Russians running yearslong Trolling operation to project their blame onto Ukraine.

BudmanTX said:

found that one under "the real news network" and it headline the Max B...then i saw a little almost made me Then i remember the reason why Putin said he was going in......that's when it tipped me off

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hanimmal said:

Yeah as sono as I heard the guy finish the tag line and say his name it was a tell that it was going to be pro-Russian propaganda.

But it has such a credible name!

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Just before 11 a.m. Moscow Standard Time on March 1, after a night of Russian strikes on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, a set of Russian-language Twitter accounts spread a lie that Ukraine was fabricating civilian casualties.

One account created last year, @Ne_nu_Che, shared a video of a man standing in front of rows of dark gray body bags that appeared to be filled with corpses. As he spoke to the camera, one of the encased bodies behind him lifted its arms to stop the top of the bag from blowing away. The video was taken from an Austrian TV report about a climate change demonstration held in Vienna in February. But @Ne_nu_Che claimed it was from Ukraine.

“Propaganda makes mistakes too, one of the corpses came back to life right as they were counting the deaths of Ukraine’s civilians,” the tweet said.

Eight minutes later, another account, @Enot_Kremle_Bot, tweeted the same video. “I’M SCREAMING! One of the ‘corpses’ came back to life during a segment about civilian deaths in the Ukraine. Information war is reaching a new level,” they said.

Two other accounts created last fall within a few days of @Enot_Kremle_Bot soon shared the same video and accusations of fake civilian casualties. “Ukrainian propaganda does not sleep,” said one.

The Twitter profiles are part of a pro-Putin network of dozens of accounts spread across Twitter, TikTok and Instagram whose behavior, content and coordination are consistent with Russian troll factory the Internet Research Agency, according to Darren Linvill, a Clemson University professor who, along with another professor, Patrick Warren, has spent years studying IRA accounts.

The IRA burst into the American consciousness after its paid trolls used thousands of English-language accounts across social media platforms to influence American voters during the 2016 presidential election. The IRA was at the center of a 2018 Department of Justice criminal indictment for its alleged effort to “interfere with elections and political processes.”

“These accounts express every indicator that we have to suggest they originate with the Internet Research Agency,” Linvill said. “And if they aren’t the IRA, that’s worse, because I don’t know who’s doing it.”

An analysis of the accounts’ activity by the Clemson Media Forensics Hub and ProPublica found they posted at defined times consistent with the IRA workday, were created in the same time frame and posted similar or identical text, photos and videos across accounts and platforms. Posts from Twitter accounts in the network dropped off on weekends and Russian holidays, suggesting the posters had regular work schedules.

Many of the accounts also shared content from facktoria.com, a satirical Russian website that began publishing in February. Its domain registration records are private, and it’s unclear who operates it. Twitter removed its account after being contacted by ProPublica.

The pro-Putin network included roughly 60 Twitter accounts, over 100 on TikTok, and at least seven on Instagram, according to the analysis and removals by the platforms. Linvill and Warren said the Twitter accounts share strong connections with a set of hundreds of accounts they identified a year ago as likely being run by the IRA. Twitter removed nearly all of those accounts. It did not attribute them to the IRA.

The most successful accounts were on TikTok, where a set of roughly a dozen analyzed by Clemson researchers and ProPublica racked up more than 250 million views and over 8 million likes with posts that promoted Russian government statements, mocked President Joe Biden and shared fake Russian fact-checking videos that were revealed by ProPublica and Clemson researchers earlier this week. On Twitter, they attacked jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and blamed the West for preventing Russian athletes from competing under the Russian flag in the Olympics.

Late last month, the network of accounts shifted to focus almost exclusively on Ukraine, echoing similar narratives and content across accounts and platforms. A popular post by the account @QR_Kod accused the Ukrainian military of using civilians as human shields. Another post by @QR_Kod portrayed Ukraine as provoking Russia at the behest of its NATO masters. Both tweets received hundreds of likes and retweets and were posted on the same day as the body bag video. At least two Twitter accounts in the network also shared fake fact-checking videos.

