Putin shot himself in the foot by annexing Cremea, the voter base for creating a pro Russian election result had been cut off. Ukraine could only move to the west, afterwards.

His margin of victory was greater than the population of the Russian occupied regions.

A margin of victory against who? The Party of Regions was not even in that election. I'm not sure you grasp this pretty simple concept. If Donald Trump was entombed in a giant golden throne to shepherd humanity through the cosmos for all eternity and won the 2096 presidential election with a +99.6% margin of victory after sending MAGA inquisitors to purge all his opposition, you couldn't really compare his vote total to that of a free and democratic election in a unified republic. Again, the democratically elected government was overthrown in 2014. The country was fractured and could no longer hold legitimate elections. The regime in power was put there by a coup d'etat. They could have declared themselves a monarchy at that point for all it mattered, what they have today is only a facade.

...and the government that was ushered in in 2014 was ushered out by a democratic election. Voter turnout in Ukraine barely fell in the 2019 election (50%) from the 2014 election (52%). The Party of Regions' successor has failed to top 40% of the vote in any oblast nationwide.

So this story is continuing to bounce around in headlines because Tulsi took it up. And once again and again, its about this meaningless distinction between "biolabs researching weaponizable pathogens" and "bioweapons research labs". And again I feel the need to point out, there's no such thing as a bioweapons research lab. Nobody has them. Every country's bioweapons programs are conducted at biolabs researching dangerous pathogens. As long as you have access to pathogen samples, you can weaponize them. Pentagon sources even confirmed that these biolabs in Ukraine have samples of Anthrax and Plague. In the middle of a war zone, in the poorest country in Europe, torn by civil war and threat of foreign invasion, the US was funding security and research on the most dangerous pathogens in the world. And the WHO was telling Ukraine to destroy these pathogens so they couldn't leak or be weaponized. Russia itself has used bioweapons a few times now, used in an assassination and used to storm a terrorist hostage siege. Those bioweapons didn't come from some overt bioweapons facility, they came from research biolabs that just happen to have heavy military security protection and BSL-4 containment and serve the stated purpose of "researching biotechnology and virology". Like in Koltsovo. There's no way to distinguish between a lab like those in Ukraine and those used for bioweapons in the best of times, and the fact its literally a facility built out of the old soviet bioweapons program using their old bioweapon samples, under that same pretense of research, gives every reason to treat it as bioweapons. Honestly, what's supposed to be the difference here? Intent? We can claim our intentions for studying dangerous pathogens are purely peaceful and preventative medicine. But Russians at their not-bioweapons facilities would say the exact same thing.

So if you are in a military conflict you automatically have a right to bomb any research institution that does biology research because it *might* also need doing bio weapons research.

Got it.

Thought the US-funded part was debunked not the labs existing part

The argument fundamentally boils down to

They might have been doing weapons research, therefore they probably were and Russia was justified in attacking it.

Basically justifies hitting every hospital and research institution in a war and its a pretty flimsy justification, but the right wing is desperate to suck off putin right now to own the libs.

im playing a phone idle game thats kinda like shim megami tensei only if every demon was made into a big tittied anime girl. pretty fun

They confirmed the funding part too.



The vast majority of research institutions that do "biology research" do not do research on bioweapons like anthrax, plague, etc. These Ukrainian facilities held those same leftover agents from USSR bioweapons programs. As I said before, nobody can conflate genetically engineered apple tree cultivars with bioweapons. Someone chopping up mice embryos to study cancer diagnostics isn't going to have weapons material. There is no distinction between research on and maintenance of weaponizable pathogens, and being a bioweapons facility. Otherwise we'd be able to say there's no such thing as a bioweapons facility anywhere in the world, even though the US, China and Russia obviously all have them. And any civilian peacetime research institution that intended to conduct its research entirely above the board, would instantly destroy its dangerous pathogens when located in a war zone. And wouldn't be located in the poorest country in Europe, in the middle of a war zone, to begin with.

This post was edited by Goomshill on Mar 15 2022 08:11am