The Ukrainian biological lab conspiracy is ridiculous.

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The Ukraine biological labs story is really dumb on so many levels. For the better part of the last two decades Russia has been spreading these sorts of conspiracy theories about the former Soviet republics.

While the Russian-backed Assad regime was being accused of using chemical weapons in Syria, Russia was planting its own allegations that Georgia had a US bioweapons lab.

During the COVID pandemic, they made this same accusation to suggest the US had manufactured SARS-COV-2. They even at one point years ago suggested HIV came from one of these alleged bioweapons labs.

In reality, the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program worked with all the former Soviet states, including Russia, to dispose of and ensure the containment of the Soviet Union's immense bioweapons program.

As the years went on, the program shifted to helping support scientists in those former Soviet states and create multilateral research partnerships and collaboration, and became more centered on biological threat detection and surveillance. Again including the Russian Federation.

Today many of these labs the Russians are saying are US bioweapons labs are more benign than that. They are Ukrainian public health labs that got funding from the US to do things like enhance epidemiological surveillance, upgrade biosafety equipment, and fund conferences and workshops for Ukrainian scientists. Many of these labs helped Ukraine with COVID pandemic testing and sequencing.

20 years ago Nature covered the collaboration between American and Russian scientists in Russia under this program that now the Kremlin is framing as some sort of covert US bioweapons program. You can read about it here : https://www.nature.com/articles/423678a#Sec1

This would be all laughable if it wasn't over such a serious topic being used as a pretext for the Ukrainian invasion. It is just repackaged old Russian disinformation that they've used for everything from HIV to SARS-COV-2.

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