There’s a lot we don’t know about how monkeypox, which had been prevalent in parts of Africa but only started infecting people in the United States and Europe this spring, is spreading. Yet the Russian defense ministry and Kremlin-controlled media outlets have been busy suggesting to audiences around the globe that the outbreak was engineered by U.S. military biological laboratories. Russian Duma Deputy Chair Irina Yarovaya echoed the Kremlin’s latest conspiracy theory earlier this month when she called on the World Health Organization (WHO) to lead an investigation into “the secrets of the U.S. military biolaboratories.”
Russia’s monkeypox narrative is a textbook Kremlin information operation, a reprise of the Russian campaign to link COVID-19 to U.S. biolab activities. It’s long past time for the United States to respond to the Kremlin’s information warfare and debunk these theories. Washington should apply the lessons it learned in the lead-up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when the Biden administration successfully leveraged its intelligence advantage to neutralize Russian disinformation and expose the Kremlin’s war plans for all the world to see.