The findings indicate that professionalized trolling remains a force in domestic Russian propaganda efforts and continues to adapt across platforms, according to Linvill.

“I can’t stress enough the importance of understanding the way that this is a tool for Putin to control narratives among his own people, a way for him to lie to his own people and control the conversation,” Linvill said. “To suggest that the West is blanketly winning this information war is true only in some places. Putin doesn’t have to win the information war, he just has to hold his ground. And these accounts are helping him do that.”

After inquiries from ProPublica, all of the active accounts were removed from TikTok, and nearly all were suspended by Twitter.
Meta said it removed one Instagram account for violating its spam policy and that the others did not violate its rules. None of the platforms attribute the accounts to the IRA. Twitter and TikTok said the accounts engaged in coordinated behavior or other activity that violated platform policies.

A TikTok spokesperson said the initial eight accounts shared with it violated its policy against “harmful misinformation.” TikTok removed an additional 98 accounts it determined were part of the same pro-Putin network.

“We continue to respond to the war in Ukraine with increased safety and security resources to detect emerging threats and remove harmful misinformation,” said a statement provided by the company. “We also partner with independent fact-checking organizations to support our efforts to help TikTok remain a safe and authentic place.”

A Twitter spokesperson called the roughly 60 accounts it removed “malicious” and said they violated its platform manipulation and spam policy, but declined to be more specific. They said the company had determined that the active accounts shared by ProPublica had violated its policies prior to being asked about them. Twitter decided to leave the set of 37 accounts online “to make it harder for bad actors to understand our detections,” according to the spokesperson.

The accounts were removed by Twitter within 48 hours of ProPublica contacting the company about them. The week before, Twitter removed 27 accounts that the Clemson researchers also identified as likely IRA accounts.

“Our investigation into these accounts remains ongoing, and we will take further action when necessary,” said a statement from a Twitter spokesperson. “As is standard, when we identify information operation campaigns that we can reliably attribute to state-linked activity, we will disclose this to the public.”

Twitter declined to offer more details on why it left roughly 30 accounts that it identified as violative online to continue spreading propaganda. It also declined to comment on connections between the roughly 60 accounts in this recent network and the hundreds of accounts flagged by Linvill and Warren last spring as possible IRA profiles. Linvill said he identified the recent accounts largely based on their commonality with the previous set of 200.

“I connect these current accounts to the ongoing activity over the course of the past year by carefully tracking accounts’ tactics, techniques and procedures,” he said.

Platforms may be hesitant to attribute activity to the IRA in part because the agency has adapted and made its efforts harder to expose, according to Linvill. But he said social platforms should disclose more information about the networks it removes, even if it can’t say with certainty who is running them.

“In every other area of cybersecurity, dangerous activity from bad actors is disclosed routinely without full confidence in the source of the activity. We name and disclose computer viruses or hacker groups, for instance, because that is in the public interest,” he said. “The platforms should do the same. The Russian people should know that some sophisticated and well-organized group is covertly using social media to encourage support for Putin and the war in Ukraine.”

The Internet Research Agency is a private company owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian entrepreneur known as “Putin’s Chef.” Prigozhin is linked to a sprawling empire ranging from catering services to the military mercenary company Wagner Group, which was reportedly tasked with assassinating President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The IRA launched in St. Petersburg in 2013 by hiring young internet-savvy people to post on blogs, discussion forums and social media to promote Putin’s agenda to a domestic audience. After being exposed for its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. election, the IRA attempted to outsource some of its English-language operations to Ghana ahead of 2020. Efforts to reach Prigozhin were unsuccessful.

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BOSTON (AP) — Long before waging war on Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin was working to make Russia’s internet a powerful tool of surveillance and social control akin to China’s so-called Great Firewall.

