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Global Engagement Center

GEC Counter-Disinformation Dispatches #5

May 27, 2020

The Coronavirus and Disinformation: Russia Remains True to Form

Image of Igor Nikulin on television

Russian disinformation about the coronavirus started on January 20, when Igor Nikulin falsely claimed it could be an American bioweapon aimed at pressuring China in an interview with Zvezda TV, a media outlet run by the Russian Ministry of Defense. Nikulin also falsely suggested that American corporations could have created the virus to make profits from selling drugs. Nikulin had previously served as a Russian observer on the U.N. Commission on Biological and Chemical Weapons.  (Image of Nikulin; credit: beeld nd)

Nikulin later made even wilder conspiracy claims on the Russian state-funded RT Arabic on February 27, falsely claiming the coronavirus:

was selected very carefully, in order to reach countries that are considered to be America's rivals, such as China, Iran, and some EU countries including Italy. ... This is a scheme by the world's elites … the global government … 200 families [who] have $40 trillion, and … consider themselves to be the most important people on Earth. They own most of the media outlets. They are the ones making the Hollywood movies …, and [they] claim that humanity must be reduced to one-tenth of the current population."

Within weeks, the United States would become the epicenter of the disease outbreak, with the most recorded cases and deaths in the world, so Nikulin’s claims were made for their shock value, not from scientific knowledge. 

Nikulin’s initial statement marked the start of a Russian disinformation campaign on the coronavirus that has spread far and wide. Its main aim is to falsely blame the United States for creating the virus as a bioweapon, just like the Russians and Soviets have done for the past 70 years when other diseases unexpectedly appeared.

 

Past False Russian/Soviet Claims of U.S. Biological Warfare

Newspaper headline accusing US of "germ warfare"

In 1951 and 1952, North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union falsely claimed that the United States had used biological warfare (BW) during the Korean War.  (Image: British-China Friendship 1950s photo by Andrew Burgin; ©2006 Robert Neff Collection)

Biological warfare expert Milton Leitenberg says:

these biological warfare allegations were contrived and fraudulent, as documents obtained from former Soviet archives in January 1998 show, explicitly and in detail. Nevertheless, the propaganda campaign had wide international resonance at the time.

A 1953 document from the Presidium of the USSR Council of Ministers to Chinese leader Mao Zedong stated unequivocally:

The Soviet Government and the Central Committee of the CPSU were misled. The spread in the press of information about the use by the Americans of bacteriological weapons in Korea was based on false information. The accusations against the Americans were fictitious.

As Leitenberg and others point out, the Soviets and Russians have made many other false claims of U.S. biological warfare:

  • From 1950 to 1952, Soviet and East Bloc countries falsely claimed the United States was “dropping Colorado beetles in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Poland, and Czechoslovakia in order to destroy their potato crops, ‘starve’ their people, and induce the ‘economic collapse’ of the countries.”  See “American Bug,” a Cold War Czechoslovak disinformation video.
  • The KGB made false claims in the 1970s and 1980s that a Malaria Control Research Unit in India and a Medical Studies Centre in Pakistan were engaged in biological warfare.  KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov awarded the head of the KGB residency in Pakistan a special “testimonial” for their disinformation campaign.  Both countries closed the research facilities.
  • The KGB mounted a false AIDS disinformation campaign starting in 1985.
  • In 2006, Russian Communist party leader Gennady Zyuganov falsely blamed the United States for the spread of avian influenza, or bird flu, in Russia and Europe.
  • In 2016, Gennady Onishchenko, an aide to Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev at the time, falsely suggested “the United States could be infecting mosquitos with the Zika virus in the Black Sea area as a form of biological warfare against Russia.”
  • In 2019, Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov falsely suggested that the United States may have played a role in the spread of Zika and Ebola. Meanwhile, during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, “Russian internet trolls disseminated information that accused the United States of bringing Ebola to that region.”
  • Russia has made numerous false allegations of biological warfare by the U.S.-funded Cooperative Biological Engagement Program/Biological Threat Reduction Program, which works with more than two dozen countries worldwide to “improve biosafety, biosecurity, and disease surveillance for traditional select agents (weapons-usable biological material) and emerging pathogens that may cause public health emergencies of international concern.”

Leitenberg summed up the relentless Russian/Soviet disinformation effort:

Starting only a few years after the end of World War II, in 1949, and lasting until 1988 under General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, the USSR maintained a near continuous campaign of false allegations of biological weapon use by the United States. Never in history had any other country carried on such a campaign of false BW (biological warfare) allegations. … After a pause of a few years between 1988 and 1995, senior Russian military officials began repeating the old false allegations.

 

U.S. Policy on Biological Weapons

Entrance to Fort Detrick

In 1969, the U.S. government “renounced all development, production, and stockpiling of biological weapons and declared its intent to maintain only small research quantities of biological agents, such as are necessary for the development of vaccines, drugs, and diagnostics.” (Image: Entrance to Fort Detrick, home of U.S. Army research on defensive countermeasures against biological warfare.)

In 1972, the United States was one of the first signatories of the Biological Weapons Convention, which entered into force in 1975 and obligated parties:

Never to develop, produce, stockpile, or otherwise acquire or retain: 1) biological agents or toxins of types and in quantities that have no justification for peaceful uses; and 2) weapons, equipment, or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes.

 

Russian Disinformation about COVID-19 in Specific Countries

Russian disinformation seeks to advance general themes in various countries by:

  • emphasizing the negative (almost every state except Russia and its allies is supposedly a “failed” state)
  • striving to exacerbate existing divisions in order to weaken targeted societies.

For example, key COVID-related themes in Russian media regarding Lithuania in late March were, as noted by Debunk EU:

  • Lithuania and other Baltics states are failing to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic
  • NATO does not care about Lithuania
  • COVID-19 is destroying the EU and NATO
  • Lithuania is causing COVID-19 to spread to Crimea
  • Lithuanian nationalists fear Chinese help on COVID-19
  • While EU bureaucrats fight, Russia and China help people
  • Russia could have saved the Baltic states from COVID-19.

For other countries, these same types of themes and objectives are adapted to local circumstances.

 

Countering Russian Disinformation

European Union special report on COVID-19 Disinformation

Perhaps the most effective effort to counter Russian disinformation on coronavirus was the EU statement that Russia aims to “aggravate the public health crisis in Western countries, specifically by undermining public trust in national healthcare systems, — thus preventing an effective response to the outbreak.” (Image credit: EU)

This analysis came in an internal document by the European Union’s counter-disinformation team, as reported by the Financial Times and Reuters.  The Financial Times added:

“The campaign is designed to exacerbate confusion, panic and fear, and to prevent people from accessing reliable information about the virus and public safety provisions,” the EU document says.

The EU statement drew widespread media attention because it showed how disinformation causes harm, which generates moral outrage, identified in GEC Counter-Disinformation Dispatches #2 as the most effective way to counter disinformation.  Creating a fact-based narrative of harm that competes with and may replace a false narrative of harm is one of the best ways to counter disinformation.  As Nassim Nicholas Taleb said, “You need a story to displace a story.”

 

For more, see:

Next issue: “Amplifying Extreme Voices"

Past issues:

To contact us, email: GECDisinfoDispatches@state.gov