I'm going to go on the record and say that it's possibly an op, fake, it's bubbles for the camera. Possible.

EDIT: Adding more

calibrated very carefully to avoid a widely expanded conflict.” We can see that the US did exactly that, but did not hold back, and pushed Russia into their “Special Military Operation”,

This really shows how valuable the DS views their biolabs to be (or their sensitivity to exposure of these programs). It was worth disregarding this advice