? 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. ?????? He said there was no chance that the U.S.-funded labs were performing any work on biological weapons. Its core staff were sourced from the Kirov BW facility. Ukraine does operate biological laboratories that receive US funding. By way of example, Lewitin, who has a Ph.D. in genetics, pointed to the absolutely wild idea of the existence of special DNA of the Slavs, which could be used to target ethnic Russians with a biological weapon. ? "He's already used. 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 drug had already been approved by the FDA in 2013. 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. A state lab in Russia's Siberia is beginning research into prehistoric viruses preserved in the remains of animals found in melting permafrost. 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. It has been successful in helping former Soviet and other countries fulfill public health obligations. In a statement sent to The Intercept, the institute rejected the Russian claims. 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. At this time the country only possessed a single facility focused on viruses, the Moscow-based D.I. 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. The secret program was code-named "Ecology". 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. J Miller, S Engelberg, and W Broad (2001). Early programs at the military lab focused on Francisella tularensis (the causative agent of tularaemia). In August 1925, he was appointed the first head of the Red Army's Military-Chemical Directorate (Voenno-khimicheskoe upravlenie, abbreviated to VOKhIMU). Cook, Michelle Stem and Amy F. Woolf (April 10, 2002). ????? 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. "Dead through spite, he will cause the others to shine." You know, if theres no evidence right now, that doesnt mean that no evidence exists, Zakharova said. [25] This triggered George H. W. Bush and Margaret Thatcher to pressure Gorbachev into opening for inspection several of his facilities. It conducted its secret activities at numerous sites across the USSR and employed 30-40,000 people.[20]. That too, is impossible. The threat reduction assisted post-Soviet states in containing and destroying the pathogens in Soviet labs. In the 1990s, Boris Yeltsin admitted to an offensive biological 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. Nulands comments were seized upon by far-right commentators as evidence of a secret plot. We are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces.. German intelligence independently identified the secret BW programme allegedly managed by Zlatogorov and Maslakovets. Putin comments on US-led biolabs in Ukraine pic.twitter.com/oqO4WDDxSr. 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.. Two major Japanese offensive BW installations at Pingfang and Changchun were overrun by the Red Army. 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. The Russian governments claim that the biological labs funded by the U.S. were experimenting with dangerous pathogens,thoughdebunked by the Russian biologists, was echoed by influential voices on Fox News like Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard. Not only did Russia inherit from the USSR the world's largest arsenal of biological weapons, but also all classified databanks on biological warfare program outputs, engineering documentation and manuals providing guidance in biological weapons deployment. Moscow Doesn't Like It", "Russia Commits to End Biological Weapons Program", Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland, "Interview: Alexander Kouzminov, Author of Biological Espionage", "From Offence to Defence? Speaking at a press briefing in Moscow, Kirillov claimed that a shipment of chemical . Moscow claimed its invading forces discovered evidence of an emergency clean-up. Consider what the world of media would look like without The Intercept. Yet it tried to provide cover for its activities by repeatedly charging that the. An outbreak of weaponized smallpox occurred during testing in 1971. Lewitin explained that all of the bacterial strains mentioned in the documents were the kind of samples found in any public health lab or epidemiological institute. 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 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. 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. Russia has claimed without any evidence that biological weapons are being developed in laboratories in Ukraine with support from the United States. And those who have read it will say: Well, yes, maybe there are no dangerous pathogens in these documents. Robert Mackey[emailprotected]theintercept.com@RobertMackey. The Soviet Union continued the development and mass production of offensive biological weapons, despite having signed the 1972 BWC. [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. These agents were prepared to be sprayed down on enemy fields from tanks attached to airplanes over hundreds of miles. The program reportedly includes institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences from Pushchino. 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. Russia is seeking to unlock unknown prehistoric viruses up to 50,000-years-old by extracting biological material from carcasses of ancient animals frozen in permafrost. He didnt take part, but some of his contemporaries did. In 1998, Alibek reported that "there was significant discussion of the possible use of monkeypox as a biological weapon instead of smallpox. Fox News ??????? ?????????? For the past six years, the BNITM has instead been working with public health officials in Ukraine to investigate seroprevalence, the existence of antibodies, on various infectious diseases occurring in this region. According to The Soviet Unions Agricultural Biowarfare Programme (2021), "The Pokrov biologics plant is the best-documented of the agricultural BW mobilisation facilities. House. 