deemed “nonsense.”)
“The scale of the program is impressive,” said Igor Kirillov, head of the radiation, chemical, and biological defense department of the Russian Armed Forces.
“In addition to the military department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the George Soros Foundation, and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention are directly involved in its implementation. Scientific curation is carried out by leading research organizations, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which develops nuclear weapons under the Manhattan Project,” he said.
Perhaps hoping for a shout-out from Fox News, Russian defense officials zeroed in on President Biden’s son, claiming the investment firm he co-founded in 2009, Rosemont Seneca, financed the Pentagon’s “military-biological program” in Ukraine.
There is, of course, absolutely no actual evidence that Hunter Biden is bankrolling a secret bioweapons lab.
Kirillov claimed there is a “close connection” between Rosemont Seneca and “the main contractors of the U.S. military,” including suppliers of “Pentagon biolaboratories around the world.”
While the “biolabs” conspiracy theory dates all the way back to the Soviet Union, it has been amplified more frequently on Russian state TV recently, as the Kremlin’s initial claim that it invaded Ukraine in order to “de-Nazify” a country led by a Jewish president failed to gain much traction beyond its own domestic propaganda.
The Kremlin’s increasingly dramatic claims have also begun to sound more and more like science fiction, with defense officials accusing the Pentagon of developing pathogens that would specifically target Slavic people.
The latest conspiracy also seems to have been pulled straight from far-right message boards.
Both Hunter Biden and George Soros have long served as the preferred boogeymen for fringe groups and believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory, with Soros almost always at the center of thinly veiled antisemitic attacks. The Hungarian-born financier has routinely (and baselessly) been accused of using his philanthropic initiatives around the world as a cover for taking over the world.
The social network Gab featured a post on Feb. 14, just 10 days before Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine, from a user claiming to expose “US biolabs in Ukraine… financed at the expense of the US Department of Defense,” NBC News reported.
That claim blew up on far-right networks after Russia attacked Ukraine on Feb. 24.
Since 2005, the U.S. Department of Defense has partnered with Ukrainian health facilities in the Biological Threat Reduction Program, which aims to monitor and detect potentially dangerous pathogens like COVID-19 and African swine fever, but there is no evidence of the program developing bioweapons.
The United Nations, forced to address this conspiracy theory by Russia last week, said there was no evidence to back up Moscow’s claims and that it was not aware of any bioweapons program in Ukraine.
