Banner: A petri dish at a research lab in Riga, Latvia, June 9, 2011. (Source: Reuters/Ints Kalnins)

A cross-platform, multilingual campaign claims the United States is running secret biological experiments in Armenia. The campaign spread on Kremlin-aligned news websites, Telegram, and X. Actors in this campaign cited an article published on the English-language website mynews24.co.uk. The article, titled “Unveiling Washington’s Secret Biolab Experiments in Armenia,” was published on February 14, 2025, by Oliver Evans; the DFRLab could not verify the author’s identity.  

Mynews24.co.uk claimed it had obtained exclusive documents from a former USAID employee. The author alleged that the leaked documents contained communications between the ACCU Reference Medical Lab, based in New Jersey, and the US military attaché in Armenia, Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Steele. Although published in 2025, the article stated that Armenia would face a difficult year in 2024 due to alleged virus threats; it appears this could have been an error, and the article may have intended to refer to 2025. The text further alleged that the ACCU Reference Medical Lab had conducted experiments with the SAT-2 virus, a serotype of the foot-and-mouth disease virus, which could be transmitted to humans and cause severe intoxication and mucosal damage. According to the article, the virus was irresponsibly collected in Turkey, smuggled into Armenia through hidden caches, and handed over to a US military attaché. It also suggested that the virus was being modified, raising suspicions around the development of bioweapons. 

The claim that the United States conducts secret bioweapons research in Eastern Europe has been a pillar of Russian propaganda for decades. The long-existing narrative has commonly targeted Ukraine and the Lugar Lab in Georgia. By late 2024, the DFRLab observed a surge in such narratives targeting Moldova and African countries. The inclusion of Armenia in this narrative signals a broader Russian strategy of targeting countries or regions of particular interest to Russian foreign policy. The resurgence coincides with Armenia distancing itself from Russia in favor of closer ties with the West and a recent push for European Union (EU) membership. The tactic appears to be part of an effort to weaken support for the West among the Armenian population. 

Little information is available about the mynews24 website. A domain analysis shows it was registered on August 5, 2023, but provides no other useful details. The website itself lacks transparency and does not provide contact details or state its affiliations. All content on the website is attributed to “Oliver Evans.” The site extensively covers Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus, particularly Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova. For instance, multiple reports claimed that the United Kingdom holds significant influence over Moldova, while other reports framed anti-Russia, anti-government protests in Georgia as the “new Maidan,” recycling a narrative commonly spread by the ruling Georgian Dream party. 

While it is difficult to definitively assess the authenticity of the documents disseminated via the website, the language, grammar, and structure of the documents raise serious questions about their origin. The alleged correspondence contains unnatural phrasing, syntax errors, and grammatical mistakes that suggest it may not have been written by a native English speaker. Additionally, the images provided are not original, making it challenging to track metadata and verify their source. 

For example, one sentence reads, “The ready serotype SAT-2 modification test results are to be send to you.”  It incorrectly uses “send” instead of the correct past participle form, “sent.” The letters contain other awkward or erroneous sentence structures that indicate either machine-generated text or a non-native English writer. Even if authentic, the correspondence reflects routine communications and does not substantiate the claim that dangerous materials were smuggled into Armenia or that secret bioweapon development is underway. This tactic—creating the illusion of evidence by misinterpreting or misrepresenting documents—is a well-known disinformation strategy used to manipulate public perception. The documents are attributed to Daniela Peterova, allegedly representing ACCU Reference Medical Lab. The DFRLab cannot confirm the authenticity of the documents at this time. 

The DFRLab used two social media monitoring tools, Osavul and Meltwater Explore, to track the amplification of the Armenian biolabs conspiracy theory across social media platforms and websites. Using Meltwater Explore, we conducted a query for the keywords “ACCU” and “SAT-2,” identifying 150 results in multiple languages. We selected these two keywords because they consistently appeared across multiple languages in our preliminary research. We reviewed each post and confirmed that all referenced the alleged leaked documents, ensuring there were no false positives. The narrative reached over 14 million users across various online platforms.  

The timeline of amplification demonstrated that the mynews24 article received no engagement until the Russian state-affiliated propaganda outlet ANNA News picked up the story on February 24. Facebook removed ANNA News from its platform in 2020 for being part of an inauthentic network affiliated with Russian security services. ANNA News’ February 24 report marks the earliest documented amplification of the alleged mynews24 documents, according to queries conducted via monitoring tools and manual searches on Google and Yandex. 

