Thank you, this is the kind of context I was thinking of but I must have missed that particular story in the news.

Igor Kirillov, head of Vladimir Putin’s Russian Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Troops, claimed in a video (pictured) that America is planning to use drones to infect his troops with malaria to incapacitate Russian troops

Hmm.

That sounded kind of bizarre – why malaria? – but it sounds like “American malaria biowarfare in Russia/Ukraine” is actually just an offshoot from a recent Russian psyop aimed at Africa. That makes more sense – malaria is a major issue there.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/world/africa/russia-africa-disinformation-malaria-.html

Russia’s Latest Target in Africa: U.S.-Funded Anti-Malaria Programs

Scientists fighting the spread of infectious diseases on the continent have been targeted online by pro-Russian activists, part of an effort to spread fear and mistrust of the West.

But in the pro-Russian propaganda telling of their work, the scientists, helped by funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, were not protecting local people against malaria, they were infecting them.

“Since these mosquitoes have arrived in Burkina, we’ve noticed an increase of malaria and dengue fever,” Egountchi Behanzin, a French-Togolese activist who often posts pro-Russian content, said in an interview.

Mr. Behanzin could not cite any scientific evidence, and researchers say there are no grounds for such a claim. But his anti-Western messages, and his praise for Russia in Africa, are shared daily among his more than 600,000 followers on social media.

His posts are seen as only one element in a recent pro-Russian disinformation operation that is targeting U.S.-funded health care programs in Africa.

The Kremlin did the same thing when AIDS showed up in Africa:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Denver

Operation Denver[3][4][5] (sometimes referred to as “Operation INFEKTION”) was an active measure disinformation campaign run by the KGB in the 1980s to plant the idea that the United States had invented HIV/AIDS[6][7] as part of a biological weapons research project at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

The telegram, which referred indirectly back to the Patriot article (“facts … in the press of the developing countries, in particular India”), provided guidance to Bulgarian State Security regarding how to couch their AIDS disinformation:

Facts have already been cited in the press of the developing countries, in particular India, that testify to the involvement of the special services of the United States and the Pentagon in the appearance and rapid spread of the AIDS disease in the United States, as well as other countries. Judging by these reports, along with the interest shown by the U.S. military in the symptoms of AIDS and the rate and geography of its spread, the most likely assumption is that this most dangerous disease is the result of yet another Pentagon experiment with a new type of biological weapon. This is confirmed by the fact that the disease affected initially only certain groups of people: homosexuals, drug addicts, immigrants from Latin America.[13]

To explain how AIDS outbreaks in Africa occurred simultaneously, the Moscow World Service announced a discovery by Soviet correspondent Aleksandr Zhukov, who claimed that in the early 1970s, a Pentagon-controlled West German lab in Zaire “succeeded in modifying the non-lethal Green Monkey virus into the deadly AIDS virus”. Radio Moscow also claimed that instead of testing a cholera vaccine, American scientists were actually infecting unwitting Zairians, thus spreading AIDS throughout the continent.

Well, I guess the '80s are back. I was hoping for stuff like denim jackets and the original The Terminator, but I guess instead it’s rehashing Cold War psyops.