A Russian scientist with close ties to President Vladimir Putin recently told a group of teachers that the West is using biological warfare, childfree advocacy, and the “LGBT agenda” to eliminate the majority of the human population.

Mikhail Kovalchuk, the head of Russia’s Kurchatov Institute for Nuclear Research, made these comments to a Kremlin-backed forum of about 1,000 Moscow schoolteachers, The Times reported, in addition to 325,000 livestream viewers.

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Kovalchuk – who is reportedly a close friend of the vehemently anti-LGBTQ+ Putin – claimed that the West “understands that a huge number of people are becoming unnecessary” due to technological advancements and thus “they have begun to prepare for a population reduction.”

“They introduced the LGBT agenda and for those who didn’t go along with it, they offered a second option — the child-free family,” he continued. “It’s working brilliantly. In a generation or two, there’ll be no continuation of their bloodlines. Only a small elite, the ones they actually need, will remain.”

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“As for the rest — the people they don’t even see as human — they’ll be eliminated with biological weapons. A virus or something like that with a 90 per cent mortality rate will come along and mow them down.”

Putin first signed a law banning so-called “gay propaganda” in Russia in June 2013 and has increasingly demonized LGBTQ+ identities ever since. The law ostensibly sought to “protect children” from any “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relationships,” as stated in the law’s text.

But the law has mostly been used to silence LGBTQ+ activist organizations, events, websites, and media, as well as to break up families and harass teachers. It has been roundly condemned by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, the human rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as civil rights activists around the world.

In December 2022, Putin signed a law expanding the country’s prohibition on LGBTQ+ “propaganda.” The newer law effectively bans any public expression of LGBTQ+ life in Russia by prohibiting “any action or the spreading of any information that is considered an attempt to promote homosexuality in public, online, or in films, books or advertising,” Reuters reported.

In November, acting on the request of Putin’s Ministry of Justice, Russia’s Supreme Court declared the international gay rights movement an “extremist organization.” The ruling has led to raids on LGBTQ+ bars and other establishments, while Russian LGBTQ+ organizations have been essentially forced underground.

Kovalchuk is no stranger to conspiracy theories. According to Russian publication Meduza, he has suggested the existence of bioweapons explicitly created to target Russian people and has posited that the United States has created a human subspecies with limited self-awareness to act as servants.

He is also dedicated to finding a way to halt the aging process. An anonymous source told Meduza that he is “obsessed with immortality and the ‘Russian genome.'” They say it’s likely he is the one who has convinced Putin to pour resources into his research through the nation’s “New Health Preservation Technologies” project, announced last year.

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