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. The UN security council met on Friday to discuss Moscows claims the US is funding military biological activities in Ukraine. It says material is being destroyed to conceal . Imagine you come to a certain office and see an inscription on one of the rooms:Instruction for the cleaner. ), 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. In the summer of 1936, Ivan Mikhailovich Velikanov led the Red Army's first expedition to conduct tests of biological weapons on Vozrozhdeniya Island. Symptoms. The Russian Biological Weapons Program: Vanished or Disappeared? By the following year, the idea that the U.S. operated biological weapons labs on Russias borders was treated as an undeniable fact on Russian talk shows. But they dont tell us about it for nothing. [21] The Soviet bioweapon effort became a huge program rivaling its considerable investment in nuclear arms. Soon after the broadcast, the same documents were also presented to the Russian public on the big screen at a defense ministry briefing led by Konashenkov and Kirillov. However, citing doubts concerning the United States compliance with the BWC, they subsequently augmented their biowarfare programs. Running parallel to the work underway at Vlasikha, BW research was also being pursued in an institution controlled by the state security apparatus. In July 1937, while planning for a second expedition to the island, Velikanov was arrested by the Soviet security organs and subsequently shot. 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. Russian scientists who have looked at the documents Russia calls proof of bioweapons labs in Ukraine say there is no evidence for such claims. [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. 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. [34], In the 1990s, specimens of deadly bacteria and viruses were stolen from western laboratories and delivered by Aeroflot planes to support the Russian biological weapons program. [17] The new military institute later pursued major programmes focused on variola virus and viral haemorrhagic fevers. on about your day, ask yourself: How likely is it that the story you just read would have been produced by a different news outlet if The Intercept hadnt done it? The issue of compliance by Russia with the BWC has been of concern for many years". [25], It has been reported that Russia made smallpox available to Saddam Hussein in the beginning of the 1990s. ", United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, "Disarmament Treaties Database: 1925 Geneva Protocol", "Russian Federation: Ratification of 1925 Geneva Protocol", "The Shortcomings of Indeterminacy in Arms Control Regimes: The Case of the Biological Weapons Convention", "Ex-Soviet Bioweapons Labs Are Fighting COVID-19. These are invitations to workshops and accompanying material, lists of instructions on biosafety, lists of completely innocent strains [of pathogens], many of them received from Russian collections., As for the stuff on avian and bat migration investigations, routine research on strains of flu and other viruses in the wild population that could jump to humans, Lewitin told me he couldnt comprehend it any other way than as a complete delirium., A parallel effort to evaluate the first set of documents presented as proof of biological weapons research at the labs in Kharkiv and Poltava was conducted by a group of nine Russian-speaking biologists based in Russia, Belarus, Sweden, and France that was published on Twitter in Russian by Olga V. Pettersson, an ex-pat Soviet expert in genome sequencing. In 2012, they fought anthrax in the Altai Territory. No Hyperbola! These are the first 100 units of a gene in an influenza virus. Ivanovskii Institute of Virology. In his account of the Soviet BW programme, Alibek, a former senior manager of Biopreparat, raises the intriguing possibility that in the late summer of 1942 the Red Army engaged in the deliberate aerosol dissemination of Francisella tularensis (the causative agent of tularaemia) against German panzer troops near Stalingrad. From the 1970s, it focused on molecular biology and the development of genetically modified organisms. Aralsk-7 was part of a. The latest claims come just hours . The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed on Thursday that the US undertook a secret biological weapons testing program in Georgia, killing at least 73 people. Thats all it takes to support the journalism you rely on. Asked why the Pentagon provided the money beyond the obvious fact that the Department of Defense is the one part of the U.S. government that is lavishly funded Favorov said that the Pentagon took the lead in the effort to upgrade biosecurity in those countries partly in response to the anthrax attacks in the U.S. that started just a week after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. [18] In his uncorroborated account, Alibek claims that capacity for the production of smallpox virus was established in Zagorsk. Rimmington argues that this "was in fact a pivotal period in the Soviet programme, when BW production technology was being transferred from the military to facilities concealed within civil manufacturing plants. [12], The Soviet Union reportedly had a large biological weapons program enhancing the usefulness of the Marburg virus. 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. 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.. Favorov told me that older, Soviet-trained military biologists probably assume that the U.S. is still doing that sort of work. The theory took on a life of its own on social media under the hashtag #usbiolabs, and found a welcome home among rightwing outlets in the US including the War Room podcast of Donald Trumps former adviser Steve Bannon and the Fox News primetime show hosted by Tucker Carlson. [16] This conclusion is not surprising, since it was precisely at this moment, that both the fate of the Soviet Union and the Third Reich hung precariously in the balance during the build-up to, and the outcome of, the Battle of Stalingrad. 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. 