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Moments later, Nebenzya did something of an accidental homage to Powell, by holding up images of pregnant women who were injured in the shelling of a maternity hospital in Mariupol by Russian forces and repeating the thoroughly debunked claim that the photographs had been staged. pic.twitter.com/LiFrprWAUt. 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. It asserted that "the bacterial option could be successfully used in war" and proposed a plan for the organisation of Soviet military bacteriology. "He's already used. Ukraines ambassador to the world body, Sergiy Kyslytsya, called the idea being advanced by Russia a bunch of insane delirium. The kind of reporting we do is essential to democracy, but it is not easy, cheap, or profitable. Putin comments on US-led biolabs in Ukraine pic.twitter.com/oqO4WDDxSr. [12], A production line to manufacture smallpox on an industrial scale was launched in the Vector Institute in 1990. 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. These weapons could be . 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. 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. Nostradamus, a locked-in member of the "seer" Mount Rushmore, predicted that a zombie apocalypse will occur in 2021 after a Russian scientist creates a biological weapon that produces a. 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. German intelligence independently identified the secret BW programme allegedly managed by Zlatogorov and Maslakovets. 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. The Soviet Union conducted experimentations with the Marburg virus in aerosol form to transform it into a strategic-operational biological weapon. 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 list of destroyed strains published by RIA Novosti and other Russian media outlets contains not a single particularly dangerous strain. #??????? These agents were prepared to be sprayed down on enemy fields from tanks attached to airplanes over hundreds of miles. Russia's mission in New York called for an emergency meeting Friday, 24 hours after its defense ministry falsely claimed it uncovered "U.S. secret military biological projects in Ukraine," per . 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 . From the 1970s, it focused on molecular biology and the development of genetically modified organisms. Favorov told me that older, Soviet-trained military biologists probably assume that the U.S. is still doing that sort of work. Because it upsets so many people that I talk to constantly, I have introduced a bill to stop taxpayer funding for bioweapons, Greene said. Moscow claimed its invading forces discovered evidence of an emergency clean-up. It conducted its secret activities at numerous sites across the USSR and employed 30-40,000 people.[20]. Carlsons claims about what Nuland said were quickly translated into Russian by the state broadcaster in Moscow and shared on Twitter by Russian diplomats. The allegations were quickly amplified by China, which supported the claims during the UN security council debate. Two years earlier, the same nerve agent had been used in a botched attempt to murderSkripal in England. Ivanovskii Institute of Virology. The anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny survived an attempted assassination with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok in Russia in 2020. ?????????? Photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images. 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 . 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. 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. 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. Fears are growing Vladimir Put "[30] Yeltsin promised to end the Russian bio-weapons program and to convert its facilities for benevolent scientific and medical purposes. Russia to Witness 'Zombie' Anthrax Outbreak? The principal architect of the Soviet Union's first military biological programme was Yakov Moiseevich Fishman[ru]. At a second briefing three days later,he claimed that documents on public health projects to detect and monitor animal diseases in Ukraine including coronaviruses in bats, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever and hantavirus in ticks and rodents, and avian flu in ducks that migrate from Ukraine to Russia were proof of a sinister plot to send infected animals to Russia. Aralsk-7 was part of a. What if these labs are creating viruses just like COVID-19?. 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. [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. 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 "[33] They conclude that "In hindsight, we know that with the ultimate failure of the [negotiations] process and the continued Russian refusal to open the facilities to the present day, neither the Yeltsin or Putin administrations ever carried out 'a visible campaign to dismantle once and for all' the residual elements of the Soviet bioweapons program". Over the next decade or so, dual-use BW production plants were created at Berdsk, Omutninsk, Penza and Kurgan. Biblical famine As well as a deadly zombie virus, Earth apparently 'will be hit with a famine of biblical proportions.' 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, who was a well-known Soviet scientist, used his old connections to help oversee the modernization of labs in the former Soviet states, including the lab in Georgia, while serving as the CDCs regional director for Central Asia from 2000 to 2008. [26], The NunnLugar Cooperative Threat Reduction aimed to secure and dismantle weapons of mass destruction, including the Soviet biological weapons program. [12], The Soviet Union reportedly had a large biological weapons program enhancing the usefulness of the Marburg virus. Both America and the Soviet Union experimented with anthrax, which can kill people when inhaled. Conclusion. We are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces.. A state lab in Russia's Siberia is beginning research into prehistoric viruses preserved in the remains of animals found in melting permafrost. The virus can be isolated and produced as a biological weapon. A total of fourteen highly detailed reports on the Soviet BW programme were issued in the period 1924-1927. 