Russian Conspiracy Goobers: America Created Ukrainian Super-Soldiers in Secret Biolabs

Explaining away defeat with gibberish

A pair of Russian lawmakers leading the commission to “investigate” supposed American biolabs in Ukraine have made a new claim that sounds a lot like very bad science fiction.

According to Yahoo! News, “Konstantin Kosachev, the deputy speaker of Russia’s Federation Council, and Irina Yarovaya, deputy chair of the State Duma, touted what they described as bombshell findings” based on analysis of blood samples from Ukrainian prisoners of war.

The absurdity was first reported in the Russian business paper Kommersant. Founded in 1989, that publication was once considered among the most liberal and fact-based in Russia.

Adding an extra layer of stupid to an already-dumb narrative, Yarovaya claimed that blood antibodies prove the United States has committed “cruelty and barbarity” against the Ukrainian POWs.

Several of them have tested positive for Hepatitis A antibodies, which are common in areas with poor sanitary and hygiene conditions, such as battlefields, or a POW camp.

However, rationalism goes out the window whenever Russians explain to themselves just why their corruption-addled military cannot seem to defeat a much smaller, weaker neighbor.

According to Yarovaya, traces of this common infection somehow prove that American scientists have given Ukrainian soldiers stimulants “to completely neutralize the last traces of human consciousness and turn them into the most cruel and deadly monsters.”

She did not explain her scientific reasoning behind this assertion because there is none. However, it does sound a bit like Nazis using amphetamines to stay awake on the Eastern Front during World War II.

German author Norman Ohler published a controversial book in 2017, Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany, claiming that Hitler and the entire Third Reich were abusing methamphetamines as well as other psychiatric drugs throughout the conflict.

Controversial among historians, the reimagined hypothesis blends well with previous silly conspiracy theories about American Nazi biolabs in Ukraine that were supposedly preparing to attack Russia, and had to be stopped.

Other possible sources of inspiration include Universal Soldier, a cheesy 1992 Jean-Claude Van Damme film, as well as other examples of pop culture storytelling around the exploitation of soldiers through medical science.

A reactionary known for paranoid politics, Yarovaya recently accused the United States of “creating a massive network to control the number of people living in different countries,” which sounds suspiciously similar to the conspiracy rants of Alex Jones.

The fact that so many of the things Jones says are warmed-over, decades-old Kremlin agit-prop is probably not a coincidence. Conspiracy fantasists tend to reflect and amplify each other, and in the age of the internet, this process is global.

Kosachev, a pro-corruption activist, is currently sanctioned by the United States.