The underside of the infox, the chronicle

In Georgia, an American biological laboratory is the subject of all the fake news from propagandists

Audio 03:29

The Richard Lugar Center, a central public health reference laboratory in Tbilisi, Georgia, opened on March 18, 2011. It was built by the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency, part of the US Department of the defense.

© Wikimedia Commons

By: Régis Genté Follow

3 mins

In Georgia, an American biological laboratory is the target of all fake news from Russian propagandists.

This is the Richard Lugar Center for Public Health Research in Tbilisi.

It opened in 2013 and aims to promote public and animal health through the detection of infectious diseases and epidemiological surveillance. 

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How does Russian propaganda talk about this laboratory?

Generally speaking, the real fake news campaign launched 5 years ago is to say that the Americans built this laboratory to develop biological weapons.

Including the Covid-19, American creation therefore.

Articles claim, for example, that the center collects genetic material, in order to develop specific weapons for certain ethnic groups.

Implied: the Georgians.

Others sometimes report deaths during tests, never confirmed.

The latest article devoted to this laboratory, published on January 24 on the blog of the so-called Bulgarian journalist Dilyana Gaytandjieva, claims that the Lugar center conducted a dangerous study on a population of 1,100 Georgian soldiers.

The article produces scanners of documents emanating from said center,

real documents which in part are actually public, but which she systematically grossly misinterprets.

For example, it forgets to say that the participation of the military consists only of donating their blood for analysis.

She pretends it's an experiment on them.

How is the intox distributed?

Almost all the articles concerning the Lugar center in Tbilisi are signed by this Bulgarian journalist.

She publishes them on her blog, but they are then systematically taken up the next day by Russian or at least Russian-speaking media, always conspiratorial and anti-Western.

She herself reposts them on similar Facebook pages.

His articles are also taken up in Georgia, in the Georgian language, but only on pro-Russian media, such as

What is the intention of this propaganda?

Basically, this is "negative" soft power on the part of Russia.

The 3.7 million Georgians are overwhelmingly pro-Western and anti-Russian.

So Moscow understands that it cannot sell them anything positive.

Hence a propaganda that consists of saying negative things about the West.

In this case, by multiplying fake news about America secretly working to eradicate Georgians from the face of the earth.

This echoes other privileged themes of Russian propaganda, such as that of homosexuality,

she explains .

in essence

One last detail: when it was proven that the Russian secret services had poisoned in 2018, on British territory, their former colleague Sergey Skripal, Russian propagandists multiplied the publications on the Lugar center, just to say in hollow, since they had just been caught red-handed, that the Americans were also developing biological weapons.

It was a way to drown the fish

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