Inside Pentagon’s Shaky Efforts to Combat Russian Disinformation
Internal documents reveal how the US struggled to fend off ‘Russian lie’ about US support for Ukraine weapons labs
Russia Ambassador to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, shows documents during a March 2022 UN Security Council emergency meeting after the country accused the US of funding research into the development of biological weapons in Ukraine (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images)
I love document dumps. Recently, a Defense Department office dropped 2,500 pages in response to one of my FOIA requests. They provide a pretty revealing – and somewhat startling – look at how the Biden administration struggled to counter a Russian disinformation campaign after the Ukraine invasion. If you haven’t yet, sign up now to get FOIA Files delivered to your inbox every Friday.
Not long after Russia launched airstrikes in Ukraine in February 2022, siren-blaring-emoji tweets bombarded my Twitter feed. They all had a similar message: that some of Russia’s targets were laboratories where Ukraine had secretly been developing biological weapons with the help of the US government. The “bombshell” allegations seemed to be an obvious attempt to justify the invasion. They garnered thousands of retweets on right-wing media. Soon Fox News was amplifying the claims.