So when Western tech companies began cutting ties with Russia following its invasion, Russian investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov was alarmed. He’d spent years exposing Russian censorship and feared that well-intentioned efforts to aid Ukraine would instead help Putin isolate Russians from the free flow of information, aiding the Kremlin’s propaganda war.

“Look, guys the only space the Russians have to talk about Ukraine. and what is going on in Russia. is Facebook,” Soldatov, now exiled in London. wrote on Facebook in the war’s first week. “You cannot just, like, kill our access.”

Facebook didn’t, although the Kremlin soon picked up that baton, throttling both Facebook and Twitter so badly they are effectively unreachable on the Russian internet. Putin has also blocked access to both Western media and independent news sites in the country, and a new law criminalizes spreading information that contradicts the government’s line. On Friday, the Kremlin said it would also restrict access to Instagram. By early Monday, the network monitor NetBlocks reported the social network throttled across multiple Russian internet providers.

RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR

• Russia-Ukraine war: Key things to know about the conflict
• In Russian invasion of Ukraine, Cold War echoes reverberate
• Anti-war protests across Europe, small rallies in Russia
• Ukraine refugees tell harrowing tales even as numbers ease

Yet the Kremlin’s latest censorship efforts have revealed serious shortcomings in the government’s bigger plans to straightjacket the internet. Any Russian with a modicum of tech smarts can circumvent government efforts to starve Russians of fact.

For instance, the government has so far had only limited success blocking the use of software known as virtual private networks, or VPNs, that allows users to evade content restrictions. The same goes for Putin’s attempts to restrict the use of other censorship-evading software.

That puts providers of internet bandwidth and associated services sympathetic to Ukraine’s plight in a tough spot. On one side, they face public pressure to punish the Russian state and economic reasons to limit services at a time when bills might well go unpaid. On the other, they’re wary of helping stifle a free flow of information that can counter Kremlin disinformation — for instance, the state’s claim that Russia’s military is heroically “liberating” Ukraine from fascists.

Amazon Web Services, a major provider of cloud computing services, continues to operate in Russia, although it says it’s not taking on any new customers. Both Cloudflare, which helps shield websites from denial-of-service attacks and malware, and Akamai, which boosts site performance by putting internet content closer to its audience, also continue to serve their Russian customers, with exceptions including cutting off state-owned companies and firms under sanctions.

Microsoft, by contrast, hasn’t said whether it will halt its cloud services in the country, although it has suspended all new sales of products and services.

U.S.-based Cogent, which provides a major “backbone” for internet traffic, has cut direct connections inside Russia but left open the pipes through subsidiaries of Russian network providers at exchanges physically outside the country. Another major U.S. backbone provider, Lumen, has done the same.

“We have no desire to cut off Russian individuals and think that an open internet is critical to the world,” Cogent CEO Dave Schaeffer said in an interview. Direct connections to servers inside Russia, he said, could potentially “be used for offensive cyber efforts by the Russian government.”

Schaeffer said the decision didn’t reflect “financial considerations,” although he acknowledged that the ruble’s sharp drop, which makes imported goods and services more expensive in Russia, could make it difficult to collect customer payments. Meanwhile, he said, Cogent is providing Ukrainian customers free service during the conflict.

Schaeffer said these moves might impair internet video in Russia but will leave plenty of bandwidth for smaller files.

Other major backbone providers in Europe and Asia also continue to serve Russia, a net importer of bandwidth, said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for the network management firm Kentik. He has noted no appreciable drop in connectivity from outside providers.

Cloudflare continues to operate four data centers in Russia even though Russian authorities ordered government websites to drop foreign-owned hosting providers as of Friday. In a March 7 blog post the company said it had determined “Russia needs more Internet access, not less.”

Under a 2019 “sovereign internet” law, Russia is supposed to be able to operate its internet independent of the rest of the world. In practice, that has brought Russia closer to the kind of intensive internet monitoring and control practiced by China and Iran.

