Russian economist Valentin Katasonov said in a February 28, 2022 interview on Russia Today TV that the primary objective of the Russian military operation in Ukraine was to eliminate American biological laboratories that he claimed America had placed in Ukraine.
He elaborated that America has placed 200 of these laboratories in many countries around the world, with a large part of them in former Soviet republics, and with 15 of them in Ukraine. Katasonov said that this constitutes a “siege” on Russia, that these labs constitute weapons that must be dismantled by experts and cannot be bombed, and that World War III has been “going on for a long time.”