At the next summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in New Delhi, Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Nikolai Patrushev delivered a speech in which, as usual, he accused the West of provoking a nuclear war and supporting the Nazis in Ukraine, assured that all the goals of the “special operation” would be achieved, and also spoke about the US biological laboratories – not only in Ukraine, but also in some countries of the SCO itself:
“There is irrefutable evidence of large-scale biological activities carried out by Washington on the territory of Ukraine, as well as the involvement of American elites in these processes. In the districts of Ternopil, Odessa, Kharkov, Nikolaev, infectious outbreaks were noted in the immediate vicinity of institutes where pathogens were studied – hemorrhagic fever, cholera, swine flu, hepatitis A, botulism," Patrushev said.
The Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation does not particularly specify his statements, but they are all taken from Russian propaganda in recent years, so it is not difficult to understand when these alleged outbreaks occurred. For example, in March 2022, the pro-Kremlin media began to distribute carbon-copied horror stories about American biological laboratories and how Ukrainians were sick from them. “In 2015, there was an outbreak of hemorrhagic pneumonia in the Ternopil region,” Vesti.ru claimed .
Other propaganda media refer to 2009. At that time, an epidemic of H1N1 swine flu was raging in almost all countries of the world. It started in Mexico, spread to the US and then spread to Europe. Russia and Ukraine were also affected. In the latter, three regions were especially affected – Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Ternopil. The Ukrainian authorities kept silent for two weeks about the rapid spread of the disease. Doctors and politicians said different things: that people simply have a weakened immune system, that this is a provocation from other parties, and so on. As a result, frightening rumors and alternative versions of the origin of the disease began to spread among local residents.
One of these conspiracy theories, which quickly gained popularity, blamed the American corporation Baxter, which had offices in Russia and Ukraine. Baxter allegedly produced biological weapons in Ukrainian laboratories, in particular the swine flu vaccine, which leaked from the laboratory. The source of these messages was called one Joseph Moshe – allegedly a microbiologist of the Israeli special services (Mossad), who got through to a radio show with this information, after which he was detained by the police.
In 2009, the American media did report on a certain Joseph Moshe who was detained by the police for threatening to blow up the White House. However, in reality, there is no evidence that Moshe is a Mossad microbiologist.
Why was Baxter the target of the rumors? This company by that time had a far from impeccable reputation. In February 2009, it mistakenly supplied samples of viral material contaminated with avian influenza to a number of European laboratories. Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic and Slovakia were affected. This incident did not have serious consequences (although experimental ferrets died in the Czech laboratory), but Baxter's reputation suffered.
However, Baxter, apparently, never had a laboratory near Ternopil. The only source of this information is the pro-Kremlin journalist and political scientist Alexander Rogers from Vinnitsa, the author of the Ukraina.ru propaganda portal. In 2015, he suddenly began to talk on Russian TV channels that the bird flu epidemic that swept western Ukraine in 2009 was allegedly related to the activities of an American laboratory. In particular, Rogers claimed that at the height of the “atypical flu” epidemic, he discovered a laboratory of the Baxter corporation near Ternopil, but “a week after the publication, the laboratory was promptly closed, and all traces of its activities were destroyed.”
As for the "hemorrhagic fever", we are probably talking about the statement of the head physician of the Ivano-Frankivsk Regional Infectious Diseases Clinical Hospital Roman Ostyak, made by him at the height of the swine flu epidemic. The doctor said that six people who died recently had "extremely severe hemorrhagic pneumonia", while almost none of them had typical signs of influenza. However, in the future, Ostyak did not report any "unknown" infection.
Patrushev also mentions the Odessa region and periodically occurring outbreaks of hepatitis A there. The target of his attacks is obviously the Mechnikov Anti-Plague Institute, which studies especially dangerous infections and methods of dealing with them. However, firstly, this is a Ukrainian institute funded by the country's Ministry of Health, so it is not very clear what Washington has to do with it. Secondly, hepatitis A is one of the most common diseases, which is registered annually in 1.4 million people around the world, including in Russia. Large outbreaks of hepatitis A are usually associated with contamination of water bodies (water supplies) or sewage entering the water supply network. In the Odessa region, as well as throughout Ukraine, several dozen people, mostly schoolchildren and students, become infected with hepatitis every year. However, absolutely the same thing periodically occurs in different regions of Russia .
Information about biolaboratories and related outbreaks of infectious diseases in Kharkov is also entirely a fiction of Russian propaganda. In 2020, Rossiyskaya Gazeta and other publications published the news that the United States allegedly recognized the existence of secret biological laboratories in Ukraine. The materials themselves, however, said something else – deputies of the Verkhovna Rada from the pro-Kremlin party "For Life" of Putin's godfather Viktor Medvedchuk sent a request to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, which spoke of the presence of Washington's "secret biolaboratories".
“In January 2016 in Kharkiv, 20 military personnel died from a flu-like virus, more than 200 people were hospitalized. Two months later, 364 deaths were recorded in the country. According to the deputies, the cause of all these deaths was swine flu, the same strain of influenza that led to the global pandemic in 2009,” the deputies wrote .
Zelensky’s administration, RG notes, ignored this request, but the Americans “preferred to play ahead of the curve, trying to convince Ukrainian public opinion that the work of laboratories is carried out exclusively for scientific purposes and is of a peaceful nature.” All the allegations made in the letter to Medvedchuk's party were called "Russian disinformation" by the US embassy.
In March 2022, information about “20 dead and 200 hospitalized soldiers in the Kharkov laboratory” pops up again – this time at a briefing by Igor Kirillov, head of the Russian Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defense Forces. This time, the source of the assertion is some "Bulgarian media". Behind this vague wording is the Bulgarian journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva. In January 2022, she published several articles on her blog claiming that the US was conducting "biological experiments on soldiers in Ukraine and Georgia" and that "the Pentagon is starting biological experiments on Bulgarian soldiers." The journalist claimed that the US Embassy in Kyiv was seizing documents related to the biohazard mitigation program. However, it quickly became clear that this was a fake, and the “deleted” documents are still in the public domain on the embassy website, and in the screenshot of the “non-working” link to the documents posted by Gaytandzhieva, there is a completely different URL.
Finally, the cholera outbreak in Nikolaev in 2015 is completely made up by the Russian media. The last epidemic of cholera occurred in 1995, when the causative agent of infection, which is occasionally detected in city rivers, got into the organisms of Nikolaev residents through fish. Then the outbreak claimed the lives of 30 residents of the city. Since then, cholera has often appeared in the regional news – in 2017, the city authorities were seriously preparing for a repeat of the 1995 epidemic, having discovered cholera in the Ingul River. However, no patients were recorded as a result. And in June 2022, the authorities of Odessa and Nikolaev denied fakes about cholera outbreaks in cities. According to the city authorities, false reports are spread by Russian propaganda in order to sow panic among local residents and divert attention from the threat of a cholera outbreak in occupied Mariupol.
As for the “biological laboratories in the SCO countries” mentioned by Patrushev, obviously, he means primarily Kazakhstan and the Central Reference Laboratory (CRL) built there with US support. However, the last American specialists left the laboratory in 2020, since then only Kazakh scientists have been working there, and it is entirely supported by the Kazakh budget, as the country’s authorities have repeatedly said . Kazakh authorities have repeatedly let Russian delegations into the CRL, but the Russian authorities continue to insist that this laboratory, with the support of Washington, is developing biological weapons.
