About 30 minutes after this article was published on Thursday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who appears to also represent the extreme reaches of the internet, introduced Russian disinformation about bioweapons in U.S.-funded labs in Ukraine into the Congressional record. [22] It comprised various institutions operating under an array of different ministries and departments including the Soviet Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Health, USSR Academy of Sciences, and KGB. The Fox host, whose commentaries have become a staple of Russian state TV, also claimed, wrongly, that Nuland had all but said that theres a military application to this research, that they were working on bioweapons. Carlson then took the bait offered by the Russian militarys reference to coronavirus to make the wild claim that the mundane public health research in Ukraine was identical to dangerous experiments on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, China, funded by the U.S. before the Covid-19 pandemic. When Steve Rosenberg of the BBC put it to Zakharova in late 2018 that there was no evidence in the documents tracking the Sovaldi project that any biological weapons experiments on humans had been performed in the U.S.-funded lab, the Russian diplomat unwittingly echoed Donald Rumsfelds infamous remarks in 2002 on the lack of evidence for Iraqi WMD, in her reply. The scheme was originally known as Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) but is now more commonly referred to as biological engagement. The aim of the project is and was to enable the country to do diagnoses on antibodies itself. The institute added that its project is part of the German governments effort to improve global biosecurity through the minimization of biological risks emanating from highly hazardous pathogens in 25 countries., Konashenkov, the defense ministry spokesperson, also claimed that the documents from Ukraine showed that certain experiments were carried out with samples of coronavirus in bats. Russian officials accused the U.S. of funding biowarfare efforts in Ukraine, drawing concern from Western officials who fear that a crescendo of allegations about weapons of mass destruction. The paperwork even indicated that some of the strains had been purchased from Russian labs. Correction: March 21, 2022 Favorov recalled that there was pressure on Soviet scientists to look for potential military applications for their research. Here's what he said: "Few young people: halfdead to give a start. [15], In the Far East the Soviet Union had been subject of a BW attack in 1939 during the battles of Khalkin Gol (Nomonhan) by Japan's Unit 731 under Shir Ishii. Russian authorities said that no biological material was present in the lab at the time of the explosion. Scientists from the. In the summer of 2016, the Russian army participated in the fight against the epidemic of anthrax in Yamal. Tens of thousands of scientists, researchers, doctors, engineers, technicians, and . Carlson distorted Nulands statement into an admission that, in his words, Ukraine has secret bio labs and that falsely asserted that Nuland said whatever theyre doing in those labs is so dangerous and so scary that she is quite concerned that the so-called research material inside those bio labs might fall into the hands of Russian forces.. The kind of reporting we do is essential to democracy, but it is not easy, cheap, or profitable. ??????????? So the Pentagon-funded projects, Favorov said, were focused on how to identify pathogens, how to introduce biosafety to all these labs which were working with these pathogens anyway. In many cases, Favorov added, I believe that Russians were kind of jealous that, you know, somebodys helping their used-to-be Russian colonies to organize better laboratories.. In 1952, as a response to this perceived area of weakness, the Soviet government issued a special decree for the creation of the Scientific-Research Sanitary Institute (NIIS) in Zagorsk. The threat reduction assisted post-Soviet states in containing and destroying the pathogens in Soviet labs. We dont have ads, so we depend on our members 35,000 and counting to help us hold the powerful to account. Journal articles by scientists suggest that in 1999 the experiments were still being continued. The Sverdlovsk facility launched a scientific programme in 1951 which focused on botulinum toxin.[10]. This week, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria . Further attacks were initiated against the Soviet Union by Unit 100 in the summer of 1942, and at a later unspecified date, again by Unit 731. Thomas-Greenfield said: I will say this once: Ukraine does not have a biological weapons program. She went on to turn the accusation back on Moscow. A report on the briefing from the Russian government news agency Tass included this conspiratorial aside about Sovaldi, which is used to treat chronic hepatitis C infections: Kirillov noted that the U.S.