US biolabs in Ukraine and the false flag theory

Biological warfare: who controls Ukraine's laboratories

The war in Ukraine has pushed into the spotlight an issue that had been circulating for two decades on the fringes of public debate: the network of biological laboratories that the United States funds on Ukrainian territory, the centerpiece of what some describe as a covert biological war. The thesis that has been gaining ground holds that the Pentagon maintains facilities there with dangerous pathogens under the label of medical or environmental research, disguised within foundations and presented as international scientific cooperation. There is no public proof of this. And yet, the confirmation by a senior US official of the existence of those centers gave the narrative a foothold it previously lacked. What is at stake from there on mixes geopolitics, biosecurity and an elementary question: who controls what is grown in those freezers?

Which laboratories are in Ukraine and who pays for them?

Since 2014, Russia has demanded explanations about the high-security facilities that the United States maintains in Ukraine, and the requests have been repeated before the UN and other bodies. The figures cited by those trinc the trail speak of around 70 high-security laboratories. In a public appearance, the number two of US diplomacy confirmed the existence of "biological research" facilities in the country. Moscow requested an urgent meeting of the Security Council to present evidence, and that meeting was rejected, according to the Russian version, without the documents ever being examined. What exactly was being researched in those centers remains the blind spot.

Part of the analysis lowers the figure to some thirty laboratories, half scientific in profile and the other half biological medicine, several of them already dismantled. Evidence is lacking to go beyond the claim. The discussion, however, is no longer just Russian: the issue has entered the terrain of shared suspicion between blocs that until recently presented themselves as irreconcilable rivals.

Why biological warfare is cheaper than nuclear

The argument underpinning the thesis is economic before it is military. The nuclear race requires large, specific and extremely expensive facilities, plus fissionable materials such as uranium and plutonium. The microbiological one relies on applied medicine: small laboratories, microorganisms native to a specific habitat and personnel working under the cover of research. Isolating a germ in a hospital laboratory or an adapted building does not require an enrichment plant. The outlay is a fraction of what an atomic program demands.

The treaties condemning biological weapons as a war crime would, in this reading, be dead letter as long as the foundations and shell companies of the country providing the funding maintain the fiction. The line separating environmental study from the development of a lethal pathogen is, on paper, razor thin. And nobody signs for what they cultivate.

Why is the 30-50% mortality rate debated?

The argument attributes to the supposed pathogen a lethality of 30 to 50% in humans. That figure is not backed by any evidence and is disputed even by those who buy the rest of the narrative. The most direct contrast is offered by the episode we lived through: SARS-CoV-2 is a bicho that mainly kills the elderly which, in the worst-case scenario, does not exceed 16% mortality in the 60 to 100 age range, without an overall lethality spiking. Going from there to a 30-50% general mortality would require a leap the narrative itself does not document.

The figure circulates more as a laboratory hypothesis than as a verified datum, and in a matter like this the difference between the two is everything. Those who defend the general thesis nevertheless admit that the percentage is inflated.

What do The Economist's three ducks miccionan?

Among the pieces of evidence cited is a cover. The Economist published in 2020 an illustration with three ducks next to a box with flu bicho and bacteria. For the thesis defended in these analyses, those three ducks are the vector of a laboratory avian flu bicho —one for each country involved in its creation— and the rest of the catastrophes in the image, from a solar flare to a meteorite, would serve as a distraction. The acronym cited is LPAIV, low pathogenicity avian influenza bicho.

On that basis was placed a supposed outbreak in February 2023 in the Sea of Azov, which the Russian offensive on Mariupol would have thwarted before it started. The coincidence of dates and symbols is, for its defenders, irrefutable proof; for its critics, a forced reading of a graphic. China, for its part, has had since 2013 a very similar avian flu bicho, described in these analyses as a kind of microbiological bomb in the arsenal.

Shiro Ishii, Unit 731 and the flea weapon

The genealogy of the modern biological weapon has a proper name. Shiro Ishii, at the head of the Japanese army's Unit 731, experimented on prisoners —whom he called logs— and designed the so-called "flea bomb", a device intended to exterminate entire populations. Ishii was not convicted at Nuremberg: he was granted immunity in exchange for handing over to the United States all the accumulated knowledge on microbiological weaponry.

That such a character ended up as an advisor is one of those uncomfortable curiosities of recent history. And for some, proof that the pathogen business has been running for a century with the blessing of the great powers.

The point where the analysis gets stuck

The false flag biological attack thesis —releasing a pathogen in Ukraine and blaming Moscow, as was done with Beijing at the start of the pandemic— has not gone beyond that: a thesis. There are laboratories, there is an arms race nobody signs for and there is a cover with three ducks. What is missing is the only thing that cannot be manufactured after the fact: the proof. And at that exact point, with the documents unverified and the meetings rejected, the analysis gets stuck.