Its telecommunications oversight agency, Rozkomnadzor, successfully tested the system at scale a year ago when it throttled access to Twitter. It uses hundreds of so-called middleboxes — router-like devices run and remotely controlled by bureaucrats that can block individual websites and services — installed by law at all internet providers inside Russia.

But the system, which also lets the FSB security service spy on Russian citizens, is a relative sieve compared to China’s Great Firewall. Andrew Sullivan, president of the nonprofit Internet Society, said there’s no evidence it has the ability to successfully disconnect Russia from the wider internet.

“Walling off a country’s internet is complicated, culturally, economically and technologically. And it becomes far more complicated with a country like Russia, whose internet, unlike China’s, was not originally built out with government control in mind,” he said.

“When it comes to censorship, the only ones who can really do it are the Chinese,” said Serge Droz, a senior security engineer at Swiss-based Proton Technologies, which offers software for creating VPNs, a principal tool for circumventing state censorship.

ProtonVPN, which Droz says has been inventive in finding ways to circumvent Russian blocking, reports clocking ten times as many daily signups than before the war. VPN services tracked by researchers at Top10VPN.com found Facebook and Twitter downloads surging eight times higher than average. Its research found the Kremlin to have blocked more than 270 news and financial sites since the invasion, including BBC News and Voice of America’s Russian-language services.

Russia’s elites are believed to be big VPN users. No one expects them to disconnect.

Russian authorities are also having some success blocking the privacy-protecting Tor browser, which like VPNs lets users visit content at special ”.onion” sites on the so-called dark web, researchers say. Twitter just created a Tor site; other outlets such as The New York Times also have them.

The Kremlin has not, however, blocked the popular Telegram messaging app. It’s an important conduit for Ukrainian government ministries and also for Meduza, the Latvia-based independent Russian-language news organization whose website is blocked in Russia. Meduza has 1 million followers on Telegram.

One reason may be that Telegram is also a vital conduit for Kremlin propagandists, analysts say.

Additionally, Telegram does not feature default end-to-end encryption, which renders messages unreadable by the company and outsiders, as the popular U.S.-based messaging apps Signal and WhatsApp do. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook’s parent, Meta. Telegram does offer users fully encrypted “private chats,” although users have to make sure to activate them.

After the invasion, Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike tweeted a reminder that sensitive communication on insecure apps can literally be a matter of life and death in war. A Signal spokesman would not share user numbers, but WhatsApp has an estimated 63 million users in Russia.

Being able to access outside websites and apps vital to staying informed depend, however, on foreign-based VPN services that Russians say they are having trouble paying for since Visa and Mastercard cut off their country.

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BudmanTX said:

normally i don't like sky news, but this reporter gave a straight question to the UN ambassador......"when is putin gonna stop the war" etc

now listen to the ambassadors answer.........i know i know...you might have to take a hot shower after this...but still....

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Russia’s early struggles to push disinformation and propaganda about Ukraine have picked up momentum in recent days, thanks to a variety of debunked conspiracy theories about biological research labs in Ukraine. Much of the false information is flourishing in Russian social media, far-right online spaces and U.S. conservative media, including Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News.

The theories, which have been boosted by Russian and Chinese officials, come as U.S. officials warn that Russia could be preparing a chemical or biological weapons attack of its own in Ukraine.

Most of the conspiracy theories claim that the U.S. was developing and plotting to release a bioweapon or potentially another coronavirus from “biolabs”’ throughout Ukraine and that Russia invaded to take over the labs. Many of the theories implicate people who are often the targets of far-right conspiracy thinking — including Dr. Anthony Fauci and President Joe Biden — as being behind creating the weaponized diseases in the biolabs.

Disinformation experts said the biolabs theory echoes other Russian propaganda meant to justify its military efforts, which often makes allegations against other countries and populations that reflect similar attacks it plans to make.

