The Russian Defense Ministry comes up with more and more series of series about "biological weapons" and "insidious" Ukrainians armed with biological weapons at briefings. This time, the Russian military took the old fake about "tuberculosis-infected leaflets" that were allegedly scattered by the Ukrainian military in 2020 over the Slavyanoserbsky district of Luhansk Region - and added new slides to it.

This fake was already refuted back in 2020: then a representative of the LNR Interior Ministry said that fake ruble banknotes were scattered near a district school, which people picked up, and during the day they became ill. The local laboratory seems to have found tuberculosis on these hundred dollar bills. The only real fact in these reports is that the Ukrainian volunteers did indeed spread the leaflets by drone - and did so regularly. The difference this time was that the texts were printed on paper that resembled ruble bills - and therefore attracted more attention from locals. Everything else is fiction: people could get sick for any reason, but tuberculosis is a disease that has a long incubation period of up to a month, so no one can catch it instantly and feel worsened within a day. You can read more refutation of this fake here. But the Radio Liberty article clearly was not read by the Defense Ministry - so they just repeated the fake about "deliberate contamination with counterfeit money" in the Luhansk region.