China has joined Russia’s disinformation campaign and influence operations targeting to undermine the U.S. policy stances in the post-Soviet space.
On April 28, the Russian propaganda new agency TASS cited China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang as claiming the Chinese Government’s support for Russia’s stance and considering the existing biological laboratories in some countries – former Soviet republics, dangerous.
The U.S. Department of Defense’s Biological Threat Reduction Program is working together with national governments to provide consolidated and secure storage for infecting agents and dangerous toxic agents at appropriate state institutions to pursue peaceful studies and develop vaccines.
The Pentagon provided funds to ensure safety for the Sanitary and Epidemiological Service laboratories left over since the Soviet period to prevent the viral strains’ samples stored there from coming to terrorist and criminal organizations. The facilities listed as biological facilities, their safety sponsored by the U.S., comprise plague laboratories at national research institutes, diagnostic laboratories, including those for combating epizootics.
In March 2020, the Georgian Ministry of Health, in a statement on COVID-19 epidemic, emphasized the importance of the US Biological Laboratory named after Senator Richard Lugar, helping the country’s authorities to diagnose coronavirus cases quickly.
The U.S. Department of Defense’s Biological Threat Reduction Program is based on the Geneva Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, stipulating that “the States Parties to the Convention undertake to facilitate the fullest exchange of equipment, materials, scientific and technical information on the use of bacteriological (biological) agents and toxins for peaceful purposes and have the right to participate in such an exchange. The Convention assumes that the States Parties to the Convention cooperate in assisting in the development and application of scientific discoveries in the field of bacteriology (biology) for the prevention of diseases or for other peaceful purposes”.
China’s joining the Russian PSYop was a response to Washington’s accusation of Beijing over China’s concealing the scale and danger of COVID-19. In particular, the State Department criticized the Chinese Communist Party for not notifying the World Health Organization of a new coronavirus outbreak in time. In addition, the US accused Beijing of supplying substandard COVID antibody tests.
The United States Intelligence Community has concluded that the Chinese government intentionally withheld and even fabricated crucial data about infections and deaths from COVID-19, according to reports. Consequently, the official numbers relating to the novel coronavirus outbreak in China allegedly represent a considerable under-reporting of both total cases and total deaths.
This claim was published on Wednesday on the website of the American news agency Bloomberg. The news agency cited “three [anonymous] US officials” in its report.
Therefore, China decided to support Russia’s PSYop launched in 2008 over the biological laboratories functioning in the post-Soviet space under the intergovernmental agreements with the United States.
The Kremlin is making use of the COVID-19 pandemic yet again to interfere in politics, sabotage stability in some countries, as well as discredit the agreements within the EU, NATO and bilateral security and defense agreements.
Russia has stepped up the disinformation campaign on US cooperation programs in the field of securing national facilities for storing and studying the causative agents of dangerous human and animal diseases in the past to years. The Kremlin, using Russian intelligence agencies, is seeking to provoke local clamor against such cooperation and undermine the United States. Similarly, Russia is circulating conspiracy theories on the artificial origin of coronavirus. Such campaign aims to stop the cooperation, thus scaling up risks for biohazards’ storage, the vulnerability of national governments to crises and the effectiveness of PSYops and disinformation campaigns in the countries the actions are targeting.
In 2018, the Kremlin used Georgia’s former State Security Minister Igor Giorgadze, accused of organizing a terrorist attack at home and living in Moscow since 1995.
A senior Russian intelligence agent told the conference in Moscow that he had received documents from unnamed sources indicating that “secret experiments could have been run on the people” living in Georgia. The British Air Force conducted a large-scale investigation proving that all the information circulated by the Kremlin as for the Georgian technical center was fake, and Giorgadze himself went back on his words, saying that “he does not have evidence of lethal tests at the Lugar laboratory near Tbilisi.” Giorgadze’s statement was initially implausible, as he had not visited Georgia since 1995, the Lugar Laboratory was not built until 2011, and Giorgadze himself was not armed with the sources capable of providing such documents at the time of the statement. Consequently, disinformation on the Georgian laboratory is a part of Russia’s intelligence campaign beyond all doubt.
Similar Russia’s campaign was held in Ukraine on August 14, 2019 by registering a petition (gaining just 75 votes) to the president demanding to close 15 laboratories based on regional diagnostic and university centers and functioning as part of the program. Propaganda clichés, Russia’s Foreign Ministry manner of speech used in the text speak for the Russian connection. At the end of April 2020, the pro-Russian For Life party in Ukraine, led by politician Viktor Medvedchuk (who is lobbying Ukraine’s joining the Union with Russia), affiliated with Vladimir Putin, filed a parliamentary appeal requesting to investigate the laboratories operating under the U.S. Department of Defense’s Biological Threat Reduction Program. The US Embassy Kyiv had to clarify and answer the charges.
Thus, the concurrency of the campaign to discredit the U.S. Department of Defense’s Biological Threat Reduction Program speaks for the anti-U.S. operation carried out by Russia with support from China using Russian assets and anti-U.S. individuals in post-Soviet countries. It is noteworthy that Moscow does not conduct the PSYops using this narrative in the countries with pro-Russian leadership (Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Armenia), where the U.S. Department of Defense’s Biological Threat Reduction Program is running. This fact reveals an obvious anti-Western focus of the campaign.