-based Gilead Sciences, in which former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is a key shareholder, manufactured the drug.. Russia says it has uncovered a military biological weapons programme in Ukraine, claims described by the US as "absurd propaganda". It was transferred to the control of the USSR Ministry of Defence in March 1954. Western allies have accused President Vladimir Putin and his . [14], By 1939, with the USSR on a war footing, the Soviet leadership is reported to have believed that the "imperialistic and fascistic countries" had actively undertaken BW preparations and that the use of such weapons, in case of emergency, was a foregone conclusion. At a U.N. Security Council meeting on March 11, 2022, Russia U.N. What if these labs are creating viruses just like COVID-19?. The anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny survived an attempted assassination with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok in Russia in 2020. Running parallel to the work underway at Vlasikha, BW research was also being pursued in an institution controlled by the state security apparatus. And those who have read it will say: Well, yes, maybe there are no dangerous pathogens in these documents. He points to evidence that infected rodents were the key to the large-scale outbreaks and that inhalationary tularaemia may have resulted from inhalation of dust from contaminated straw in matresses. On March 13, Gabbard tweeted a video viewed nearly 3 million times, in which she falsely claimed that the public health labs were conducting research on dangerous pathogens and were engaged in that she called dangerous research, including gain of function, similar to the lab in Wuhan where Covid-19 may have originated from.. (11 October 2013). RUSSIA could unleash a bioweapon on Ukraine more lethal than Covid from a Ukrainian lab, the former head of the British Army's chemical weapons unit has warned. WASHINGTON (AP) The Biden administration publicly warned Wednesday that Russia might seek to use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine as the White House rejected Russian claims of illegal chemical weapons development in the country it has invaded. ???????????? The Chimera Project attempted in the late 1980s and early 1990s to combine DNA from Venezuelan equine encephalitis and smallpox at Obolensk, and Ebola virus and smallpox at the Vector Institute. Operating under the codename "Ekologiya" (Ecology), the new network incorporated three virology facilities. The Zombie Threat Is Very Real!!! In 2018, when Russia faced international condemnation for trying to kill the former spy Sergei Skripal with a nerve agent, Russian state television suddenly revived conspiratorial claims that a U.S.-funded lab in Georgia was testing biological weapons on the Georgian people. In 1926, at a small laboratory controlled by VOKhIMU, Fishman initiated research on Bacillus anthracis (the causative agent of anthrax). Soviet officials, including Boris Yeltsin, lied about what caused the outbreak until 1992. However, the largest epidemic of anthrax in Russia took place in Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg) in April 1979. The ambassador endorsed a discredited conspiracy theory that the photographs had been staged. We know that because WHO is urging Ukraine to destroy any highly dangerous agents to avoid the risk of a disastrous outbreak should one of the labs be hit by Russian forces. Zlatogorov was in fact one of the world's leading authorities on pneumonic plague and had studied 40 strains of plague bacilli from around the world. The Soviet Union's 1991 collapse made Russia the inheritor of the vast majority of the USSR's weapons of mass destruction. [29] On 11 April 1992, Yeltsin decreed "the termination of research on offensive biological weapons, the dismantlement of experimental technological lines for the production of biological agents and the closure of biological weapons testing facilities",[23][30] and in September 1992 Yeltsin agreed in a Joint Statement on Biological Weapons with the United States and the United Kingdom that the two Western nations would "have a blanket invitation to visit facilities of concern in Russia under ground rules that guarantee unprecedented access, including access to the entire facility, the ability to take samples, the right to interview the workers and scientists, and the right to record the visits on video and audio tape. His American counterpart, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, warned that Russias claim could be a pretext for launching its own biological weapons attack on Ukraine. Unsecured bioweapons in a war zone are a bad idea, Carlson told his millions of viewers this week. On Monday, Biden said Russia was also suggesting that Ukraine has biological and chemical weapons in Ukraine Thats a clear sign he is considering using both of those. Before the recent crackdown on independent media outlets in Russia, these outlandish claims from Russian defense officials which were amplified on the global stage by Russias foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and its U.N. ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya might have been undercut by interviews with Russian biologists who called the underlying evidence for the allegations transparently false. [35] At least two agents died, presumably from the transported pathogens. In the later summer of 1942, in the face of the German offensive to capture Stalingrad, there was a second evacuation of STI, which was eventually permanently relocated to Kirov, located some 896 kilometres north-east of Moscow on the Vyatka river. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "biological weapons, also called germ weapons, are any number of disease-producing agents, such as bacteria, viruses, rickettsiae, fungi, toxins, or other biological agents, that may be utilized as weapons against humans, animals, or plants." 1 Throughout history, pathogens have proven to be the most [12], A production line to manufacture smallpox on an industrial scale was launched in the Vector Institute in 1990. Russian scientists who have looked at the documents Russia calls proof of bioweapons labs in Ukraine say there is no evidence for such claims. Putin comments on US-led biolabs in Ukraine pic.twitter.com/oqO4WDDxSr. The defendants were found guilty and sentenced to terms ranging from two to twenty-five years in Soviet labour correction camps. Kirillov also claimed that in a joint Ukrainian-American project called R-781, bats are considered as carriers of potential biological weapons agents. However, the document describing that project, which was projected on the big screen behind the general, just outlined a proposal for an expert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta to collaborate with a veterinary medicine specialist in Kharkiv and a researcher in Tbilisi on routine disease surveillance of bats in Ukraine and Georgia, including testing for bacterial and viral infections (such as coronaviruses) and performing genomic sequencing. In. The development was conducted in Vector Institute under the leadership of Dr. Ustinov who was accidentally killed by the virus. During the period 1947-1949 a new military biological weapons facility, the USSR Ministry of Defence's Scientific-Research Institute of Hygiene, was established in Sverdlovsk, It occupied the site of the former Cherkassk-Sverdlovsk Infantry Academy on Ulitsa Zvezdnaya, 1. There are various accounts regarding the relocation of STI, with official Russian sources indicating that it was initially transferred to Saratov. Now, the Biden White House has taken the extraordinary step of calling out both countries on their coordinated propaganda campaign and saying they might be providing cover for a potential . [25], It has been reported that Russia made smallpox available to Saddam Hussein in the beginning of the 1990s. As for the year ahead, a Russian scientist will create a biological weapon that will turn people into zombies, DublinLive reported on Saturday, based on a prophecy warning of the "half-dead to . Nostradamus predicted a zombie apocalypse in 2021, citing a Russian scientist who created a biological weapon that produces a virus that - Turns humans zombies. Given the subsequent Russian shelling of Kharkiv, the Ukrainian effort to ensure that an attack on the lab there could not cause the accidental release of bacteria seems prudent. The list of destroyed strains published by RIA Novosti and other Russian media outlets contains not a single particularly dangerous strain. Ukraine has biological research facilities, she said, adding that there was concern that Russian forces were trying to gain control of the labs. The latest claims come just hours . FilippaLentzos, a biologist and a scholar at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studiesreported in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that year that she had been part of a group of international experts that visited the lab in Tbilisi. The Russian biological weapons program in 2022 By Robert Petersen October 5, 2022 On February 24, Russia launched a war of conquest against Ukraine after it had already illegally annexed Crimea in 2014 and waged war for eight years in the Donbas. The Soviet Union covertly operated the world's largest, longest, and most sophisticated biological weapons program, thereby violating its obligations as a party to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. The comprehensive review of the documents by experts who understand both the science and the Cyrillic alphabet took on new importance on Wednesday, as President Vladimir Putin cited the imaginary threat of weapons of mass destruction near Russias borders as a justification for the invasion of Ukraine. [1] The program began in the 1920s and lasted until at least September 1992 but has possibly been continued by Russia after that. 2. [12] The development of genetically