PolitiFact has debunked the theories, and no evidence of U.S.-run bioweapons labs in Ukraine has been put forward. Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee the U.S. has no evidence that Ukraine has pursued bioweapons and that the only assistance provided by the U.S. was “in the context of biosafety.”

“The ‘biolabs’ are serving as a false justification for why Russia invaded Ukraine. It’s defensive,” said Clint Watts, an MSNBC contributor who is a senior fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University. “They create a situation where they go to a populist audience, push out talking points, get the audience primed and make it true later.”

Gavin Wilde, a managing consultant at the Krebs Stamos Group, a security consulting company, who previously was director for Russia, Baltic, and Caucasus affairs on the White House National Security Council, said the theories appeared to focus on the U.S. Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which was created to decommission Soviet-era chemical and biological weapons.

He said the program “has long provided fodder for Russian propaganda campaigns” and can be particularly effective on Russian residents.

“In a media environment almost completely dominated by Kremlin narratives — with few independent or Western outlets remaining — creating a pretext for escalation that the Russian public will accede to using these well-worn narratives is an easy task,” Wilde said.

The “biolabs” conspiracy theories were almost unheard of until the day of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

Pyrra Technologies, a cybersecurity and threat intelligence company, said the first mention of biolabs came on the far-right social network Gab on Feb. 14, 10 days before the invasion. The user included an awkwardly worded graphic, titled “Exclusive US biolabs in Ukraine, and they are financed at the expense of the US Department of Defense.”

The post largely sat idle for days. Welton Chang, the CEO of Pyrra, said posts about biolabs on the top 15 far-right social networks numbered in the single digits in the days before Russia’s invasion. But on Feb. 24, the day Russia began its invasion, the number of posts about biolabs on English-language far-right websites skyrocketed into the hundreds and only grew in the days after.

Boosted by far-right influencers on the day of the invasion, an anonymous QAnon Twitter account titled @WarClandestine pushed the “biolabs” theory to new heights, using the same “US biolabs” graphic initially included on the Gab post that went largely unshared the week before.

Twitter said the account and others that pushed the biolabs theory were banned for “multiple violations of our abusive behavior policy.”

The biolab conspiracy theory has taken over as the prevailing narrative on pro-Trump and QAnon websites like The Great Awakening and Patriots.Win.

Chang said the rhetoric on pro-Trump sites, which had largely been anti-Putin in the first days of the war, has shifted because of the biolab conspiracy theory.

“These communities already know what the rhythm and cadence of Covid conspiracies should be like to get people to buy it,” Chang said. “They had a lot of practice with QAnon. The kinds of things that get people excited, like any time you say ‘secret biolab,’ it gets people’s emotions up.”

Russian and Chinese officials have also boosted the theory. On Tuesday, China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry began pushing the conspiracy theory, asking for a “full account” of Ukraine’s “biological military activities at home and abroad.”

By Wednesday, almost two weeks after the invasion, the conspiracy theory had reached Carlson, who led his show claiming that the “Biden administration was funding secret biolabs in Ukraine.”

On Thursday, Russia requested a meeting at the U.N. Security Council about “military biological activities” in the U.S.

The Kremlin has a long history of planting false reports that the U.S. was developing chemical or biological warfare to distract from its own use of such weapons, said Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University and the author of a history of Soviet and U.S. disinformation tactics.

In the early 1980s, as Soviet forces deployed chemical agents in Afghanistan and Laos, the Kremlin tried to distract from such attacks by publishing false tales, like one that the CIA was developing weaponized mosquitoes in Pakistan to spread encephalitis in Afghanistan.

“There were multiple incidents of Soviet disinformation that involved claims of American bioweapons, including the big one, HIV/AIDS,” Rid said.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s another attempt at accusing the other side of the thing they are in fact doing,” Rid said.

Zignal Labs, which analyzes social media, broadcast, traditional media and online conversations, found that English-language influencers helped create the talking point for Russian propaganda.

