THE GOP ECHOES PUTIN'S FALSE CLAIMS

A virulent claim is circulating in right-wing media and among some Republicans that the United States might be working on biolabs in Ukraine. This assertion, which echoes Russian propaganda and implies that the United States and Ukraine are collaborating on something nefarious and dangerous, has been sharply refuted by Biden officials and independent experts.

Days before Russia invaded Ukraine, all the Kremlin and its proxies could talk about was potential aggression from Kyiv. Denis Pushilin, a Russian proxy leader in Donbas, claimed on Feb. 16. “The armed forces of the enemy are in combat formations and are ready for the forceful capture of Donbas. President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky will soon issue a decree to the military to go on the offensive and implement a plan for the invasion of the territory.”

Of course, Ukraine never did invade. But one week after those remarks, Russia launched its invasion, claiming it was a peace-keeping mission.

That move: accuse an enemy of an act you are about to or have committed, is a familiar tactic from Putin. In 2017, Putin remarked the “U.S. has always interfered in Russia’s elections.”

And of course, which American political party has ALWAYS operated with this strategy?

Western policymakers have been alarmed this week to see the the Kremlin making insane noises about a potential chemical or biological attack in Ukraine, supposedly launched out of U.S.-sponsored biolabs.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said yesterday: “Now that Russia has made these false claims, and China has seemingly endorsed this propaganda, we should all be on the lookout for Russia to possibly use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine, or to create a false-flag operation using them. It’s a clear pattern.”

Today, the Russian Ministry of Defense stated: “From all the U.S.-produced means of destabilizing the epidemiological situation, this is one of the most reckless and irresponsible, as it does not allow for the situation to be controlled further,” Russia’s Ministry of Defense said in the statement.” They accused the U.S. of trying to manufacture bird-borne viruses to attack Russia. In Ukraine. Conveniently, the newly discovered labs are in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odessa - cities that are the focus of Russian attacks.

It’s a trolling of the Bush Administration claims about weapons of mass destruction that were never found in Iraq. But the Kremlin seems to have seized on a fantasy that will appeal to American conservatives: birds, and the biolaboratories supposedly devoted to weaponizing them. This plays directly to the far right conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was created in Chinese laboratories funded by either George Soros or Anthony Fauci, or both together.

The Kremlin calls this “Project UP-4.” The central claim is that the labs have created a mutated bird flu virus with a 50 percent kill rate. This would be spread by birds with migratory patterns across Russia.

For those who failed to keep up with the news of the Russian intervention in Syria, there were several instances of Russians using chemical weapons that are outlawed. If there is a country where such biological weapons research is actually going on, it is Russia. If there is a government that would actually release such a weapon in such a way that it harmed people in Russia, it’s the government run by a man who had his agents bomb apartment buildings in Moscow and Leningrad in 1997 and 1998 to give him a causus belli to start the First Chechen War as he rose to power in Moscow. British officials said at a briefing this week that “we’ve got good reason to be concerned about possible use of non-conventional weapons” in Ukraine.

To no one’s surprise, Tucker Carlson devoted a segment to this Kremline claim last nigh, using his usual “I’m just asking questions” routine, implying there might be something to it. Amazingly enough, Fox News national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin,Griffin then went on Hannity’s Lie-athon and pushed back, noting that these labs are left over from the Soviet era and that the United States has been working to “convert the facilities safely.”

A CNN fact-check pointed out that, “There are US-funded biolabs in Ukraine, that much is true. But they are not building bioweapons. Actually, it’s the opposite: Part of the reason for their creation was to secure old Soviet weapons left behind in the former Soviet republics.”

And U.S. officials pointed out the truth about this program even during the Trump administration. In April 2020, the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine put out a statement decrying “Russian disinformation” about these labs and noting the Pentagon program works with Ukraine to “secure pathogens and toxins” in these facilities, “while allowing for peaceful research and vaccine development.”

Former Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana was the major voice in getting this program started, to deal with “proliferation” of such weapons after the end of the Soviet Union, going back to his first work on the issue in 2005. In 2013, President Barack Obama gave a speech honoring Lugar in which he joked about touring these same labs with Lugar. “Traveling with Dick, means getting close to test tubes filled with anthrax and the plague.” He then noted that this work destroying old Soviet arsenals was “absolutely critical to making us safer in the wake of the Cold War.”

This is an area where the Defense Department has done much good, yet some on the right want to convert this into proof of U.S. perfidy and clandestine warmongering. And we can be sure they will. In case you think the Trumpist Right has stopped being pro-Putin, the news today is that Madison Cawthorn recently trashed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a video obtained by WRAL, in which Cawthorn is seen railing against Zelensky and the Ukrainian government at an event with supporters this past weekend: “Remember that Zelensky is a thug,” the congressman says. “Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and it is incredibly evil and it has been pushing woke ideologies.” Thus he neatly combines Russian propaganda with far right culture-war memes.

Unsurprisingly, Russia and the GOP both follow the same playbook: “Here’s the lie we’re spouting to justify the evil we’re about to commit. You won’t believe what we say, and of course we don’t believe it either. But the evil we’re gonna do, that you can believe.”

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