Nearly five months into its senseless war against Ukraine, Russia has concocted a wild new explanation for why the Kremlin’s plans for a quick takeover fell apart so spectacularly—because Ukrainian troops were turned into superhuman killing machines during “secret experiments” in American-run biolabs, of course.

That claim was made Monday by two Russian lawmakers heading up a commission to investigate “biolaboratories” in Ukraine, Kommersant reported.

Konstantin Kosachev, the deputy speaker of Russia’s Federation Council, and Irina Yarovaya, deputy chair of the State Duma, touted what they described as bombshell findings from the “investigation.”

Testing of Ukrainian POWs’ blood, they claimed, uncovered “a range of diseases” that suggest they were secretly experimented on “for military purposes.”

“And we see: the cruelty and barbarity with which the military personnel of Ukraine behave, the crimes that they commit against the civilian population, those monstrous crimes that they commit against prisoners of war, confirm that this system for the control and creation of a cruel murder machine was implemented under the management of the United States,” Yarovaya was quoted telling reporters.

“And those performance enhancing drugs that they are still given in order to completely neutralize the last traces of human consciousness and turn them into the most cruel and deadly monsters also confirm this,” she claimed.

Bizarrely, she also claimed that the presence of Hepatitis A antibodies in Ukrainian prisoners’ blood was proof of an American biolabs conspiracy, since a former health minister for Ukraine was a dual Ukrainian-American citizen who had worked to acquire drugs for the treatment of hepatitis in the country.

“It is quite possible that this was about testing these drugs on military personnel,” Yarovaya said.

The claims appeared to be a new take on the biolabs conspiracy theory that Russia’s Defense Ministry has routinely rolled out to try and justify the war.

The latest iteration appears to be aimed at explaining away Russia’s military setbacks by way of mutant Ukrainian troops.