altered strains of smallpox was presumably conducted in the Institute under the leadership of Dr. Sergei Netyosov in the mid-1990s, according to Kenneth Alibek. The biolab narrative "exploded on social media right . Joining is simple and doesnt need to cost a lot: You can become a sustaining member for as little as $3 or $5 a month. That too, is impossible. Representative to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield warned that Russias claim could be a pretext for it launching its own biological weapons attack on Ukraine. He knows therell be severe consequences because of the united Nato front but the point is: its real.. Russia was reportedly developing smallpox-based weapons as late as 1988. I guess we shall see., Russia makes claims of US-backed biological weapon plot at UN, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. The documents from Ukraine, Lewitin wrote inan open letterposted on Facebook and Change.org, do not imply any development of biological weapons or even the use of particularly dangerous pathogens in the laboratories. Russia's willingness to use weapons of mass destruction There is no doubt that Russia has a long history of producing chemical and biological weapons. Leitenberg, Milton and Raymond A. Zilinskas (2012). It breeds and spreads among birds, but on rare occasion, it can infect . The White House on Wednesday warned that Russia could use "chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine" or could create a "false flag operation" using them, after the Kremlin accused the U.S. of . Ivanovskii Institute of Virology. WASHINGTON White House officials have dismissed Russian allegations, recently leveled again by a top Kremlin general, that the United States developed biological weapons in Ukraine,. It asserted that "the bacterial option could be successfully used in war" and proposed a plan for the organisation of Soviet military bacteriology. The threat of chemical and nuclear warfare loomed large over most militaries during the Cold War. The accidental release of anthrax in 1979 from a Soviet military research facility in Yekaterinburg, which was known as Sverdlovsk in Soviet times, killed at least 66 people. The discussion came amid Russia's ongoing military invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24. UK and US intelligence officials have warned there is "serious concern" Russia could use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine. Scientists are seeking to unlock unknown prehistoric viruses up to 50,000 years old by extracting biological material from carcasses of ancient animals frozen in permafrost, according to reports.. the poisoning of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Put another way, what this senior Russian diplomat said in 2018 holds true today: Russia will not be deterred by a lack of evidence from claiming that the U.S. operated biological weapons labs in . The SIS reports indicate that Zlatogorov and Maslakovets conducted some of their research on a so-called Plague Fort - Fort Alexander 1, located at Kronstadt. After seeing the results of international investigations into chemical weapons use in Syria, Russia introduced a resolution to the United Nations last month that would have undermined future independent . At this time the country only possessed a single facility focused on viruses, the Moscow-based D.I. In the summer of 1936, Ivan Mikhailovich Velikanov led the Red Army's first expedition to conduct tests of biological weapons on Vozrozhdeniya Island. In July 1931, the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU), a forerunner of the NKVD, seized control of the Convent of the Intercession in Suzdal and then the following year created a special prison laboratory, or sharashka, where around nineteen leading plague and tularaemia specialists were forced to work on the development of biological weapons. Its origins remain obscure, but it's possible that the deadly cache was manufactured at Compound 19, a facility near the Russian city of Sverdlovsk, now Yekatarinburg. The key hub of the Soviet BW programme at this time was the Scientific-Research Institute of Epidemiology and Hygiene located in Kirov. [2], "Pokrov, Berdsk and Omutninsk all revealed evidence of biological activity since 1975, such as large-scale production in hardened facilities, aerosol test chambers, excessive containment levels for current activity and accommodation for weapons-filling lines."