As the Russian military continues to sustain heavy losses in its war with Ukraine, the Kremlin has concocted a bizarre new conspiracy theory to justify its invasion of a peaceful democratic country. And wouldn’t you know, it has something to do with Hunter Biden.
On Thursday, Russia’s Defense Ministry released a color-blocked diagram that looked to be made by a high schooler attempting to use Adobe for the first time. Within the infographic, the Kremlin made some baseless claims for why it invaded Ukraine. Initially, President Putin said the war was done with the Ukrainian people’s best interest at heart as the country needed to be de-Nazified (whatever the hell that means). Of course, since Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is actually Jewish, that reasoning didn’t hold up for long to any person with a fully functioning brain. Now, Putin’s cronies are saying Russia attacked the country because it was working with the U.S. government to create bioweapons that specifically target Slavic people, which is also of course utter nonsense.
The official document released by the country’s defense ministry is titled “Coordination of Biological Laboratories and Scientific Research Centers of Ukraine and the U.S.,” and, besides some weird pictures of a smiling George Soros and a tab dedicated to implicating the entire Democratic party in this scheme, the main argument it makes is this: that a bunch of U.S. institutions have been funding Biolabs in Ukraine and secretly working on an “especially dangerous pathogen of anthrax.” The diagram accuses everyone from the Centers for Disease Control to the U.S. military to the George Soros Foundation to the Los Alamos National Laboratory of being involved in this secret plan to infect every Russian on the planet with anthrax.
But where does President Joe Biden’s son come in? Well, according to Russia, Hunter Biden’s investment firm, Rosemont Seneca, is responsible for financing the Pentagon-backed “military-biological program.”
Of course, there’s absolutely no evidence to back up these claims — and the idea that America is developing bioweapons to use against Russia isn’t even an original one. The Soviet Union made that same accusation decades ago, even accusing America of developing AIDS in a lab. And both Hunter Biden and George Soros are favorite targets of far right-wing conspiracy theorists, which is likely why Russia has started zeroing in on them both — it’s no secret the wild ramblings of these fringe groups have been the country’s preferred method when it comes to infiltrating American elections and destabilizing our democracy.
Still, we can’t help but think this new strategy of blaming President Biden’s son for the current war is going to make people like Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham especially happy. They’ve been giddily spreading disinformation about the war in Ukraine for weeks under the guise of “just asking questions” and concern trolling this latest conspiracy theory feels juicy enough to milk for at least a handful of on-air rants. Everyone else might be tired of this war but those two certainly aren’t.
Via The Daily Beast