If Russia is to be believed, Hunter Biden, the son of US president Joe Biden, has been funding ‘bio-labs’ in Ukraine. While Hunter Biden has had business deals with the war-torn country in the past, the story about bio-weapons seems like nothing more than a conspiracy theory
United States president Joe Biden put the world on edge after his unscripted remark, saying his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin cannot remain in power. The White House was quick to backpedal after the global reverberations from the comment, but it was not enough to placate the Kremlin. Now five days on, the focus has shifted to Hunter Biden, the American president’s son, and his connections to war-torn Ukraine.
The allegations are rather explosive, involving bio-labs and whatnot. Russia claims to have evidence and American far-right has bought into the narrative. We get behind the truth.
The Russian story
On 24 March, RIA Novosti, a Russian state-owned news agency, published a story headlined “Biden’s son funded American bio-labs in Ukraine”.
“Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca investment fund financed the Pentagon’s military biological programme in Ukraine, said Igor Kirillov, head of the radiation, chemical and biological defence forces of the Russian Armed Forces,” according to the RIA Novosti report.
Kirillov also alleged that the labs were part of the American plot to study the natural immunity of the population to identify the most dangerous pathogen for people in the region.
RIA Novosti carried a flow chart released by the Russian defence ministry that shows not only Hunter Biden’s involvement but also the role of financier George Soros in the alleged “bioweapons labs”.
The story was called picked up by RT, a state-controlled television network. “The incoming materials allow us to trace the scheme of interaction between US government agencies and Ukrainian biological objects. Attention is drawn to the involvement in the financing of these activities of structures close to the current US leadership, in particular the Rosemont Seneca investment fund, which is headed by Hunter Biden,” said Kirillov, according to RT.
According to him, the fund has resources in the amount of at least $2.4 billion. “At the same time, the fund has a close relationship with the main contractors of the US military department, including Metabiota, which, along with Black and Veach, is the main supplier of equipment for Pentagon bio-labs around the world,” he added.
Kirillov said that the Los Alamos nuclear centre, where the first American atomic bomb was developed, was one of the scientific curators of the Pentagon’s military biological programme in Ukraine.
The reports are alarming but one does not need a reminder that the Russian state media toes the Kremlin line.
Is there any truth to these allegations?
Russia’s charges are difficult to believe. For starters, the US and Ukraine have signed a treaty never to produce biological weapons.
“The Kremlin is intentionally spreading outright lies that the United States and Ukraine are conducting chemical and biological weapons activities,” US State Department spokesperson Ned Price had said earlier this month.
There are no bioweapon labs in Ukraine, but bioresearch facilities which work toward strengthening public health measures in the country with the assistance of the US, says mainstream American media.
According to a report in The Washington Post, Hunter Biden was not financing the labs. In fact, he was not part of a decision to invest in a company at the centre of the Russian allegations; he did not profit from it as he was kicked out of the investment firm over cocaine allegations, and the company made little money from its tiny bit of business in Ukraine.
What about the firm Metabiota and Hunter Biden’s connection to it?
A US-led project the Cooperative Threat Reduction programme helps former Soviet states like Ukraine to transform old Soviet labs into state-of-the-art biological facilities. The work is undertaken by various American firms, which received a contract from the Pentagon. Metabiota is among one of the subcontractors that did the work in Ukraine. It received an investment from a private equity firm with connections to Hunter Biden, The Washington Post report says.
The other US firm Black & Veatch, which finds a mention in the RT story, were hired by the US defence department to enhance disease diagnosis. Both Metabiota and Black & Veatch have “performed a variety of training, renovation, and equipping projects competitively awarded by the Cooperative Threat Reduction programme to support Ukrainian critical human and veterinarian public health infrastructure needs. The work has always centred on improving the health, safety and well-being of the Ukrainian people”, Andrea Chaney, a Defense Threat Reduction Agency spokesperson told the newspaper.
However, The New York Post published a story that said that Russia’s assertion was based on truth, according to the emails they reviewed, which were allegedly recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop.
So does Hunter Biden have no connection to Ukraine?
Hunter Biden was a director on the board of Ukraine energy firm Burisma while his father was the Obama administration’s point man on US-Ukrainian relations. AFP
Hunter Biden did work in foreign countries including Ukraine and China for which he was paid large sums of money. This was at a time when his father Joe Biden served as the US vice president. The US justice department has an ongoing criminal investigation into these dealings and potential financial crimes. The probe into Hunter Biden’s finances was launched in 2018, but he claims that he learnt about it only in 2020.
During the 2020 election campaign, the father-son duo was frequently accused by Trump about wrongdoings in China and Ukraine.
The New York Post had published a report in October 2020 about an alleged email in which an adviser from Burisma, a private energy company in Ukraine, thanked Hunter Biden for inviting him to meet his father Joe Biden. The correspondence was part of a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop, which reportedly belonged to Hunter Biden. The computer was dropped off at a repair shop in Biden’s home state of Delaware in April 2019, the store’s owner had told the Post.
Hunter Biden was a director on the board of Burisma while his father was the Obama administration’s point man on US-Ukrainian relations. He was one of several foreigners involved with the company, according to a BBC report.
Hunter Biden joined Burisma in 2014, and remained on the board until April 2019.
When asked about the investigation against him in April 2021, the US president’s son told the broadcaster CBS, “I’m co-operating, completely. And I’m absolutely certain, 100% certain, that at the end of the investigation, that I will be cleared of any wrongdoing.”
What the US far-right has to say
Now, a year on, as US slams Russia over the Ukraine war, the spotlight is back on Hunter Biden. The Russian media “bio-labs claim” found a willing audience in the US far-right. “It’s clearly a case where the US government has been lying; it has mounted a disinformation campaign, if you will, designed to cover up what it is doing,” said Fox News host Tucker Carlson during his show on 24 March.
A QAnon follower on Twitter gained thousands of retweets with a thread posted on 24 February, the day of the invasion, claiming that Russian airstrike targets included “US installed bio-labs”.
Old Russian tactics
However, there’s nothing new about Russia’s claims to US-funded bio-labs. It something the Kremlin has been accusing America of since 2011. “When it comes to the bio-labs, this is an old canard,” Scott Radnitz, an expert on post-Soviet Russia and an associate professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, told NPR.
He said that the narrative only exploded after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“There’s this narrative that’s been pushed by Russia at least since 2011, about US-funded laboratories that in fact do research on diseases. They’re part of a defense department programme to support public health research in post-Soviet countries. And Russia has always been suspicious of these labs — putting out misinformation, asking insinuating questions through official channels,” Radnitz said.
With inputs from agencies
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