Russia Is Now Claiming the US Trained Birds to Deliver Ukrainian Bioweapons
The Kremlin’s efforts to convince its citizens that Ukraine is the real aggressor are becoming increasingly desperate.
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For example, the Kremlin’s latest claim is that the U.S. has trained an army of migratory birds to carry bioweapons developed by the Ukrainian army, and that said birds are preparing to fly into Russia and deploy those bioweapons.
This message wasn’t seeded on some fringe message board by a conspiracy theory-addled extremist: It was boosted by Major General Igor Konashenkov, the chief spokesman for the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, who was speaking on camera Thursday about this outrageous (and entirely fictional) plot.
There’s no point really engaging in this delusion, but, for the record, birds cannot be trained to attack targets in Russia, or anywhere else, with bioweapons.
Pigeons were famously used in both World Wars for sending communications and there was also Project Pigeon, a U.S. Army experiment in which pigeons were trained to sit inside missiles in an attempt to guide the weapons to their targets. It never worked.
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He claimed that the U.S. was researching how to use birds, bats, and reptiles as vectors for spreading deadly diseases such as anthrax and African swine fever.
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The documents released Thursday contain nothing to back up the claims Konashenkov made, yet they’re already being shared widely on far-right and conspiracy channels on the encrypted messaging platform Telegram as further “proof” that Putin’s actions are justified. The documents have been posted in groups supporting the
trucker convoys as well as numerous QAnon-linked channels.
And this is exactly what the Kremlin wants.
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