By signing up, I agree to receive emails from The Intercept and to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. ???????????? Speaking at a press briefing in Moscow, Kirillov claimed that a shipment of chemical . ?????????? 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. Russia has been saying in recent weeks that Ukraine might possess chemical or biological weapons. 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. [8] Due to these reservations, it was in practice a "no-first-use" agreement only.[9]. 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 . [21] The Soviet bioweapon effort became a huge program rivaling its considerable investment in nuclear arms. This particular flu virus belongs to a strain called H5N1. "The Memoirs of an Inconvenient Man: Revelations About Biological Weapons Research in the Soviet Union" by Igor V. Domaradskij and Wendy Orent, This page was last edited on 24 January 2023, at 00:52. On the House floor, Greene repeated the claims that have jumped from Russian state media to Infowars to Fox News as she introduced the Stopping the Spread of Taxpayer-Funded Bioweapon Act., Greene talks about Biolabs in Ukraine and announces her bill to prevent US taxpayer funding for Bioweapons pic.twitter.com/IJZDb9Tsop, Greene argued that her legislation was necessary because, in her words, there are reports of possibly deadly pathogens escaping these biolabs in places like Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan that is [sic] responsible for killing people. She did not mention that those reports were from Russian state media, quoting claims Russian officials made based on faulty evidence. Congress. 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. International restrictions on biological warfare began only with the June 1925 Geneva Protocol, which prohibits the use but not the possession or development of chemical and biological weapons. [31][4], Compliance with the agreement, as well as the fate of the former Soviet bio-agents and facilities, is still mostly undocumented. Project Factor was the codename for the budget to develop microbial weapons with new properties of high virulence, improved stability, and new clinical syndromes. 1. 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 "I'm not . Forty years after the UN General Assembly gave the secretary-general broad authority to investigate allegations of chemical and biological weapons use, that power is still under threat. Thats all it takes to support the journalism you rely on. It asserted that "the bacterial option could be successfully used in war" and proposed a plan for the organisation of Soviet military bacteriology. [32] Leitenberg and Zilinskas, in The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History (2012), state flatly that "In March 1992Yeltsin acknowledged the existence of an illegal bioweapons program in the former Soviet Union and ordered it to be dissolved. The paperwork even indicated that some of the strains had been purchased from Russian labs. In the summer of 2016, the Russian army participated in the fight against the epidemic of anthrax in Yamal. 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. So what is the dispute all about, and what is actually happening inside Ukraine? In 1926, at a small laboratory controlled by VOKhIMU, Fishman initiated research on Bacillus anthracis (the causative agent of anthrax). [1] The program began in the 1920s and lasted until at least September 1992 but has possibly been continued by Russia after that. His back is against the wall, said Biden, mentioning the false claims about US-funded biolabs in Ukraine. 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. 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. 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. Russian scientists who have looked at the documents Russia calls proof of bioweapons labs in Ukraine say there is no evidence for such claims. 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. The Russian military, Lewitin told Aronova, had simply lied about what the Ukrainian documents meant. Two major Japanese offensive BW installations at Pingfang and Changchun were overrun by the Red Army. Nostradamus predicted a zombie apocalypse in 2021, citing a Russian scientist who created a biological weapon that produces a virus that - Turns humans zombies. Photo: Russian Ministry of Defense via YouTube. Last week, both the Chinese statement and the Infowars video were promoted on Facebook as paid advertisements. Symptoms. And chances are . It is Russia that has active chemical and biological weapons programs and is in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention and Biological Weapons Convention. 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. 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. 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. Maybe there are dangerous strains in other documents that cannot be published openly., When I asked Lewitin in an online chat this week what he made of the other documents, on research projects involving American experts from the CDC and USDA, he replied: I would say that this is a hash of scattered information with no relevance to the subject [of] bioweapons. He knows therell be severe consequences because of the united Nato front but the point is: its real.. We dont have ads, so we depend on our members 35,000 and counting to help us hold the powerful to account. ????? The kind of reporting we do is essential to democracy, but it is not easy, cheap, or profitable. A screenshot of a talk show on Russian state television in 2019. 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. For starters, a Russian scientist will successfully develop a biological weapon in 2021, and create a virus that morphs humankind into zombies. The first group to arrive from Kirov included the new director of the Institute of Hygiene, Major General Nikolai Fillipovich Kopylov. Russia's Reform of its Biological Weapons Complex and the Implications for Western Security", "The Soviet Union's Offensive Program: The Implications for Contemporary Arms Control", "Next Generation Bioweapons: Genetic Engineering and BW", "Anthrax genome reveals secrets about a Soviet bioweapons accident", "Interviews With Biowarriors: Sergei Popov", Soviet Defector Warns of Biological Weapons, Statement by Dr. Kenneth Alibek before the Joint Economic Committee of United States Congress, Post-World War II Programs of Biological Weapons. Another innovation was the "mobilization production facilities"ostensibly civil manufacturing plantswhich incorporated capacity for production of weapons in wartime emergency." 