I know there’s a lot of misinformation flying around out there about what’s going on in Ukraine right now, and it can sometimes be hard to tell fact from fiction.

There’s one pro-Putin conspiracy theory in particular that keeps coming up over and over again, and that’s this idea that Putin invaded Ukraine because the U.S. and Ukraine were working together in “secret biolabs” to build biological weapons that target Russians.

It sounds kind of crazy when you put it like that, but it’s gotten an awful lot of airtime. Marjorie Traitor Greene brought it up in her stupid Facebook Live stream this week, Tulsi Gabbard has talked about it on Twitter, that jackaloon Tucker Carlson brings it up on his show almost every night, and I know Jen Psaki has been asked about it, too.

The problem with a lie like this one is that it’s got just enough basis in something true to really scare people. So, I just wanted to take a few minutes to set the record straight about what is and isn’t true about these so-called “Ukrainian biolabs.”

FICTION: Ukraine has biolabs dedicated to making biological weapons of mass destruction.

FACT: Ukraine, just like every other developed country in the world, has a number of laboratories devoted to biomedical research. (If you live near a university, you probably have one in your town!) These labs are used for all kinds of studies, including pharmaceutical research, food safety monitoring, disease identification and testing, and yes, research on microbes that can make people sick … for the purpose of treating those illnesses, not weaponizing them.

It's worth noting that in the world of biological research, there are four “levels” of biolab security, with Level 1 being the lowest (no harmful germs here – the most dangerous thing in this lab is the bleach they use to clean it), and Level 4 being the kind of lab you probably think about when you hear the term “biolab,” with hazmat suits and clean rooms and vials of super-contagious, super-deadly viruses like Ebola and smallpox. This is the only level of lab where a bioweapon could be created without infecting and killing the entire staff. Ukraine has no level 4 biolabs.

FICTION: The U.S. is funding Ukraine’s biolabs and helping them build WMDs.

FACT: The U.S. Department of Defense runs a program called the Biological Threat Reduction Program (BTRP) in the former Soviet states and a few other places where dangerous bio-agents had been in the custody of governments that ceased to exist. Just like Ukraine was persuaded by the U.S. to give up its stash of Soviet nukes after the fall of the Soviet government, it agreed to work with the DoD to track down and safely secure any harmful biological materials that the Soviets might have been using in experiments. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a smart plan to me!

FICTION: Ukraine’s biolabs and biological research are “secret,” and so is the U.S.’s involvement.

FACT: You can go on the Ukrainian embassy website right now and read all about these labs and the work that they do … but unless you’re a medical researcher yourself, it’s pretty dry reading. 

Here’s a list of their “Active Research Projects,” publicly available to anyone who knows how to use Google (and doesn’t live in a country like Russia, where it’s blocked):

“BTRP supports many collaborative research projects through which Ukrainian and American scientists work together.  A few recent examples are:

• Risk Assessment of Selected Avian EDPs Potentially Carried by Migratory Birds over Ukraine
• Prevalence of Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever virus and hantaviruses in Ukraine and the potential requirement for differential diagnosis of suspect leptospirosis patients
• The Spread of African Swine Fever Virus (ASFV) in Domestic Pigs and Wild Boars in Ukraine – Building Capacity for Insight into the Transmission of ASFV through Characterization of Virus Isolates by Genome Sequencing and Phylogenetic Analysis
• ASF Biosurveillance and ASF Regional Risk Assessment: A Field to Plate Survey”

In plain English: We’re helping the Ukrainians track potential outbreaks of bird flu and swine flu and trying to make sure their food supply stays uncontaminated. Pretty nefarious stuff!  (NOTE: That was sarcasm.)

Anyway, I hope this clears the air some and sets the record straight on what’s really going on with those “Ukrainian biolabs.”  Yes, they exist.  No, they’re not a secret.  No, they’re not building biological weapons.  Oh, and there’s no such thing as biological weapons that “target Russian people,” at least outside of science fiction and Vladimir Putin’s twisted daydreams.

Sappers clear the way, Airborne all the way!

--Richard

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