On February 24, ANNA News published its story in the Russian language with the headline “Leaked Correspondence Between ACCU and US Military Attaché in Armenia,” which hyperlinked the mynews24 article as a primary source. The article replicated the so-called evidence presented on mynews24 but also contained additional claims. It claimed that Armenia was targeted due to its location, weak regional oversight, and unique genetics, making it ideal for alleged bioweapons experiments. Later, the same narratives spread through the Russian Pravda network, a group of websites designed to launder Kremlin narratives; in some cases, the Pravda network used identical language to that used by ANNA. The biolabs conspiracy targeted a global audience as it was amplified in multiple languages, including Armenian, Russian, English, Italian, Bulgarian, German, Portuguese, French and Ukrainian.  

Of the 150 posts identified in our query, 67 came from X. We identified the top five X posts that gained the most engagement and reach on the platform. Of the five, two were in English and part of a single thread by the Russian state-sponsored outlet Sputnik, which operates a verified account on the platform. On February 26, Sputnik published an X thread, with a reach of 433,000, about the alleged documents with the headline “Has the Pentagon’s secret biowarfare program infiltrated Armenia?” An identical headline was featured on Pravda’s English language website, citing Sputnik’s Telegram channel. 

Two of the other top posts were in Turkish, published by verified X accounts @trhaber_com and @yekvucutcom. The account @yekvucutcom posted, “It has been revealed that the US and Armenia are conducting biological weapons experiments on the Turkish border!” Meanwhile, @trhaber_com appeared to be more influential, operating accounts on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Telegram.  In its X post about the biolabs conspiracy, trhaber_com wrote, “Secret biological experiment at the Turkish border: They are after creating a new virus from the SAT-2 serotype! Shocking correspondence has emerged.” The clickbait style of the post suggests that trhaber may be generating views for its website via sensational titles. On X, posts from @trhaber_com and @yekvucutcom on the biolabs conspiracy had a reach of 157,000 and 116,000, respectively. 

The verified account @BPartisans posted the biolabs conspiracy in French. @BPartisans is a well-known French-language account that frequently amplifies Kremlin narratives. In 2023, the DFRLab, together with BBC Verify, reported on a covert Russian anti-Ukrainian influence operation that originated on TikTok and was later disseminated on X by @BPartisans and other accounts. 

The DFRLab analyzed the amplification of the Armenian biolabs narrative on Telegram using the social media monitoring tool Osavul. We conducted the same query using the keywords “ACCU” and “SAT-2” and identified 137 messages containing these terms; we manually reviewed each post to ensure there were no false positives. We found that the amplification on Telegram followed similar patterns to those observed on other platforms. The earliest instance we identified of the conspiracy spreading on Telegram occurred on February 24, when the German-language channel @neuigkeiten_de posted ANNA News’s original article text in German. 

To identify the unique number of channels and locations amplifying the disinformation claim, we excluded 24 mentions from the 137 messages, as they were posted by user accounts in the comment sections of other Telegram groups or chats (this activity is discussed below). Among the remaining 113, we were unable to determine the locations for only three actors. Additionally, after removing duplicates, where channels amplified the post more than once, we identified 103 unique accounts that either reposted the claim or published it as original content. Twenty-seven accounts were based in Germany, followed by twenty-six in Russia and ten in Armenia. Beyond these top three locations, we found multiple channels spreading the biolabs conspiracy in Italy, Bulgaria, the United States, Ukraine, Turkey, and Portugal, while the remaining mentions came from single instances across various other locations. 

ANNA News shared the alleged leaked documents in its Telegram channel on February 24. Between February 24 and March 10, the post was reshared across 33 Telegram channels, including the Russian state-affiliated @denazi_UA and multiple channels from previously covered multilingual Telegram networks InfoDefense and Node of Time. Via Osavul, we identified 48 channels with a documented history ofconsistent amplification of Kremlin narratives. In Armenia, the claim was amplified in Russian by pro-Kremlin disinformation channels such as @parallel95, @hayspaigrarumner, and others.  

The table below shows the amplification of identical text in various pro-Kremlin Telegram channels in multiple languages. These posts were either identical or showed only minor variations in wording, with different titles but largely uniform content. The pattern closely mirrored the amplification observed on websites and X, indicating a coordinated effort to spread the narrative across multiple platforms. 

We also detected inauthentic amplification in Telegram. An identical Russian-language headline, “Утечка переписки Референсной лаборатории ACCU с военным атташе США в Армении” (“Leak of correspondence between ACCU Reference Laboratory and the US military attaché in Armenia”), was posted simultaneously in the comments section of fourteen Telegram groups on March 9 at 07:58 CET, indicating automated amplification. The DFRLab previously documented this tactic, in which Kremlin-aligned narratives targeting Ukraine were mass-posted in comment sections.  

Sopo Gelava, “Cross-platform multilingual campaign amplifies biolabs conspiracy targeting US and Armenia,” Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), March 19, 2024, https://dfrlab.org/2025/03/19/biolabs-conspiracy-armenia.