[4]. The Russian military, Lewitin told Aronova, had simply lied about what the Ukrainian documents meant. The samples of Marburg taken from Ustinov's organs were more powerful than the original strain. Updated: 15:41, 28 Dec 2020 EXPERTS fear Russian scientists are experimenting with the deadly Ebola virus as part of a terrifying "Doomsday" chemical weapons project. He also alleges that human experimentation occurred with typhus, glanders and melioidosis in the Solovetsky camp. [23], In the 1980s, the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture successfully developed variants of foot-and-mouth disease and rinderpest against cows, African swine fever for pigs, and psittacosis to kill chicken. In a related report by the Inquisitr, if the Ebola virus did become airborne, this feat would require genetic engineering, since evolutionary theory seems to indicate the scenario would not happen naturally. Another innovation was the "mobilization production facilities"ostensibly civil manufacturing plantswhich incorporated capacity for production of weapons in wartime emergency." The Russian strategy, of loudly making claims about biological weapons research and pointing to documents that do not, in any way, confirm that to be true has been employed multiple times in recent years. The destruction of the pathogens listed on orders sent to the labs, Konashenkov said, was a desperate effort to conceal any traces of the military-biological program financed by the U.S. Department of Defense in Ukraine., At a defense ministry briefing in Moscow the next day, Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov the head of the Russian militarys radiation, chemical, and biological protection force displayed these documents on a huge screen. Cook, Michelle Stem and Amy F. Woolf (April 10, 2002). "[24], In 1989 the defector Vladimir Pasechnik convinced the British that the Soviets had genetically engineered a strain of Yersinia pestis to resist antibiotics. The UN security council met on Friday to discuss Moscows claims the US is funding military biological activities in Ukraine. In the early 1950s the Soviet leadership became concerned that the USSR was vulnerable to attack by a new generation of virus-based biological weapons. The development of new nerve agents during the 1940s, as well as advanced delivery systems later on. The Intercept is an independent nonprofit news outlet. "And the world sees it." At a meeting in September of the 197 state parties to the biological weapons convention, she said, "Russia failed to provide any credible evidence to support these false allegations" and an overwhelming number of countries that spoke "considered that the issues raised by . When Russian news outlets repeated these claims, Lewitin,the veteran Russian biologist, wrote that they had been duped into printing what he called deliberately false information,fed to them by the military, about what was in the documents. ?????????? Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokesperson, said that the documents made public by Giorgadze again raise questions about the U.S. militarys true aims and objectives in Georgia. The documents Giorgadze publicized were described as a bombshell on Russian state television, in a report that quoted a former Russian military biologist speculating that Georgians were being used as guinea pigs in biological weapons experiments. The United Nations security council met earlier this month at Russias request, to discuss Moscows claims that the US is funding military biological activities in Ukraine in other words, secretly developing biological weapons in Ukrainian laboratories. In the first two years of the program, more than 90 percent of the first 30,000 patients to be treated were cured of the illness. In 1930, Velikanov was placed in command of a new facility, the Red Army's Vaccine-Sera Laboratory in Vlasikha, around 30 miles to the west of Moscow. ??????????? The Russian Bioweapons program would be the most capable, deadliest program in the world. Two times a day to wet clean the room. From this you conclude that in this room Ukrainian nationalists dismember people alive twice a day and sacrifice them to Cthulhu, and then cover up the traces. When the project started, Eurasianet reported, Sovaldi was administered to 5,800 Georgian hepatitis patients with severe complications like advanced liver fibrosis and cirrhosis. Because the first patients to get the drug were the sickest, it is not surprising thatdozens of them died before the drug could clear the virus from their system. ? Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the head of the Russian militarys radiation, chemical and biological protection force, described documents on recent biological research in Ukraine at a briefing in Moscow on Thursday. The development and production were conducted by a main directorate ("Biopreparat") along with the Soviet Ministry of Defense, the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture, the Soviet Ministry of Health, the USSR Academy of Sciences, the KGB, and other state organizations. Unit 68240 of Vladimir. Imagine you come to a certain office and see an inscription on one of the rooms:Instruction for the cleaner. But Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, the Russian defense ministry spokesperson, told the state news agency that the attempt to secure the labs was itself evidence that Ukrainian and American scientists had been secretly plotting to weaponize dangerous pathogens. The statement