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. Nuland did not answer the question head on. Russia was reportedly developing smallpox-based weapons as late as 1988. Velikanov was placed in command of the Gorodomlya Island facility which was named as the Biotechnical Institute, also known by the code designation V/2-1094. 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). That possibility leaves even seasoned experts rattled. 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. They are working with the remains of extinct woolly . 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. This particular flu virus belongs to a strain called H5N1. However, the largest epidemic of anthrax in Russia took place in Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg) in April 1979. ? Committee on Armed Services. But a closer look at the records from the lab in Georgia reveals that there was nothing suspicious about the deaths reported in 2015, as Russian officials had claimed. It breeds and spreads among birds, but on rare occasion, it can infect . "[24], In 1989 the defector Vladimir Pasechnik convinced the British that the Soviets had genetically engineered a strain of Yersinia pestis to resist antibiotics. Zombie Attack in Russia REAL(biological wapon) Ataque de Zombies en Rusia REAL (arma biologica).wmv - YouTube AboutPressCopyrightContact usCreatorsAdvertiseDevelopersTermsPrivacyPolicy &. Topline. The Russian team is this week reportedly taking samples from a collection of beasts preserved in ice that have been found in recent years.. [1] The program began in the 1920s and lasted until at least September 1992 but has possibly been continued by Russia after that. Here's what he said: "Few young people: halfdead to give a start. 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. [35] At least two agents died, presumably from the transported pathogens. As a result there was a tightening-up of state control over personnel working on microbial pathogens and an emphasis on the gathering of intelligence from foreign legations relating to the feasibility and use of biological weapons. Crucially, Geissler notes that there are no contemporary accounts by the German army or intelligence services regarding the use of F. tularensis as a biological weapon at Stalingrad. Ukraine has biological research facilities, she said, adding that there was concern that Russian forces were trying to gain control of the labs. 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. With recent advances in gene editing, it may be possible for bioterrorists to design viruses capable of altering our behaviour, spreading such a disease and ultimately killing us. Russians test a gun that turns people into zombies Russian President Vladimir Putin says a mind-control gun may be ready within a decade. How many covert wars, miscarriages of justice, and dystopian technologies would remain hidden if our reporters werent on the beat? No. Russia's Defense Ministry says the United States appears to be running a clandestine biological weapons lab in the country of Georgia, allegedly flouting international rules and posing a direct . 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. As part of this work, WHO has strongly recommended to the ministry ofhealth in Ukraine and other responsible bodies to destroy high-threatpathogens to prevent any potential spills, the UN health agency said. 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.. A screenshot of a talk show on Russian state television in 2019. 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. That quickly made it a priority for the U.S. to help secure dangerous pathogens, particularly in some of the impoverished former Soviet states where anthrax is naturally occurring but had also been used in biological weapons experiments before the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Biblical famine As well as a deadly zombie virus, Earth apparently 'will be hit with a famine of biblical proportions.' Spearheaded by the Vector State Research Centre of. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Kremlin spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told reporters: "We can conclude that in Ukrainian laboratories close to our borders, components of biological weapons were being developed. The existence of these chimeric viruses programmes was one reason why Alibek defected to the United States in 1992. [36], As of 2021, the United States "assesses that the Russian Federation (Russia) maintains an offensive BW program and is in violation of its obligation under Articles I and II of the BWC. The U.N. Security Council met at Russia's request to discuss Russia's claim of U.S.-supported chemical and biological weapons labs in Ukraine. Tucker Carlson took the bait offered by the Russian militarys reference to coronavirus. and the kicker is it will eventually leave us extinct. [20], The USSR was a signatory of 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). The first set of Ukrainian documents to be made public by the Russian military were published by the Russian government news agency RIA Novosti on March 6. Konashenkovadditionally stated as a matter of fact something for which none of the documents presented at the briefing backs up: that American-financed studies of bird, bat, and reptile pathogens planned for later this year would include experiments on the ability of the animals to be used to covertly transmit weaponized African swine fever and anthrax. In an interview, Pettersson told me that while she had faced a torrent of online harassment because the collaborative research thread was posted on her Twitter account, she was most concerned for the safety of her colleagues in Russia and Belarus who had helped debunk the Russian governments claims despite living in countries where such criticism could bring severe consequences. Some of the documents cast by Kirillov as evidence of biological weapons research actually concerned the Ukrainian health ministrys cooperation with German experts from BNITM, the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, to improve surveillance and diagnosis of diseases like dengue fever and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever.