General Professor Peter Burgasov, former Chief Sanitary Physician of the Soviet Army, and a senior researcher within the program of biological weapons described this incident: Spores of Bacillus anthracis (the causative agent of anthrax) were accidentally released from a military facility in Sverdlovsk in April 1979. A UK/US inspection team visited the facility in 1993 and identified five underground reinforced concrete bunkers holding hundreds of thousands of hens eggs being used to grow massive quantities of virus, allegedly in order to sustain a strategic weapons system."[42][43]. The US undersecretary of state Victoria Nuland affirmed those facts in a Senate foreign relations committee hearing this week, in which the Republican senator Marco Rubio asked directly if Ukraine had biological weapons. According to fox13now, because one of the . Nulands comments were seized upon by far-right commentators as evidence of a secret plot. ??????????? ?? The proposal had nothing to do with biological weapons research, and the CDC told The Intercept thatthe project did not receive funding and never even began. The Russian military, Lewitin told Aronova, had simply lied about what the Ukrainian documents meant. [13] SIS identifies Petr Petrovich Maslakovets and Semen Ivanovich Zlatogorov as the lead BW scientists working on Yersinia pestis (the causative organism of plague) and other dangerous pathogens. According to The Soviet Unions Agricultural Biowarfare Programme (2021), "The Pokrov biologics plant is the best-documented of the agricultural BW mobilisation facilities. Two major Japanese offensive BW installations at Pingfang and Changchun were overrun by the Red Army. [17] The new military institute later pursued major programmes focused on variola virus and viral haemorrhagic fevers. Fears are growing Vladimir Put 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. The Soviet Union conducted experimentations with the Marburg virus in aerosol form to transform it into a strategic-operational biological weapon. 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 . The secret program was code-named "Ecology". When Russias U.N. ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, presented those false claims to the Security Council last week, he scoffed at American denials by mentioning that the diplomats were in the very same room where, in 2003, Colin Powell had held up that famous test tube during his presentation of faulty intelligence on Iraqs suspected weapons of mass destruction. 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.. [25], It has been reported that Russia made smallpox available to Saddam Hussein in the beginning of the 1990s. Soviet officials, including Boris Yeltsin, lied about what caused the outbreak until 1992. German intelligence reported that the institute was engaged in experiments focused on Francisella tularensis (the causative agent of tularaemia) and Yersinia pestis (the causative agent of plague). Ukraine does operate biological laboratories that receive US funding. [35], In the 2000s, the academician, "A.S.", proposed a new biological warfare program, called the "Biological Shield of Russia" to president Vladimir Putin. ? 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. What if strange outbreaks surrounding U.S.-funded biolabs are the result of these labs and the work that is taking place in them? Greene asked. Domaradskij, Igor V. and Wendy Orent (2003), All-Union Scientific-Research Institute of Microbiology, State Research Centre for Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, All-Union Scientific-Research Institute of Molecular Biology, All-Union Scientific-Research Institute of Highly Pure Biopreparations, Stepnogorsk Scientific Experimental-Industrial Base, Vector State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology, All-Union Scientific-Research Institute of Veterinary Virology and Microbiology, Poison laboratory of the Soviet secret services, Ministry of Agriculture and Food (Soviet Union) Role in offensive Soviet biological warfare programme, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jbscf.30, "2021 Adherence to and Compliance With Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments", "The Trilateral Agreement: lessons for biological weapons verification", "What happened after an explosion at a Russian disease research lab called VECTOR? #??????? [15], On the 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany commenced Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union along a 2,900-kilometre front. 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. And chances are . It conducted its secret activities at numerous sites across the USSR and employed 30-40,000 people.[20]. Biodefense: Worldwide Threats and Countermeasure Efforts for the Department of Defense: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities of the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, One Hundred Thirteenth Congress, First Session, Hearing Held October 11, 2013. p. 34. While the unfunded CDC proposal to monitor diseases in bats in Ukraine and Georgia obtained by the Russian military mentioned surveillance of diseases, including coronaviruses, the idea that any viral strains obtained by the researchers would be manipulated in gain-of-function research was wholly invented by the Russian military, Carlson, and Gabbard. 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 . [26], The NunnLugar Cooperative Threat Reduction aimed to secure and dismantle weapons of mass destruction, including the Soviet biological weapons program. 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. ?????????? "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 . Robert Mackey[emailprotected]theintercept.com@RobertMackey. In fact, US funding to the laboratories had its roots in the fall of the Soviet Union, after which money was pumped into Ukraine and other countries to help them transfer scientific skills away from weapons towards public health. UK and US intelligence officials have warned there is "serious concern" Russia could use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine. Symptoms. Just four years after the creation of the Zagorsk facility, the CPSU and the USSR Council of Ministers issued a decree "for strengthening scientific-research work in the field of microbiology and virology". The drug had already been approved by the FDA in 2013. 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. The kind of reporting we do is essential to democracy, but it is not easy, cheap, or profitable. Another Russian expat amazed by the Russian claims is Michael Favorov, who immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union three decades ago, after a long career in public health and epidemiology, and then oversaw CDC programs in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The nerve agent is classified as a chemical weapon, not a biological weapon, by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. The Ministry of Defense made a false, unfounded statement and now, if I talk to people, 90percent of them will say: Bioweapons were made in Ukraine. No one has read the attached documents. [4][45] The death toll was at least 66, but no one knows the precise number, because all hospital records and other evidence were destroyed by the KGB, according to former Biopreparat deputy director Kenneth Alibek. ???????:#?????? It breeds and spreads among birds, but on rare occasion, it can infect . Five people died from inhaling anthrax and 17 others were infected after exposure in the following months, as envelopes stuffed with spores were mailed to U.S. officials and journalists. ? The new strain, called "Variant U", had been successfully weaponized and approved by the Soviet Ministry of Defense in 1990.[12]. "He's already used. Most of the work of the Ukraine labs today, Gronvall said, involves surveillance of diseases in animals and people as an early-warning system for illnesses such as African swine fever, which is endemic in the region. Congress. Committee on Armed Services. The State Department, per a 2021 report, "assesses that the Russian Federation (Russia) maintains an offensive BW program and is in violation of its obligation under [the Biological Weapons . Russia says it has uncovered a military biological weapons programme in Ukraine, claims described by the US as "absurd propaganda". The Russian permanent representative to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, delivered a lengthy account of the alleged biological weapons plot, and said the birds, bats and insects supposedly intended. An outbreak of weaponized smallpox occurred during testing in 1971. Marburg virus is also a Category A bio-warfare agent identified by the CDC's classification system and is hosted in African fruit bat. Favorov told me that older, Soviet-trained military biologists probably assume that the U.S. is still doing that sort of work. This would not have sudden onset, like the movies. Heeven speculated that a document showing that researchers in Ukraine had sent blood samples to labs in Australia was proof of a secret Pentagon effort to study Slavic DNA, in order to construct a biological weapon that would infect only ethnic Russians. According to Alibek, in 1928, the Revolutionary Military Council signed a decree about the weaponization of typhus. The only possible explanation for why the samples were disposed of in such haste, Kirillov insisted, must have been to prevent Russian experts from discovering that synthetic biology methods were being tested there to enhance the microorganisms pathogenic properties.. And those who have read it will say: Well, yes, maybe there are no dangerous pathogens in these documents. 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. (2012). Earlier in March, the Russian ministry of foreign affairs posted a tweet accusing the US and Ukraine of running a secret military-biological programme inside the stricken country. A state lab in Russia's Siberia is beginning research into prehistoric viruses preserved in the remains of animals found in melting permafrost.
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