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. [15], On the 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany commenced Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union along a 2,900-kilometre front. 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. Our group observed nothing out of the ordinary, or that we wouldnt expect to see in a legitimate facility of this sort.. The convention was backed by Richard Nixon, who in 1969 also put a stop to the US developing its own offensive biological weapons. No. This week, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria . [10], In his account of the history of the Soviet BW programme, Alibek, who as Kanatzhan Baizakovich Alibekov had been a biological weapons scientist for Biopreparat, describes a quite separate strand of early BW research being pursued in Leningrad. In. Over the course of its history, the Soviet program is known to have weaponized and stockpiled the following bio-agents[3] (and to have pursued basic research on many more): These programs became immense and were conducted at dozens of secret sites employing up to 65,000 people. This week, speaking to business leaders in Washington, Joe Biden warned that Vladimir Putin could use biological weapons. Topline. It says material is being destroyed to conceal . 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. Here's what he said: "Few young people: halfdead to give a start. 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. "[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 assessment of the US state department is that Russia continues to maintain an offensive biological weapons programme in violation of the convention it signed. This article has been revised to correct the description of the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok used in two high-profile assassination attempts attributed to Russian intelligence agents by Western governments and journalists. And weapons developed in secret Soviet labs are still used to poison Russian dissidents and defectors. We were given access to all areas of the site, examined relevant documentation, and interviewed staff, and concluded that the Center demonstrates significant transparency, Lentzosreported in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Russian officials have repeatedly invoked the fact that the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 on the false pretext that the country had weapons of mass destruction including mobile biological research laboratories as a reason to distrust the Americans now. The article claims that Nostradamus, also known as Michel de Nostradame, predicted a Russian scientist would create a biological weapon and produce a virus that would turn humans into. 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. Strange, alarming, morbidly intriguing -- any or all of those would serve to describe the newly announced "Zombie Gun" that Russian president Vladimir Putin plans to use "for achieving. 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). Unit 68240 of Vladimir. The latest claims come just hours . It was transferred to the control of the USSR Ministry of Defence in March 1954. In a phone call this week, Favorov told me that he suspects some of the Russian militarys wild ideas about what is happening in U.S.-funded labs in former Soviet countries is likely projection. Two special ships and two aircraft were assigned to Khatanever for use in tests focused on the dissemination of tularaemia bacteria. ???????????? 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. Running parallel to the work underway at Vlasikha, BW research was also being pursued in an institution controlled by the state security apparatus. 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 . Earlier this week, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, accused Russia under Putin of having a long and well-documented track record of using chemical weapons, pointing to the poisoning of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny and Russias support of the Syrian regime while it deployed chemical weapons. [12] It was reported to use chicken eggs for the cultivation of the virus. The scheme was originally known as Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) but is now more commonly referred to as biological engagement. 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. 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. By 1960, numerous BW research facilities existed throughout the Soviet Union. Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov presented documents on recent biological research projects at labs in Ukraine supported by U.S. funding at a briefing in Moscow on March 10, 2022. Those records were obtained and made public by a former head of Georgian intelligence living in exile in Russia, Igor Giorgadze. On the 9 August 1945, the Soviet Union launched its invasion of Japanese-controlled Manchuria. [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. 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 2012, they fought anthrax in the Altai Territory. The Council last discussed the issue of alleged biological materials in Ukraine in a meeting on 11 March.. United States-Ukraine agreement Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia, told the Council that his delegation is in possession of new evidence of a United States-Ukrainian agreement to conduct biological weapons research on Ukrainian territory, dating back as far as 2005. 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. 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.. (Most of that long thread was translated into English by Ilya Lozovsky, an editor at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. It is Russia that has long maintained a biological weapon program in violation of international law.. The new facility became operational in July 1949. [12] (aka Kanatjan Alibekov). 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 . The biolab narrative "exploded on social media right . [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. 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. A report from 2018 on Russian state television claimed that a U.S.