Two Russian lawmakers told reporters this week that the Kremlin is investigating the blood of Ukrainian prisoners of war and has found “evidence” of experimentation, Russia’s Kommersant news agency reported. Russian senator Konstantin Kosachev told the newspaper that the blood of the Ukrainian prisoners contained traces of pathogens that he claimed were “atypical” for Ukraine. Russian officials have claimed that Ukraine created experimental supersoldiers to fight in the war. Photo by MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP via Getty Images Russian Senator Konstantin Kosachev said the blood of Ukrainian prisoners contained “atypical” pathogens. Photo by Tobias Hase/image alliance via Getty Images Images Kosachev claimed this was evidence of “experiments” being conducted on Ukrainian soldiers. IrIrina Yarovaya, deputy speaker of the State Duma, took the allegations further and said the alleged experiments were focused on creating more vicious soldiers. “We see that the cruelty and atrocities with which the military personnel of Ukraine behave, the crimes they commit against the civilian population, these monstrous crimes they commit against prisoners of war, confirm that all this is a single system of control and creation by the tougher killing machines,” he said. The lawmakers’ claims are related to a debunked Russian conspiracy theory about the development of bioweapons by the United States and Ukraine.REUTERS/Dmytro SmolienkoIrina Yarovaya, deputy speaker of the State Duma, said the alleged experimentation was creating “brutal killing machines.” Anton Vaganov The claims are a strange offshoot of the widely dismissed Kremlin-backed conspiracy theory that the US and Ukraine are secretly developing bio-weapons together. Both Yarovaya and Kosachev serve on the Kremlin’s Parliamentary Committee on Biolabs in Ukraine, which promotes the theory.
