At the turn of May and June 2024, a newsletter was distributed on WhatsApp and other instant messengers, telling about Palestinian mutant vipers - they were allegedly bred in Ukrainian biological laboratories and delivered to the Moscow region using drones. We have verified the accuracy of this story.

In a viral message that has been circulating on WhatsApp and Telegram, and also Facebook, "VKontakte", "Odnoklassniki" and other social networks, the following is said (the author's spelling and punctuation are preserved):

Be careful and attentive in the forest!
According to our sources in the central toxic-serpetnology (studying snake bites) laboratory at the FSB of the Moscow region, both cases of viper bites this week gave very strange test results.
Firstly, the type of viper itself is absolutely unusual - both attacks on people were carried out by the mutated Palestine Werner's viper (Daboia palaestinae), which, as you understand, should not be here at all. But that's not so bad. But the poison itself...
It was compared with laboratory samples of poisons (there is a whole library of them, several thousand test tubes collected over the past 70 years in all corners of the planet) - and, attention, this poison did not match any of them!
Scientists immediately rang the bells - because it is almost impossible to understand the effects of this poison without analyzing all the components - but existing equipment does not allow this.
The main working version of scientists is that this is some kind of special poison with “negative genesis” (an unclear nature) and in combination with mutated species of vipers, this suggests the man-made nature of vipers and poison.
Laboratory employees whisper among themselves that these vipers and this poison were bred in NATO bio-laboratories in Ukraine, and they are delivered to the Moscow region - that's right, by drones.
More than 100 reptiles can easily fit into one drone - even if it is shot down, many of them will survive and crawl through the forests. This is precisely what explains the absence of explosions when drones are shot down - because there are no explosives, there are vipers. There's nothing to explode.
Scientists also cite parallels with the 50s of the last century, when the Americans dropped Colorado potato beetle larvae from balloons onto the territory of the former USSR - after all, we didn’t have it before. The same handwriting, scientists say.
Let's see what happens next. In the meantime, let’s look carefully at our feet.
🙏And forward it to your loved ones and friends. God takes care of those who are careful!

In fact, this newsletter appeared last year. Posts that coincide almost verbatim with her text can be found in social networks and on blogging platforms. The earliest such publication that “Verified” discovered using the “Medialogy”, appeared on June 29, 2023 in the “News to Nowhere” group on VKontakte (now recorded deleted). The group sells cosmetics, tells news about life in Voronezh and supports Russia's war against Ukraine. The administrator of News to Nowhere could either write the text about snakes being dropped in the Moscow region from drones, or copy it from a personal message. The service we used for analysis cannot “see” WhatsApp mailings, but people, as a rule, share disturbing information on social networks shortly after reading a message in the messenger, so the time gap between its receipt and publication on VKontakte is unlikely to be large.

“Medialogy” allows you to analyze data from 170 VKontakte and Odnoklassniki profiles, which distributed this text in public profiles within a week after its first appearance, which means they wanted to attract the attention of their audience. 60% of such users are people over 60 years old, another 32% are from 40 to 59 years old. At the same time on VKontakte, and (contrary to popular stereotype) in Odnoklassniki the most active users are representatives of the age group 35–44. The imbalance observed in the results of the analysis towards elderly people clearly shows that it is they who take upon themselves the task of warning others from the dangerous reptiles allegedly dumped in the Moscow region. Mostly women do this (73%).

The newsletter develops what is already familiar to the Russian-speaking reader myth about biological weapons allegedly being developed on the territory of Ukraine, combined with the fear of drone attacks that has become no less familiar to residents of Central Russia. However, in most Russian state media publications quoting officials and military personnel, stories about such secret weapons are often abstract and lacking in detail. Here the threat is quite detailed - these are vipers of a certain type, and their poison (with “negative genesis”) has been brought to high lethality in Ukrainian laboratories.

The authors of the newsletter rely on information received from sources from the “toxic-serpentological laboratory at the FSB of the Moscow region.” However, such a unit of the Russian special service doesn't exist. But the vipers of the species mentioned in the text Daboia palaestinae - not a fiction. In the wild these poisonous snakes meet in Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine.

“Verified” asked a herpetologist to comment on the newsletter Leonid Neimark. According to him, the scenario described in the text, in which Palestinian vipers survive the downing of a drone, is unrealistic. “These are massive land snakes, falling from a great height is fatal for them,” the expert emphasizes. He adds that even if they survive such a trip on a drone to the Moscow region, the reptiles are unlikely to be active: “The Palestinian viper in the Moscow region will not die instantly, but will be inactive, lie under a log until the first frost and then die. A very heat-loving species."

Neymark considers the information about a certain poison unknown to science, allegedly discovered in tests taken from residents of the Moscow region, to be no less fantastic:

“Breeding vipers with a new composition of venom is a very long process of selective breeding; methods for breeding venomous snakes simply have not existed for so many years; they were only developed 30–40 years ago. Genetic engineering can theoretically add a new enzyme, but where to get it from? To come up with a protein, then synthesize the gene encoding it and implant it - there are no such technologies for eukaryotes.”

Discussing the warnings regularly appearing in the press and social networks related to the increase in the number of snakes in the Moscow region, the scientist notes:

“News pop up every now and then about the dominance of vipers in the Moscow region. It is difficult to strictly refute them, since no one is taking them into account; it is too laborious. But you need to understand that vipers usually reach sexual maturity by the age of three, that is, they cannot dramatically reproduce in one year. Sometimes it happens that floods of reservoirs encourage them to move closer to a populated area in a particular place, but more often these myths arise out of nowhere.”

It is quite possible that the panic mailing was inspired by rumors about a snake invasion in the Moscow region in June 2023. More article on this topic June 27 published newspaper "Moskovsky Komsomolets" The story about vipers sent from Ukraine first appeared on social networks two days later.

The viral text ends with a reminder that foreign attackers are using a well-known “handwriting” - in the middle of the last century, Americans allegedly dropped Colorado beetle larvae from balloons onto the territory of the USSR, which were supposed to destroy potato crops. However, this story is nothing more than artifice Soviet propaganda.

Thus, the mailing sent out in 2024 appeared last summer and is based on anonymous sources from a non-existent laboratory. The statements made in the text about vipers and the possibilities of modern selection of venomous snakes are unreliable. The likely purpose of the mailing is not just to support the Kremlin propaganda narrative about secret biological weapons, but also to make it more specific in order to frighten members of the older generation.

Cover photo: Wikimedia Commons