-funded lab in the former Soviet republic of Georgia was cover for biological weapons research. Western officials and open-source researchers offered convincing evidence that both attempted murders were carried out by Russian intelligence agents. The list contains only strains common to microbiological and even more so to epidemiological laboratories., More than 800 signatories endorsed Lewitins letter when it was transformed into a petition from Russian biologists urging Russian journalists to stop repeating the governments false, absolutely groundless and hatred-inciting statements about allegedly found evidence of the development of biological weapons in Ukrainian laboratories.. In the summer of 1936, Ivan Mikhailovich Velikanov led the Red Army's first expedition to conduct tests of biological weapons on Vozrozhdeniya Island. 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. Written by Tuan Nguyen, Contributor on April 8, 2012. 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.. 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. "Few young people: half-dead to give a start," Nostradamus mentioned in his writing. All this suggests that the real lesson Russian officials took from the false American claims of WMD in Iraq is not that such claims need to be backed by solid evidence, but that they can make similarly false claims now, secure in the knowledge that very few people will bother to look at the evidence at all. Let me explain with a simple example, he said. 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. These are the first 100 units of a gene in an influenza virus. 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. Making their first appearance during the Cold War, survivalists truly believed in an inevitable apocalypse caused by a nuclear war between the U.S. and Soviet Union and attempted to prepare retreats that would enable them to survive the blasts from nuclear bombs. 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. Project Bonfire was the codename for the budget to develop antibiotic-resistant microbial strains. An outbreak of weaponized smallpox occurred during testing in 1971. ??????????? Ukraines ambassador to the world body, Sergiy Kyslytsya, called the idea being advanced by Russia a bunch of insane delirium. Around 100 personnel from Velikanov's Biotechnical Institute participated in the experiments. The leniency with which the Japanese BW specialists were treated - the longest sentence any served was seven years - has led a number of scholars to conclude that some sort of deal was struck between the Soviet authorities and the Unit 731 personnel held captive in the USSR. 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. Conclusion. We know pathogens dont respect borders, so helping to put out public health fires before they become too big is an advantage to all of us, she said. This would not have sudden onset, like the movies. At a U.N. Security Council meeting on March 11, 2022, Russia U.N. [10] It was at this time that Ivan Mikhailovich Velikanov[ru], an expert on botulinum toxin and botulism, emerged as the lead scientist in the early Soviet biological weapons program. Away from television screens, the unfounded Russian allegations were echoed by the Chinese foreign ministrys spokesman, Zhao Lijian, and amplified in a conspiratorial Infowars video that was viewed more than 650,000 times. 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. 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. Biopreparat pursued offensive research, development, and production of biological agents under the guise of legitimate civil biotechnology research. Later that same summer, Leonid Moiseevich Khatanever, the new director of the Biotechnical Institute and an expert on Francisella tularensis (the causative agent of tularaemia), led a second expedition to Vozrozhdeniya. The article claims that Nostradamus, also known as Michel de Nostradame, predicted a Russian scientist would create a biological weapon and produce a virus that would turn humans into zombies, according to one of his prophecies from a book discovered at the National Library in Rome "which is believed to belong to him." "It is a milestone for Russia's deception and lies," Thomas-Greenfield shot back. [25] This triggered George H. W. Bush and Margaret Thatcher to pressure Gorbachev into opening for inspection several of his facilities. and the kicker is it will eventually leave us extinct. Red Lies: Biological warfare and the Soviet Union, An Obscure Weapon of the Cold War Edges Into the Limelight, Soviet Army used 'rat weapon' during WWII, Memories of bioweapons developer Domaradsky (Russian), Re-Evaluating Russia's Biological Weapons Policy, as Reflected in the Criminal Code and Official Admissions: Insubordination Leading to a President's Subordination, Bioweapons from Russia: Stemming the Flow, Stepnagorsk Scientific and Technical Institute, Institute of Ultra Pure Biochemical Preparations, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Soviet_biological_weapons_program&oldid=1135331140, Short description is different from Wikidata, All Wikipedia articles written in American English, Articles with unsourced statements from August 2021, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. The ambassador endorsed a discredited conspiracy theory that the photographs had been staged. 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. 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 visits occurred in January 1991. However, the officers, doctors and other personnel from Unit 731 were in fact transferred to the comparative comfort of the NKVD special prison camp No. 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. ???????????? Russian authorities said that no biological material was present in the lab at the time of the explosion. It says material is being destroyed to conceal . Yet it tried to provide cover for its activities by repeatedly charging that the. ? 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. Robert Mackey[emailprotected]theintercept.com@RobertMackey. 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. 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. The death records, Kirillov claimed, gave Russian experts, reason to believe that a highly toxic chemical drug or a highly lethal biological agent was [administered] under the guise of medical treatment at the U.S.-funded Lugar Research Center in Tbilisi. No Hyperbola! 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..
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