Militær biolab skal etableres på Bjørnøya - The Barents Observer

 

Putin gjør hva han kan for å skape falske fiendebilder. Legges det opp til militær "intervensjon" på Bjørnøya som egentlig er russisk? (Red.)

Bio-weapon claims 

The Russian Geographical Society’s Murmansk conference included a speech by Natalia Belisheva, Head of Department of Medicine and Biological Problem of Human Adaptation in the Arctic. Her department is part of Kola Science Centre, a northern branch of the Russian Academy of Science.

Talking about biomedical research at Svalbard and how humans adapt to life in the high Arctic, Belisheva suddenly changed topic and accused Norway of entering a secret agreement allowing the United States to build a military facility with a biological laboratory at Bear Island. 

“It will be a virus-biological laboratory by the Pentagon,” Natalia Belisheva stated.

She added:

“It’s a completely unknown laboratory but it is known that funding will come from the state budget of the country and the entire equipment will be supplied by General Electric and Johnson & Johnson.”

The cost, according to Belisheva, is $100 million and the funding period is from July 2023 to February 2025.

Belisheva is a highly decorated researcher with multiple internationally published science articles. 

 

Bjørnøya (Bear Island) is the southernmost island of the Svalbard archipelago, located halfway between mainland Norway and Spitsbergen. The Norwegian weather station ‘Bjørnøya Meteo’ is situated at Herwighamna on the north coast of the island. Photo: Thomas Nilsen

 

Where does the Arctic military bio-lab story come from?

Natalia Belisheva is not the first to talk about a secret US military-biological Arctic laboratory at Bear Island, the southernmost island of the Svalbard archipelago. 

The story was first planted by Mash, a pro-Kremlin Telegram channel with alleged links to Russia’s security services. 

“… the construction of a virology laboratory in the Arctic waters is one of the most important areas of the Pentagon’s specialized units,” Mash claimed with reference to unnamed sources. The story was published on June 16 this year, one day before the Norwegian Parliament’s Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defense visited Bear Island.

Like most Russian false propaganda accusations, the story soon spread from smaller regional media, like Nord-News, to larger widespread national media like the Komsomolskaya Pravda and news agency Rambler. 

According to the Svalbard Treaty, Norway cannot use the archipelago for warlike purposes.

Russia’s info-war 

Bio-labs accusations became a hot topic soon after Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine in February 2022. 

The Foreign Ministry in Moscow posted a tweet (now X) accusing the USA of running a secret military biological program. Russian soldiers invading Ukraine had allegedly discovered “the evidence of an emergency clean-up performed by the Kyiv regime…,” Sergey Lavrov’s diplomats wrote.

Russia soon brought up the issue in the UN’s Security Council and was supported by China.

Ukraine and the United States denied the accusations. US Ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, told the council:

“I will say this once; Ukraine does not have a biological weapons program.” 

Interesting with the Mash story on Bear Island is the last sentence, which states: 

“For reference: Bear Island was recognized as part of the Russian Empire in the 19th century, but after the 1917 revolution it came under the control of Norway.”