of the official representative of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, Igor Konashenkov, in combination with the documents attached to this statement, produces just such an impression., Thats how propaganda works, he added. The outlet interprets Nostradamus' writing as: "A Russian scientist will create a biological weapon and produce a virus that can turn humankind into zombies, and we will all be extinct in the near future." "Sad concepts will come to harm each one, Temporal dignified, the Mass to succeed," Nostradamus wrote. [6] Upon ratification of the Geneva Protocol, several countries made reservations regarding its applicability and use in retaliation. ), Pettersson and her colleagues converted the screenshots of the original documents ordering the destruction of pathogens at the labs published in the Russia media into a Google Docs spreadsheet that is easier to read and pointed out that, despite claims from the Russian military, there are no deadly pathogens on this list no plague, anthrax, cholera., In their detailed debunking of the Russian claims, the researchers explained that any effort to create biological weapons would require a much larger base of strains than those listed. The documents indicate that the Kharkiv lab destroyed only 40 test tubes and the Poltava lab destroyed 24. The group also agreed with Lewitins conclusion that creating a military bacterium specific only for a certain nationality and especially for Russians is absolutely evolutionarily impossible., In conclusion, the researchers said, the statements published in the Russian state media, and attributed to senior Russian officials, are unsubstantiated anti-scientific bullshit., We thank Russian biologists for not being afraid to tell the truth, Serhiy Leshchenko, a Ukrainian investigative journalist and an adviser to the Ukrainian presidents office, said in a statement on YouTube from embattled Kyiv. An outbreak of weaponized smallpox occurred during testing in 1971. "Biological weapons have been outlawed since the BWC entered into force in 1975," she added. According to the biologists, documents presented to the public last week by Russias defense ministry as supposed evidence of covert bioweapons labs under Pentagon control in Ukraine actually describe relatively harmless collections of pathogens used for public health research. Counter-proliferation efforts of the Nunn-Lugar Biological Threat Reduction program successfully averted technology transfer to authoritarian neighbors such as Iran during the decade following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Although the USSR also signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the Soviets subsequently augmented their biowarfare programs. The first group to arrive from Kirov included the new director of the Institute of Hygiene, Major General Nikolai Fillipovich Kopylov. The Leningrad Military Medical Academy began cultivating typhus in chicken embryos. Stalin in response ordered an acceleration of BW preparations and appointed Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, the head of the NKVD, in overall command of the country's biological warfare programme. After US intelligence accurately predicted Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it's disturbing that Americans now fear Russia is preparing to use chemical weapons during the conflict. An Unexpected Meeting: Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia spoke face-to-face for the first time since Moscow's invasion . Subcommittee on Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities. In April 1979, a mysterious biological weapon escaped from a lab in the Soviet Union, killing at least 66 people and an unknown number of animals in what is now central Russia. The State of the War. [27], In the 1990s, the President of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, admitted to an offensive bio-weapons program as well as to the true nature of the Sverdlovsk biological weapons accident of 1979, which had resulted in the deaths of at least 64 people. This particular flu virus belongs to a strain called H5N1. Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya held up images of pregnant women injured by Russian shelling of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine. He didnt take part, but some of his contemporaries did. Congress. The goal of this and other Pentagon-funded biological studies in Ukraine was the creation of a mechanism for the covert spread of deadly pathogens., On March 10, Russian defense ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov claimed, falsely, that documents seized in Ukraine indicated that U.S. and Ukrainian researchers were plotting to use birds to covertly send deadly pathogens to Russia pic.twitter.com/83nNA897kc. Russian President Vladmir Putin confirmed that his country is working on the creation of an electromagnetic gun that attacks its target's central nervous system, putting them in what we hope is a.