“Mentions of the bioweapon lab narrative in Russian doubled on March 6th,” about 10 days after the start of the invasion, Zignal Labs said in a report. From Wednesday to Friday, Russian mentions of the biolab conspiracy theory on social media have outpaced posts about the same propaganda in English, the report said.

Rid said he sees the theories as playing on some Americans’ fears about Covid.

“For the far right, I think it’s also about China and Covid,” Rid said. “It’s all mixed up in this mesh of fear and conspiracy theory about where Covid really came from. It’s just something that a lot of people can emotionally relate to, because the pandemic affected them so brutally for the past two years.”

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hanimmal said:

Looks like all that trolling from the last couple years by the death cult trolls is being used to sell this new narrative Putin is trying out to see if it sticks with the cultists who don't want to wake up to reality.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/qanon-ukraine-biolabs-russian-propaganda-efforts-boosted-us-far-right-rcna19392
View attachment 5102404

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cannabineer said:

The biolabs lie is a setup for his use of bio or gas.

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WASHINGTON — Prominent social media users and conservative voices have amplified a baseless theory promoted by Russian state media accusing the United States of funding biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine.

There is no evidence to support the claims, which President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department have all unequivocally denied.

There are biological laboratories inside Ukraine, and since 2005, the United States has provided backing to a number of institutions to prevent the production of biological weapons. But Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, and others have misleadingly cited remarks from American officials as proof that the labs are producing or conducting research on biological weapons.

“Out of nowhere, the Biden official in charge of Ukraine confirmed the story,” Mr. Carlson said on his program Thursday night.
“Victoria Nuland, the under secretary of state, casually mentioned in a Senate hearing on Tuesday that actually, yes, the Biden administration does fund a series of biolabs in Ukraine.”

Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, characterized Ms. Nuland’s remarks as a “serious admission.”Donald Trump Jr., the son of the former president, tweeted that her comments propelled the claim from “conspiracy theory to fact.”

Mr. Carlson also pointed to an interview with Robert Pope, the director of the Pentagon’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which helps countries in the former Soviet Union secure or eliminate nuclear and chemical weapons.

“As Pope put it, scientists are scientists, they don’t want to destroy all the bioweapons,” Mr. Carlson continued in his segment. “Instead, they’re using them to conduct new bioweapons research — that’s what he said.”

Mr. Carlson mischaracterized those remarks from Ms. Nuland and Mr. Pope.

In congressional testimony this week, Ms. Nuland, the under secretary of state for political affairs, was asked by Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, whether Ukraine has chemical or biological weapons.

“Ukraine has biological research facilities which, in fact, we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to gain control of,” she responded. “So we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach.”

If there were a biological or chemical weapon attack inside Ukraine, Mr. Rubio asked, would there be any doubt that Russia was behind it?

“There is no doubt in my mind, Senator, and it is classic Russian technique to blame the other guy what they’re planning to do themselves,” Ms. Nuland responded.

The State Department said Ms. Nuland was referring to Ukrainian diagnostic and biodefense laboratories during her testimony, which are different from biological weapons facilities. Rather, these biodefense laboratories counter biological threats throughout the country, the department said.

Mr. Rubio made the same clarification in another congressional hearing on Thursday, noting that “there’s a difference between a bioweapons facility and one that’s doing research.”

In referring to Mr. Pope on Thursday, Mr. Carlson was distorting a February interview Mr. Pope gave to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit organization and publication.

Mr. Pope had warned that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may damage laboratories in the country that conduct research and disease surveillance and are supported by the United States. He noted that some of the facilities may contain pathogens once used for Soviet-era bioweapons programs, but he emphasized that the Ukrainian labs currently did not have the ability to manufacture bioweapons.

“There is no place that still has any of the sort of infrastructure for researching or producing biological weapons,” Mr. Pope said.
“Scientists being scientists, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of these strain collections in some of these laboratories still have pathogen strains that go all the way back to the origins of that program.”

