The Washington Post said Russia was spreading "misleading lies" about a U.S. program set up in the former Soviet Union with the aim of boosting people's security and protecting them from disease.

Russia's "disinformation campaign" about the program, which Moscow has welcomed before and participated in for 22 years, is part of the Kremlin's decades-long "deep-rooted disinformation practices" that intensified during Russia's "devastating" war on Ukraine.

The beginning of the story

The program targeted by Russia's "disinformation" campaign is known as "cooperation to reduce the threat" and was established after a visit to Ukraine by former President Barack Obama (then a Democratic Senator from Illinois) and Republican Senator Richard J. Lugar of Indiana in August 2005.

The visit included a laboratory at the Kiev Central Health and Epidemiology Station in Ukraine. The laboratory appeared to be not well secured, and bacteria and viruses that caused serious illness were kept in it.

The newspaper said that a US defense official, Andy Weber, showed Obama at the time a box of small vials carrying samples of Bacillus anthrax, the bacteria that causes anthrax. "I saw test tubes full of anthrax and plague lying semi-locked and unguarded, and we were told that these dangerous materials could not be secured without America's help," Obama said.

During Obama's visit, Ukraine signed an agreement with the United States to secure and modernize its laboratories.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, US authorities were deeply concerned that "terrorists" would have access to such materials. Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma asked the United States to verify the security of chemical and biological facilities in his country.

The program, developed in 1992 and now involving other countries and known as the Nunn-Lugar program, did shed much of the Cold War's legacy of the former Soviet Union's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and later expanded to include reducing biological threats in Russian laboratories, as well as other former Soviet republics.


Misrepresentation of facts

The Washington Post said the Non-Logar program had become the target of repeated Russian "disinformation campaigns" in recent years. Because part of its funding comes from the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Russia has repeatedly claimed that military research is being conducted at its facilities.

In December 2009, Russia's Pravda alleged that "biological weapons are being secretly developed on the territory of Georgia" and the newspaper's report contained at least nine false claims to this effect.

In 2018, Russia sparked a new wave of "misinformation" about the project, with the South Front, a website linked to Russian intelligence, publishing on January 16 a 49-page document titled "Pentagon Biological Weapons" claiming that the United States was continuing to work on biological weapons production at the Logar Center.

In September of the same year, Igor Georgadze, a former KGB officer and Georgian security official, appeared in a television interview on Russia's RT channel with documents he claimed suggested the Lugar Center "may be a cover for a biological weapons laboratory" conducting human tests, according to a Washington Post editorial.

Shortly after that interview, a Russian Foreign Ministry official said the United States was using Georgian people as "experiment pigs."

Russian General Igor Kirillov (head of the radiological, chemical and biological defense forces) also announced that the Lugar Center was "testing a highly toxic chemical or highly lethal biological agent under the guise of testing treatments."


The Washington Post says that while the allegations are untrue, they have made headlines and news websites.

When Russian forces invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Russian "disinformation fighters" used the same approach they had taken in Georgia.

The Russian Ministry of Defence announced on 6 March that it had obtained documents from Ukrainian laboratory workers showing the destruction of components of biological weapons causing serious diseases on the day of the invasion.

Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said the documents "confirm that the components of biological weapons were developed in Ukrainian biological laboratories very close to Russian territory." He also said viruses and other dangerous pathogens — including plague, anthrax and cholera — had been destroyed to conceal U.S. involvement.

Moscow goals

Through this "disinformation," the Kremlin seeks to portray the United States and Ukraine as criminal countries running microbial warfare laboratories, giving Russian President Vladimir Putin another pretext for his unjustified war on Ukraine.

The "disinformation" is also intended to distract attention from Russia's "barbaric" offensive against civilians in Ukraine.