The pro-Russian Telegram channels spread a two-year-old video pretending it’s a new one. In the video, American congresswoman and Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, urges to forbid all “bio laboratories” in Ukraine. Let’s track the history and revitalization of this narrative.


Russian-backed narrative about “secret US-funded military-biological” labs in Ukraine


The narrative starts developing in 2022 with the statement of Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, former chief of the Russian Armed Forces’ Radiation, Chemical, and Biological Defense Forces. It addresses the outcomes of a Geneva meeting of the UN member states regarding the prohibition and destruction of bacteriological and toxin weapons.

On December 17, 2024, General Kirlliov was killed by an explosive planted in an electric scooter when he was leaving home. The New York Times anonymous source confirmed that it was an SBU operation, but the security service itself didn’t provide a statement, only commenting that Kirillov is a legitimate target for Ukraine.

Russian media spread the information that, at this meeting, the USA recognized the fact of conducting biological research in Ukraine. The video of the general’s report was deleted from YouTube, but there are a lot of articles about it at Slaq.am, RT, Izvestia (ИЗВЕСТИЯ).

The minister of Russia’s foreign affairs, Sergey Lavrov, accused the Pentagon of establishing biolabs in Ukraine too.

“The Pentagon has established several dozen military-biological laboratories on Ukrainian territory as part of its program to create such bio-laboratories worldwide. We have sent an official inquiry asking for an explanation and will demand a response,” Lavrov said.


Were there really American biolabs in Ukraine?

In the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States launched the Biological Threat Reduction Program to minimize the risks posed by biological weapons left in post-Soviet countries, including Ukraine. This program involves U.S. funding for laboratory diagnostics, particularly for the modernization of laboratories and lab equipment, but local authorities, not American, manage these funds.

“The program’s framework allows participating countries to strengthen their staff and scientific capabilities, as well as their laboratory diagnostic networks, especially in detecting and reporting disease cases or outbreaks,” Ukraine’s Ministry of Health said.

In 2005, the U.S. the Department of Defense and Ukraine’s Ministry of Health signed a cooperation agreement to prevent the proliferation of technologies, pathogens, and expertise that could be potentially used in developing biological weapons.

Despite Russia’s claims that these are “secret” laboratories, details about the U.S. program are available on the U.S. Embassy’s website, and the current agreement with Ukraine’s Ministry of Health is publicly accessible on the Ukrainian government’s legal portal at zakon.rada.gov.ua.

In response to allegations by top Russian officials and the Russian Defense Ministry about laboratory experiments to produce biological weapons, the governments of ten countries — the United States, Armenia, Georgia, Iraq, Jordan, Liberia, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Ukraine — issued a joint statement in August 2022, debunking Kremlin propaganda about such weapons being developed in these labs. The statement was published on the U.S. State Department’s website.

“Our governments work openly and transparently within the Biological Threat Reduction Program, which is part of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. These partnerships are exclusively peaceful and have nothing to do with weapons,” the joint statement reads.

U.S. officials noted that Russia was a key partner in the Threat Reduction Program, collaborating on research and biosafety topics until 2014, the year when Russia occupied Crimea and invaded the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Before 2014, Russian-American collaboration was extensive: the U.S. spent over 100 million dollars re-training thousands of Russian scientists and launching hundreds of peaceful biological research projects. In particular, the countries conducted joint research on monkeypox, anthrax, brucellosis, plague, Marburg virus, ebola, smallpox, and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever.


What Gabbard said about biolabs?


On November 21, 2024, the pro-Russian Telegram channels such as Medved (Медведь) and Shkvarka News (Шкварка News) posted that Tulsi Gabbard said that Biden’s administration finances more than 300 biological laboratories with dangerous pathogens and viruses with nearly 30 of them being based in Ukraine.

“There are 25+ US-funded biolabs in Ukraine which, if breached, would release & spread deadly pathogens to the U.S./world. We must take action now to prevent disaster. U.S./Russia/Ukraine/NATO/UN/EU must implement a ceasefire now around these labs until they’re secured & pathogens destroyed,” Tulsi Gabbard said.

But Tulsi Gabbard posted this video on X (Twitter) two years ago, on March 13, 2022. And two years ago, pro-Russian channels already spread Gabbard’s statements on biolabs. So, why did they do that again? We assume that the pro-Russian media repackaged the old narrative to fuel conversations and excitement around a person who can take one of the head positions in the Trump’s administration.

Two years ago, Mitt Romney, the Republican senator from Utah, debunked Tulsi Gabbard’s claim about biolabs in Ukraine, calling it a “repetition of Russian propaganda.” President Volodymyr Zelensky also dismissed the idea of such biolabs, dismissing it as a joke.

After the series of refutations, Mrs. Gabbard made the new post and said that she didn’t mean to say that US-funded biolabs that create specifically bioweapons exist. She said she was expressing concern that there are laboratories in active combat zones that research pathogens, and suggested that there may have been some “misunderstanding” about the terms “laboratories” and “biological weapons laboratories.”

“I’m not convinced there are biological weapons labs or biological weapons in Ukraine—that’s not what I’m concerned about. I’m concerned about the existence of the 25+ biological labs in that warzone,” Tulsi Gabbard said.

Conclusion: Manipulation