In a March interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Mr. Pope also echoed Ms. Nuland’s concerns about the laboratories falling into Russia’s hands. He spoke specifically about the Pentagon’s support of 14 veterinary laboratories that provide Ukraine with sampling and diagnostic abilities to detect infectious diseases.


“Should Russian forces occupy a city with one of these facilities, we are concerned that Russia will fabricate ‘evidence’ of nefarious activity in an attempt to lend credibility to their ongoing disinformation about these facilities,” he said.

The United Nations Security Council convened a meeting on Friday about Russia’s accusations concerning biological weapons in Ukraine. Izumi Nakamitsu, the U.N.’s high representative for disarmament affairs, said the United Nations was “not aware of any biological weapons programs.”

Both Ukraine and Russia have signed a treaty outlawing biological weapons. While there is no independent body that verifies countries are complying with the treaty, known as the Biological Weapons Convention, Ms. Nakamitsu noted that a concerned country could seek recourse or address suspicions about their peers in several ways, such as by reviewing annual reports and by lodging a complaint about possible breaches to the Security Council for investigation. That reporting mechanism, she pointed out, “has never been activated.”

For years, Russia has claimed that former Soviet countries were manufacturing biological weapons at laboratories funded by the United States. Experts and journalists have found no evidence for these claims.

Filippa Lentzos, an expert on biological threats at King’s College London, wrote in 2018 that she and other international experts had been given full access to the Lugar Center for Public Health Research, a laboratory in the nation of Georgia that receives funding from the United States.

“Our group observed nothing out of the ordinary, or that we wouldn’t expect to see in a legitimate facility of this sort,” Dr. Lentzos wrote.

Similarly, the crisis reporting outlet Coda Story was shown highly sensitive areas of the lab, including a “pathogen museum,” and reported that Russian journalists had also visited and Russian scientists had previously worked there.

“If this was a secret weapon facility, would we be so open to everyone?” the lab’s director told the publication.

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cannabineer said:

The biolabs lie is a setup for his use of bio or gas.

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hanimmal said:

It is pretty rambling and basically a troll greatest hits of whataboutism and then their bullshit list of demands. It is as stupid as Trump ever was. How can anyone let themselves get so blinded that they believe these political trolls?

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hanimmal said:

The bullshit lab is being amplified by Trump Jr and Kentucky Republican Massie based on a out of context soundbite from a Hearing where a official was talking about them being concerned about Russia taking over labs that they could manufacture false data to cover the tracks of a chemical attack that Putin orders in Ukraine.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/us/politics/us-bioweapons-ukraine-misinformation.htmlView attachment 5102416



If so it looks like the Russian trolls (foreign or domestic) have been setting it up since Feb 10th.

View attachment 5102414
View attachment 5102415

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BudmanTX said:

Where did that map come from.?

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BudmanTX said:

Where did that map come from.?

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cannabineer said:

A security firm called Pyrra. Image search pyrra biolab map.

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hanimmal said:

The below is the bit from the story about the propaganda. Pyrra is the one that was tracking the propaganda, the picture is from some troll on Gab that was posted on Feb 14th.

https://www.rollitup.org/t/russians-running-yearslong-trolling-operation-to-project-their-blame-onto-ukraine.1000483/post-16856230

They didn't make the graphic, they just were the ones digging up where this bullshit propaganda originated.

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hanimmal said:

The below is the bit from the story about the propaganda. Pyrra is the one that was tracking the propaganda, the picture is from some troll on Gab that was posted on Feb 14th.

https://www.rollitup.org/t/russians-running-yearslong-trolling-operation-to-project-their-blame-onto-ukraine.1000483/post-16856230

They didn't make the graphic, they just were the ones digging up where this bullshit propaganda originated.

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Ukraine, US Biolabs, and an Ongoing Russian Disinformation Campaign

In an attempt to justify Russia's invasion of Ukraine, propagandists claimed the attack was focused on secret U.S. biolabs there.

www.snopes.com