Conservatives and U.S. media are regurgitating a fake conspiracy theory that’s being used to justify Putin’s assault on Ukraine.
It’s not evident that Russia initially formulated this specific grain of wartime propaganda for conspiratorial American audiences. Its lies about biolabs in Ukraine were likely circulated anew among domestic Russian audiences this year to build fear and support for its hostility toward Ukraine.
Regardless, those lies were turned into grist for the mills of the conspiracy-brained internet and partisan U.S. media programs that gleefully regurgitate such fare. That’s a win for the Kremlin’s war propaganda machine. Eto Buziashvili, a research associate at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab , has worked on a team tracking biolab rumors from Russian and Chinese sources for more than two years. She told me that while Russia first used narratives and disinformation related to biolabs to threaten or distract from its own actions, “now the narratives are one of main justifications of the invasion.
Though some experts and news headlines have already declared Russian propaganda efforts surrounding its invasion of Ukraine a flop, those declarations were perhaps
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