It sounded like a spiralling nightmare, with ominous background music to match. Two of Russia’s neighbors, Georgia and Ukraine, had been hit by mysterious disease outbreaks, according to the report on Rossiya 24, killing livestock and destroying lives. It was the summer of 2015 and the channel’s reporter had tracked down the victims, among them a Georgian farmer who’d lost all his pigs. “No vet in Georgia could figure out the cause,” she claimed.

The blame, she said, lay with a string of U.S. government-funded bio-laboratories in the two countries, chief among them a multi-million dollar facility on the outskirts of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Its work was so tightly under wraps, she reported, that residents had dubbed it “a secret Pentagon station.” The on-screen graphic read: “nest of viruses.”

But Kremlin-controlled Rossiya 24 failed to mention that the bacteria responsible for the spate of swine deaths had been identified and contained — by vets working in conjunction with scientists from what is better known in Georgia as the “Lugar Lab.”

Welcome to one of the more obscure frontlines in Russia’s information war with the West.