Fake of the Director of the FSB Bortnikov: NATO is working on biological weapons of electoral action

FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov at a meeting of the Council of Heads of Security Agencies and Special Services of the CIS states told how the insidious West threatens the stability of Russia and its allies using the latest technologies. According to him, Ukraine has been turned into a testing ground for new weapons and new forms of warfare, and in the CIS space, the West creates a network of digital laboratories, whatever it means, in order to manipulate the population with the help of artificial intelligence. To top it down to this frightening picture, Bortnikov said:

“NATO continues its long-term electoral support programme in the Asia-Pacific region, Africa, and Latin America. Biolaboratorys also work in the CIS countries. At the same time, field tests and incidents associated with leakage of pathogens from these institutions are legendary for natural causes.

The danger of a secretive, selective and programmed impact of biological weapons is obvious. I am sure that those present here understand that the sources, scales and vector of its possible application will be determined far beyond the Commonwealth. Especially given the fact that the development of artificial intelligence technologies increases the risks of acts of bioterrorism.

Biological weapons of selective action seem to mean so-called genetic or ethnic weapons, that is, one that is designed to defeat the population on any genetically determined basis. Russian leaders have been talking about this threat for years; for example, Vladimir Putin said at a meeting of the Valdai Club in заявил2018:

“These developments are very dangerous and related to the latest advances in genetics. From the fact that I saw, what it is talking about, some drugs that can affect a person selectively in accordance with his belonging to the ethnic group. In the second and third generation, there are such changes that radically change the appearance.

In March 2022, the Russian Defense Ministry spoke about the “UP-4 project”, which was worked on in Kiev and Odessa “under the direct guidance of specialists from the United States”: its goal was to create a special biological weapon directed exclusively against the Russians.

In September 2024, Channel One in the Great Game program поведалtold Mariupol that it turns out that in Mariupol, it turns out, worked on bioweapons, which was supposed to kill a third of the population of Russia in 10 days, for which the genotypes of the Slavic population were studied. That the Ukrainians are the same Eastern Slavs as the Russians, the expert of the “Big Game” for some reason did not come to mind. And now the FSB director has joined the topic.

The fact that some ethnic groups are less sensitive to certain pathogens than other groups have long been known. Thus, the populations of West and Central Africa have greater resistance to malaria; the mutation common in these populations has altered the structure of hemoglobin, which made the red blood cells less suitable for the Plasmodium falciparum, a parasite that causes malaria. However, the part of the population that has two copies of the mutated gene is more susceptible to sickle cell anemia.

But the use of this mechanism to create a biological weapon that selectively threatens the Russians is pure fiction. Back in 2017, the “Position of specialists of the Russian Academy of Sciences on the collection, storage, use and transmission of human biomaterials” was published, which says:

“Following the announcement of Russian President Vladimir Putin that Russian biological material is being collected nationwide by foreign professionals, the media expressed versions about the possibility of collecting biomaterials and transfer them abroad in order to develop biological weapons directed against certain ethnic groups. In this regard, the Russian Academy of Sciences considers it necessary to submit an expert opinion on this issue.

The real threat to humanity is biological weapons based on the causative agents of particularly dangerous infections of a viral, bacterial and toxin nature, including strains with increased pathogenicity and resistance to drugs. The problem of preventing the development and use of biological weapons is extremely complex and ambiguous.

As for “ethnic weapons”, this term refers to a system of genetic approaches that could lead to the death of some peoples without affecting others. First of all, public fears are associated with weapons that targeted the Russian population.

It is impossible to create such “ethnic weapons” that follows at least three scientifically based biological patterns. First, there are no variants of genetic texts (the sequence of nucleotides in the DNA molecule) present in all residents of the same country, but absent from residents of other countries. The genome diversity of humanity is very small compared to other species. Different variants of genes are found in representatives of different peoples, differing only in frequency of occurrence. Options specific to the population of an individual country cover only a percent of the population. Despite the fact that historical examples of epidemics among certain groups of the population (for example, smallpox among American Indians), they are caused not by the specificity of an infectious agent for American Indians, but only by its “novelty” for the populations of the Indians and, accordingly, by the lack of immunity.

Secondly, even the small differences found by population genetics between groups of people historically inhabiting a certain territory (populations) have rapidly decreased and decrease when changing places of traditional residence to cities, including the change of country country: genetic markers common among the indigenous population of one country are found in other countries. For example, Russians, who make up the majority of the population of our country, in the vast majority of genes differ little from the inhabitants of Europe. And those few DNA markers, which are characteristic of any one Russian area, are found in a very small proportion of the population.

Thirdly, it has long been established that two people from the same population differ from each other in genomic features several times greater than the average characteristics of this population differ from any other population on the planet.

Any of these three reasons are enough to exclude from a scientific point of view even the theoretical possibility of the existence of a genetic target characteristic of the majority of Russians, but absent from the population, say, of Europe and the United States.

Moreover, biological groups of the population do not correspond to either states or peoples. The boundaries between populations have been formed for thousands of years, and modern state borders have been determined by the latest history. The belonging of a person to an ethnos is determined by his culture and self-consciousness, and not simply “recorded in DNA,” although the bearer of both is the same individual.

In the same year, molecular biologist Konstantin Severinov in an interview with RIA Novosti explained:

“The idea of creating such weapons implies that in the genomes of all its potential victims there are common areas to which it will be targeted. Such weapons, according to the expert, can hardly be used against the inhabitants of Russia due to the peculiarities of its history.

Indeed, there are some ethnic groups that are very homogeneous, but they are few and there are very few of them. The Russians and, even if we take more narrowly, the Russians, are extremely polymorphic, that is, genetically diverse, since the history of our country was very stormy and difficult. Therefore, to find some characteristic genetic marker that the residents of Moscow, the region, the European part of Russia would have, and our potential opponents lack, is virtually impossible.

Against the background of this far from a new conspiracy hypothesis, other “high-tech threats” that Bortnikov speaks of also look doubtful. A study by Cornell University’s “Study of Forecasting Restrictions in Complex Social Systems” says that “even with unlimited data, the accuracy of forecasting will be limited significantly below the determined accuracy. Although a higher predictive ability is theoretically possible, such effectiveness requires a homogeneous system and an ideal preliminary knowledge of it: even a small degree of uncertainty in assessing product quality or slight fluctuations in the quality of different products lead to significantly more stringent pressured resistances.

AI can be successfully used to analyze society, search for vulnerable topics, optimize propaganda and information campaigns. But he is poorly predicting complex social processes, and also controls mass behavior, and therefore cannot guarantee a political result.