Nuclear and biological weapons in Ukraine: Propaganda and facts

Photo: Raskrinkavanje.ba

The narrative about Russia defending itself against the threat of Ukrainian nuclear and biological weapons is part of Russian state propaganda, which was often shared in the BCS language region as well.

At the beginning of March 2022, the Serbian edition of Russian state agency Sputnik published an article claiming that Ukraine secretly carried out activities aimed at developing nuclear weapons. The article quoted an unnamed source from “one of the competent departments of Russia” who stated that “Ukraine once received from abroad plutonium of the quality necessary for making nuclear weapons”, and that Kyiv could “secretly acquire from the West technology for centrifugal enrichment of uranium and laser separation of isotopes”. Such allegations, based on anonymous claims for which no evidence or facts have been provided, are not unusual for Russian state media. 

One of the narratives that Russian President Vladimir Putin used in his speech on February 24 referred to Ukraine as an alleged nuclear threat. Putin followed his own threat that “that any potential aggressor [against Russia as ‘one of the most powerful nuclear states’] will face defeat and ominous consequences” with a statement that Ukranian “far-right nationalists and neo-Nazis” are planning to acquire their own nuclear arsenal, which Russia will not allow. 

Shortly thereafter, in a recorded speech played at the UN Human Rights Council’s Conference on Disarmament, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated that Ukraine possesses delivery systems and nuclear technology inherited from the Soviet Union, and “the authorities settled in Kiev started dangerous games related to plans to acquire their own nuclear weapons”, describing that as a danger that Russia “can’t fail to respond to”.  

After Ukraine declared independence from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991, the Russian Federation, the US, Great Britain and Ukraine signed in Budapest the Memorandum on Security Guarantees in connection with Ukraine’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in December 1994. With this agreement, Ukraine renounced the nuclear weapons it inherited from the USSR, while the other signatories – including Russia – obliged to respect Ukraine’s borders, independence and sovereignty. Nuclear weapons on the territory of Ukraine went to Russia, and Ukraine never tried to develop its nuclear program. This country, therefore, has never posed a nuclear threat to Russia or any other country, and no evidence has been found for the claims of “weapons of mass destruction” even today, a year after the Russian invasion and occupation of parts of its territory began.

The fact that Ukraine does not undertake, nor did it undertake, any activities when it comes to the development of nuclear and biological weapons (1), did not prevent the active spread of such claims during the Russian aggression against Ukraine. 

Similarly, official Russian sources and the media favoring them intensively built the narrative that Ukraine represents a threat due to the alleged development of biological weapons in “American laboratories”. This story was particularly present in the first days of invasion and occasionally crossed over into the domain of QAnon science fiction, spread through pages and profiles of regional conspiracy theorists.

A nuclear threat that never existed

From the beginning of the Russian large scale invasion against Ukraine until December 2022, claims that Ukraine is developing nuclear and biological weapons were rated on Raskrinkavanje’s page in a total of 259 posts, which appeared most often on social networks, but also in many media. A total of 141 media outlets from the region published at least one version of these claims, led by the Serbian edition of Sputnik, news website Srbin info and several other media from Serbia (Vecernje novosti, Alo, Vesti-online, Informer, Pravda, etc.). Media from Bosnia and Herzegovina who have at least once published allegations of the Russian narrative about Ukraine as a country that develops nuclear and biological weapons include public broadcaster Radio-Television of Republika Srpska (RTRS), RS government-owned agency SRNA, Alternativna televizija and Nezavisne Novine. This narrative also appeared on IN4S from Montenegro, which often publishes pro-Russian disinformation.

Sputnik claimed, among other things, that Russia attacked Ukraine because NATO countries were planning to attack Russia from its territory – and with nuclear weapons. Thus, Russia’s invasion of a neighboring country, which undermined global security precisely because it was a nuclear power that initiated a direct and open conflict with Ukraine, was paradoxically presented as an attempt to “prevent the third world war”.

Similar claims accompanied the Russian invasion of Ukraine from the beginning. They were published without evidence or were “proved” with disinformation, such as a video shared on Russian Telegram channels, which was claimed to show a “Ukrainian right-winger with a radioactive device”. The video, on the other hand, showed the usual industrial equipment.

Among the propagators of such stories in the region is Dzevad Galijasevic, often incorrectly presented in the media as an expert on security and/or terrorism and extremism. In a column published on the Montenegrin web portal IN4S, Galijasevic repeated standard propaganda motifs about Russia’s “self-defense” against NATO, saying that it had to “rid” Ukraine of “weapons of mass destruction”, which threatened its survival within its current borders. The column was published in April 2022 and was soon shared by RTRS and Srna even though weapons of mass destruction did not exist in Ukraine and the claims are completely false.

“Biolaboratories”

Another prominent narrative that portrayed Ukraine as a military threat was built through media reports and statements by Russian officials who claimed that Ukraine was developing biological weapons with the support of the United States of America. On February 24, 2022, the day when Russia launched its attacks on Ukraine, science fiction claims about laboratories in Ukraine where biological weapons are created began to spread on social networks in the region.

On February 27, 2022, the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Bosnia and Herzegovina has published on its official Facebook page an allegation that the USA financed laboratories in Ukraine to study “methods for the destruction of the Russian people at the genetic level”. About twenty media outlets in the Western Balkans region published this statement without any verification or at least a common-sense distancing from these science fiction allegations.

These claims were immediately embraced by QAnon supporters, who placed these stories in the context of various conspiracy theories believed by this cult. At the very beginning of the attack on Ukraine, some of them claimed that the “removal of laboratories” was underway in this country, or even that this was the main reason for launching the invasion, portraying Vladimir Putin as a figure who is “saving the world from the satanic cabal” by destroying the laboratories. Local conspiracy theorists made different claims about what the “biolaboratories” were producing – some linked them to stories of “chemtrails” that were allegedly stopped by Putin’s attacks on Ukraine; some, on the other hand, with conspiracy theories about the laboratory origin of Covid-19, or monkeypox.

Richard Guthrie, a British expert on chemical and biological weapons, spoke to Deutsche Welle about the fact that allegations of the existence of biological weapons are becoming widespread because of the psychological effect they cause. The claims on which these specific stories are based are, on the other hand, without any scientific basis. For example, there is a notorious story about the development of weapons in biolaboratories that would target “Russian DNA” – a claim that can seem frightening to people, although there is no “Russian DNA”, nor can biological weapons that would target only one ethnicity be developed.

Allegations about “American biolaboratories” are not new, or even specifically related to Ukraine. From 1949 to 1988, the Soviet Union ran a propaganda campaign that the US was developing biological and chemical weapons against Russia. In 1995, senior Russian military officials revived this pattern of false allegations, which continues to this day. A similar propaganda narrative was also used during Russia’s five-day war with Georgia in 2008. Russia then claimed that the US was testing drugs on the population of Georgia and developing biological weapons there, also focusing on “American laboratories”. Claims about biolaboratories in Ukraine have been shared in the local language here since 2015, and their source was also Sputnik.

The modern version of the Cold War narratives about biological warfare, i.e. the story of “biolaboratories” is based on the fact that in 2005 the Ministry of Health of Ukraine and the Department of Defense of the United States of America concluded an agreement on cooperation in preventing the spread of technologies, pathogens and expertise that could be used in the development of biological weapons. Information about this agreement was available to the public from the beginning, as well as the agreement itself, which does not have the status of a confidential document and was published on the website of the US Department of Foreign Affairs in English and Ukrainian. The agreement never envisaged the establishment of “military laboratories”, nor the development of biological weapons. On the other hand, this cooperation was presented in propaganda narratives as a secret program for the development of biological weapons in American laboratories in Ukraine, for which no evidence was ever offered or found, nor were cases of its use documented.

The UN Office for Disarmament Affairs, after multiple requests from Russia to investigate the existence of biological laboratories in Ukraine, stated that no signs of the existence of biological weapons were found in Ukraine.

As the analysis of Raskrinkavanje’s data of shows, the narrative in the media sphere in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Croatia about the existence of biological laboratories where weapons against Russia are being developed, as well as the allegations about the development of nuclear weapons, came mostly from Sputnik. Sputnik’s content was assessed by Raskrinkavanje in 14 posts, when it comes to the narrative that Ukraine is developing nuclear and biological weapons.

These claims still continue to re-emerge in the public discourse, sometimes through Russian officials and the Kremlin-friendly media, other times through conspiracy theories channels and profiles on social media. There is still no credible evidence for any of such allegations, but that does not prevent the media from continuing publishing such disinformation.

(Tijana Cvjetićanin, Mladen Lakić, Raskrinkavanje.ba)