Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to undermine public confidence in any coronavirus vaccines developed by the United States, according to Western officials and central European analysts.
“We have seen some of these narratives circulating already in our region,” disinformation expert Daniel Milo, an analyst at GLOBSEC Policy Institute in Bratislava, Slovakia, told the Washington Examiner. “If you would be able to convince at least a part of the population that the government is actually trying to control you by implanting a microchip, you would achieve quite an important strategic advantage, I believe, just by lowering the overall trust of the population towards official authorities.”
That observation builds on U.S. and European warnings that Russia’s vast “disinformation ecosystem will act to undermine faith in a COVID vaccine,” as President Trump’s top counterpropaganda official at the State Department, special envoy Lea Gabrielle, recently put it. The effort is part of a broader disinformation operation designed to fortify Putin’s image at home while diminishing U.S. global influence, analysts say.
“I think it’s still hard for us sometimes to anticipate the use of this tactic because it’s just so contrary to our own values,” Gabrielle, who helms the Global Engagement Center, told reporters last week. “We’ve seen this in the past, and they’ll likely do this by introducing false information of their own and by amplifying local voices that push conspiracy theories. We see this time and time again.”
European Union officials issued a similar warning in a recent report on the “misleading and deceptive health information” disseminated by Kremlin-backed outlets. “These often involve extreme conspiracy theories alleging that governments will impose forced mass vaccination and nanochip implantation to establish social control, or that vaccines are either ineffective or outright harmful,” the European bloc’s diplomatic corps warned. “Bill Gates is a common target in these narratives.”
The report dovetails with a parallel Russian effort to raise conspiracy theories that U.S. officials in Ukraine may have somehow developed the virus that has spread around the globe.
“It helps Russia’s strategic objective to try to gain influence over Ukraine’s decision-making and prevent integration with the West,” Nataliya Bugayova, a former Ukrainian economy ministry adviser at the Institute for the Study of War, told the Washington Examiner. “If they can create that campaign in Ukraine and really put U.S. on the defensive, they can then extrapolate it via a global media machine and amplify it to then spread this narrative globally and basically feed these conspiracy theories about the U.S. and other countries.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov gave a subtle boost to this disinformation operation effort this week. “Washington’s reluctance to ensure the transparency of its military biological activities in various regions of the world suggests many questions: What is taking place in reality there, and what goals are being pursued?” Lavrov said.
That comment, a reference to the Defense Department’s Biological Threat Reduction Program, which coordinates with Ukrainian agencies, evokes China’s high-profile claim that the U.S. Army brought the new virus to Wuhan.
The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv defended the program as an effort “to consolidate and secure pathogens and toxins of security concern in Ukrainian government facilities while allowing for peaceful research and vaccine development.”
The campaign might reflect Putin’s desire to discourage the Russian people from looking to the U.S. for deliverance from COVID-19. “It goes to Russian domestic politics,” Bugayova said. “It really matters for him, [to the] Great Russia narrative domestically, to downplay the U.S. role in the vaccine and somehow try to spin it.”
The darker explanation, Milo suggested, could be that “if you convince people not to get vaccinated, you increase the damage in case a second or a third wave of a virus hits a particular region.”
Such a preemptive strike on faith in an American-made vaccine puts Russia in the position of attacking a prospective cure that every country needs as quickly as possible. Yet Russia has a history of kicking Uncle Sam in the shins while U.S. officials hold some wolf by the ears. Lavrov accused the U.S. of supporting the Islamic State’s affiliate in Afghanistan, for instance, even though those terrorists likely would harm Russian interests in the absence of American troops.
“They very well might be interested — and I’m sure they actually are — in having the U.S. develop a vaccine and do it fast so that the rest of the world could benefit from it,” Bugayova said. “It doesn’t necessarily imply that they won’t try to take every possible information win out of it to support another set of goals — the longstanding goals of undermining trust in the U.S., domestically and globally.”
