WASHINGTON. One of Russia’s most provocative disinformation campaigns unfolded a few days ago when its ministries of defense and foreign affairs spread statements falsely claiming that the Pentagon is funding biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine.
Chinese diplomats and state media then repeated the conspiracy theory in press conferences in Beijing, in articles and on official social media pages.
Now the Biden White House has taken the extraordinary step of asking both countries for a coordinated propaganda campaign and saying they can cover up a potential Russian military attack on Ukrainians with biological or chemical weapons.
“Now that Russia has made these false claims, and China has apparently supported this propaganda, we should all be on the lookout for Russia possibly using chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine or organizing a false flag operation using them,” Jen Psaki said. , the White House press secretary tweeted on Wednesday evening. “It’s a clear pattern.”
She called the accusations “ridiculous” and stated that the United States “does not develop or possess such weapons anywhere.” The State Department called these claims “complete nonsense” and said there were no bioweapons laboratories in Ukraine. Senior US intelligence officials confirmed these arguments at a Senate hearing on Thursday.
The Biden administration and its European and Asian allies are waging an information war against both Russia and China as Russian President Vladimir Putin continues his military offensive against Ukraine.
The spread of Russian disinformation by the Chinese government at the height of the war has raised concerns among Western officials due to China’s powerful diplomatic position and vast cyber capabilities. Analysts studying disinformation from the two countries say this is the first time they’ve seen such a scale of escalation between Beijing and Moscow around the conspiracy theory.
“I can’t think of another active propaganda campaign by Russia that received the same kind of support from China,” said Bret Schafer, who tracks disinformation from China, Russia and Iran as a senior fellow at the Alliance to Ensure Democracy in Washington. non-profit group. “I haven’t seen this volume around something like this.”
This is the latest manifestation of close cooperation between Beijing and Moscow, which the two countries said has no “limits” in a 5,000-word statement made during Mr. Putin’s February 4 meeting with Beijing President Xi Jinping. Around the same time, according to a Western intelligence report, senior Chinese officials asked senior Russian officials not to invade Ukraine until after the Winter Olympics in Beijing.
Beginning last November, U.S. officials have been secretly talking to Chinese officials, including the ambassador to Washington and the foreign minister, to discuss intelligence evidence of Mr. Putin’s troop buildup to persuade the Chinese to tell the Russians not to start war, but were refused. This was stated by US officials.
William J. Burns, director of the CIA, told a Senate hearing Thursday that he thought Mr. Xi was “alarmed” by the war in Ukraine and his own intelligence appeared to be unaware of what was going to happen.
Chinese officials publicly sided with Russia throughout the war, denouncing the United States as the cause of the conflict and emphasizing Mr. Putin’s displeasure with NATO expansion, as well as expressing concern about the humanitarian crisis. On Tuesday, Mr Xi repeated China’s standard war talking points in a video call with the leaders of France and Germany, although he added that China was “deeply saddened by the resumption of war on the European continent.” He did not say that Russia had begun hostilities.
Using press conferences, state media and diplomats around the world’s social media accounts, China is trying to escalate the situation with fiery rhetoric and conspiracy theories based on Russian disinformation, current and former US officials and independent researchers say. When Mr Xi spoke to European leaders on Tuesday, Zhao Lijian, a foreign ministry spokesman hailed by many Chinese citizens as a fiercely patriotic “wolf warrior” diplomat, raised the issue of biochemical weapons in Ukraine at a press conference in Beijing. claiming that “Russia, in the course of its military operations, has discovered that the US is using these facilities to carry out biowarfare plans.”
“He has 26 biolabs and other related facilities in Ukraine over which the US Department of Defense has absolute control,” he said. “All dangerous pathogens in Ukraine should be stored in these laboratories, and all research activities are carried out by the American side.”
Mr. Zhao spread anti-American conspiracy theories to try to deflect criticism of China’s poor response to the initial Wuhan coronavirus outbreak and questions about Wuhan Institute of Virology research. In March 2020, he said that the US military may have brought the virus to Wuhan and argued that research at Fort Detrick, Maryland may have been the cause of the pandemic. On Thursday, he mentioned Fort Detrick again.
Chinese diplomats, government agencies and state-run media have used official Twitter and other social media accounts to spread the Ukrainian lab conspiracy theory. Cao Yi, a Chinese embassy diplomat in Beirut, even tweeted the theory in both languages. Arab as well as English.
More than 235 tweets were roughly evenly split between Chinese state media accounts and non-media diplomatic or government accounts, according to Mr Schafer. There are many more posts about laboratory theory on Chinese social media.
Telesur, the Venezuelan state broadcaster, has also spread the lab theory from Russia, but the activity is minor compared to what China is doing, Mr Shafer said.
“Now that American tech platforms have taken action against Russian state media, Chinese state media is filling that gap,” he said. “They reflect the theses of the Kremlin.”
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank that monitors the Ukraine conflict, also issued a warning Wednesday that the Russian statements could be part of an effort to lay the groundwork for Moscow’s own chemical or biological attack. “Russia could stage or fabricate such an attack and blame Ukraine and NATO to justify additional aggression against Ukraine,” the statement said.
Russian-Ukrainian war: what you need to know
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There is no agreement. The foreign ministers of Ukraine and Russia met in Turkey for the first time since the beginning of the war and failed to stop the fighting. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said a ceasefire was never discussed.
Chinese state media repeats the full gamut of official Russian claims about the war in Ukraine, from the false claim that Ukraine is full of neo-Nazis to arguments that the US is an “empire of lies” pulling the strings of Kyiv’s puppet.
The Global Times, a nationalist newspaper published by the Communist Party, published an article on Tuesday saying the US government is trying to stir up anger against China over the war in Ukraine by planting articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Voice of China . America. Other articles in Chinese state media have accused Ukraine of using civilians as human shields, which is the Kremlin’s view, while avoiding any mention of civilian deaths at the hands of the Russian military.
Weibo and other Chinese social media censors have removed pro-Ukrainian posts from their platforms.
Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin began promoting closer cooperation between the two countries’ media organizations in 2015, and since then, the two governments have held an annual media conference to try to “redefine the map of international discourse.” Chinese media executives express admiration for Russian state media RT and Sputnik for their ability to spread the message on a global scale.
The two countries were linked by communist ideology in the 1950s but then split over politics and foreign policy. President Richard M. Nixon took advantage of this by making a historic visit to Beijing in 1972 to normalize diplomatic relations with China. But in recent years, Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin have strengthened their countries’ ties, thanks in large part to a shared perception of the United States as a threat and a desire to undermine American global dominance.
The February 4 joint statement included a lengthy section in which the two countries said they would lead the world in establishing true “democracy”.
This desire to firmly oppose the United States and Western Europe is evident both in the propaganda of both countries and in state media coverage, says Maria Repnikova, a professor of global communications at Georgia State University who studies China and Russia.
“There are strong overtones of anti-Western sentiment and sentiment in many of these narratives,” she said. “They are questioning the legitimacy of the US, including using these conspiracy theories.”
On the Ukrainian war, she added, “there is a convergence of Russian and Chinese propaganda about who is to blame, about the roots of the conflict.”
But some Russian news and comments on Thursday cast doubt on China’s commitment to Russia after news outlets reported that China was refusing to send plane parts to the country, Ms Repnikova said. Boeing and Airbus severed ties with Russian airlines after the Biden administration and the European Union imposed sanctions.
Large Chinese companies are likely to comply with the sanctions so as not to jeopardize their global trade. For China, Europe and the US are much larger trading partners than Russia.
Stephen Lee Myers provided reporting from Beijing.