An Instagram post from July 17 (direct link, file link) shows a depiction of Russian President Vladimir Putin and a claim that he invaded Ukraine to commit crimes.
But when I do, it is to eliminate the NWO’s biological weapons laboratories, the primary means of child trafficking and money laundering,” the text of the illustration reads. “And oh, let go of the Ukrainian people!
The post was shared through Dr. Christiane Northrup, a prominent retired doctor who has spread incorrect information about vaccines. Northrup’s post garnered over 1400 likes in two days.
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This message distorts Putin’s reasons for invading Ukraine, Putin’s genuine reasons are also based on false claims. Statistics also show that Ukraine is far from being the world capital of money laundering or child trafficking. And the claim about biological weapons labs has been refuted as a conspiracy theory.
On the morning of February 24, 2022, Russia presented its invasion of Ukraine, and Putin called it a “special army operation. “
Putin did not say Ukraine was the “main hub” for money laundering, child trafficking or biological weapons laboratories. But their stated reasons for invading were also false.
“The aim of this operation is to protect others who, for 8 years, have faced humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime. To this end, we will seek to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine, as well as bring to justice those who have perpetrated bloody crimes against civilians, adding to the citizens of the Russian Federation,” he said in a televised speech that day.
At the time, there was no evidence of genocide in Ukraine. United Nations statistics showed that the number of civilians killed in eastern Ukraine dropped sharply from 2084 in 2014 to 18 in 2021. However, after the war began, the United Nations recorded 8490 deaths from the beginning of the invasion to April 2023.
Putin also claimed in his speech that Ukraine was ruled by a neo-Nazi government. But experts in the past have shown USA TODAY that Ukraine is not under Nazi rule, and has not been since World War II. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish and has a circle of relatives who died in the Holocaust.
So what is the genuine explanation for why the invasion?The evidence shows that this is a land grab. Putin does not make Ukraine his own country, even though it became an independent country from the Soviet Union in 1991.
“I need the Kiev government and its authentic Western overlords to listen to me: the other people of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, our citizens,” NPR reported after illegally annexing those territories. “Forever. “
Fact-checking: Putin’s claims justifying war in Ukraine are baseless, experts say
“Biological weapons” and “biological laboratories” are two words related to a conspiracy theory propagated through Russia, China, and right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson, among others, who have said that the U. S. government is not working to do so. The U. S. has funded biological weapons laboratories and in Ukraine.
This is a blatant distortion of a 2005 treaty between the United States and Ukraine. The treaty was meant to save you from biological threats, not create them.
The laboratories referred to in the treaty are funded and operated by the government of Ukraine. The United States agreed to provide assistance to Ukraine’s Health Ministry “free of charge. “The U. S. Embassy in Ukraine denounced incorrect information about biological weapons in an April 2020 statement.
The message refers to the “NWO Biological Weapons Laboratories”. NWO stands for “New World Order,” which refers to a long-debunked conspiracy theory that an organization of global elites plans to take control and identify a single global government.
It’s difficult to track and rank countries in relation to cash flow because it takes position on the radar, said Tom Cardamone, president and CEO of Global Financial Integrity, a Washington, D. C. -based think tank. which focuses on corruption and cash flow.
“So, well-informed guesses can be made, but to say definitively that country X is the money laundering capital of the world would be accurate,” Cardamone said.
The Basel Institute of Governance, a nonprofit think tank in Switzerland, monitors the threat of money laundering and international terrorist financing based on a jurisdiction’s “vulnerability ability” to such monetary crimes and its ability to counter them. In 2022, Basel assigned Ukraine a threat score of 5. 09 out of 10, placing it in the middle of the 128 ranked countries. The score went to the Democratic Republic of Congo, with 8. 3 out of 10.
The U. S. Department of State The U. S. government classified Ukraine as a Tier 2 country in its 2023 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons. Tier 2 countries do not fully meet the minimum needs for trafficking in persons as required by the Protection of Victims of Trafficking in Persons Act of 2000, but make “considerable efforts to comply. “
And war makes the scenario worse, better. The State Department wrote that “the Russian government’s ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine creates significant vulnerabilities to trafficking for the millions of refugees who have fled Ukraine and for internally displaced persons and others in need of humanitarian assistance and cover in Ukraine. “
Kristen Leanderson Abrams, senior director of anti-trafficking at the McCain Institute founded in Washington, D. C. , said she had no explanation for why Russia had invaded Ukraine because it was the “primary hub” for child sex trafficking.
“In reality, Russia’s invasion created greater vulnerability for Ukrainian children, especially those who have been displaced,” he said.
USA TODAY reached out to Northrup, who shared the post, for comment but did not get a response.
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