What's fascinating about this is that this conspiracy actually predates COVID and has been a topic heavily pushed by the Russian state media for years. Predictably, this brand of conspiracy was deployed to shift blame around after Russia poisoned Sergei Skripal and his daughter with a nerve agent. The U.S. does help fund some labs in countries like Ukraine and Georgia, but the reasoning behind that is pretty simple. After the Soviet Union broke up, there were remnants of old chemical and biological agents that had to be tested on, and much of that research that could be done on these things was being done in unsafe locations. The U.S. and Ukraine entered into a weapons proliferation treaty in 2005 that was centered around offering funding to modernize these facilities that Ukraine was already operating so that they would have a far lower risk of something going terribly wrong, these nerve agents and chemical weapons getting out. Yeah, that's wise. This involved a certain amount of information sharing, but ultimately the Ukrainian Ministry of Health was still in charge of these facilities. Flash forward to the COVID pandemic breaking out and you see Russia and China both putting forth theories that the virus was made in a lab in Ukraine. The reasons for this served a number of purposes for each country. And for Russia, it allowed Putin to present Western involvement in and the Ukrainian government as a whole as a threat to Russia, which would then justify hostile action against them or at least rationalize continued hostilities in the Donbass region.