Nuland answers Rubio on Ukraine biolabs in Senate subcommittee 8 March 2022

Credit Instagram's @malumababy20.0 with this three-part compilation, saved before the first part, Nuland's testimony, mysteriously disappeared from CSPAN.

On 8 March 2022 the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations heard from Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland. Senator Marco Rubio posed several questions, of which one forms the first part of this compilation. Nuland answers Rubio very carefully: "Ukraine has biological research facilities..."

The second part of this compilation is footage, ostensibly of Ukrainian government workers on 24 February 2022 filmed in the process of burning heaps of paper documents on an outdoor pyre. Yes, it is true that the pyre cannot be pinpointed to a particular biological research facility. And it might eventually be proven that the pyre footage was taken from another unrelated event. These are unserious objections to the two main points which bookend the clip: the Nuland testimony and the Psaki evasion, about which more follows.

The third part of this compilation is of a tweet from no less an authority than White House press secretary Jen Psaki. We remark here Psaki's circumlocution: "Russia's false claims about alleged US biological weapons labs and chemical weapons development in Ukraine".

This is a carefully worded statement. She claims that the Department of Defense (DoD) didn't fund "biological weapons" because the purpose was only Nuland's "biological research". The Russians likely made no claims over "chemical weapons development." This is known as a "red herring", see [0]. She then dismisses these claims as "conspiracy theories", in classic dog whistle [1] style. All we can say is Psaki is a very slippery and cunning operator.

The Psaki denial allowed the US to avoid the brunt of the Russian accusations at the 11 March 2022 UN Security Council debate, see [3-5], because the debate was allowed to focus on "biological weapons", a term carefully specified in the obsolete 1972 BTWC [6].

As the High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, Izumi Nakamitsu, said the “United Nations is not aware of any biological weapons programmes” [4] and thereupon the matter was put to bed, for now.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics)

[2] https://www.c-span.org/video/?518615-1/un-security-council-meets-russian-claim-biolabs-ukraine

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olHRu_Ou4WI

[4] https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/03/1113812

[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/11/un-council-ukraine-russia-chemical-weapons-zelensky/

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Convention