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. The Russian team is this week reportedly taking samples from a collection of beasts preserved in ice that have been found in recent years.. 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. 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. Russia has claimed without any evidence that biological weapons are being developed in laboratories in Ukraine with support from the United States. 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. An outbreak of weaponized smallpox occurred during testing in 1971. Russians test a gun that turns people into zombies Russian President Vladimir Putin says a mind-control gun may be ready within a decade. [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. ATLANTA, GA. (THECOUNT) Forget the current worldwide pandemic, according to CDC, there may also be a zombie apocalypse coming in 2021. ?????? 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. The new strain, called "Variant U", had been successfully weaponized and approved by the Soviet Ministry of Defense in 1990.[12]. 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. Whatever their expectations, it is beyond doubt that the Russian government has succeeded in generating a global media frenzy of speculative commentary on the supposed existence of bioweapons labs in Ukraine despite the fact that the documents they have pointed to as evidence offer no support for the allegations. (2012). 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. This decree established a secret network of BW institutes within the USSR Ministry of Agriculture. 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. Yet it tried to provide cover for its activities by repeatedly charging that the. 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. And chances are . 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. 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. [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. 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. 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 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. 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. ? At a U.N. Security Council meeting on March 11, 2022, Russia U.N. Russian scientists who have looked at the documents Russia calls proof of bioweapons labs in Ukraine say there is no evidence for such claims. These worked in close collaboration with Soviet military virologists and focused on both animal pathogens such as FMD and exotic zoonotic infections. 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. For starters, a Russian scientist will successfully develop a biological weapon in 2021, and create a virus that morphs humankind into zombies. [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. [17] The new military institute later pursued major programmes focused on variola virus and viral haemorrhagic fevers. "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 . [citation needed]. [12] It was reported to use chicken eggs for the cultivation of the virus. But they dont tell us about it for nothing. [25] This triggered George H. W. Bush and Margaret Thatcher to pressure Gorbachev into opening for inspection several of his facilities. No Hyperbola! Project Bonfire was the codename for the budget to develop antibiotic-resistant microbial strains. 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.. Nostradamus predicted a zombie apocalypse in 2021, citing a Russian scientist who created a biological weapon that produces a virus that - Turns humans zombies. It was complete with viruses and pathogens that were genetically-altered and antibiotic resistant, with sophisticated delivery systems. The paperwork even indicated that some of the strains had been purchased from Russian labs. Defecting Soviet bioweaponeers such as Vladimir Pasechnik and Colonel Kanatjan Alibekov confirmed that the program had been massive and still existed. In the 1980s and 1990s, many of these agents were genetically altered to resist heat, cold, and antibiotics. The secret program was code-named "Ecology". The most important difference between biological weapons development, and the mundane but vital work of identifying, describing, and studying the viruses and bacteria that occur in nature and pose a threat to public health, Favorov told me, is that none of these labs have any type of equipment for the modification of the strain., In all these labs, he said, you only have the equipment which might describe what you have, but not to modify it., Update: Friday, March 18, 3:05 a.m. [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]. Biden said those accusations were not merely false, but a sign that President Vladimir Putin. The convention was backed by Richard Nixon, who in 1969 also put a stop to the US developing its own offensive biological weapons. [1] The program began in the 1920s and lasted until at least September 1992 but has possibly been continued by Russia after that. UK and US intelligence officials have warned there is "serious concern" Russia could use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine. 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. 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. 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. [18] In his uncorroborated account, Alibek claims that capacity for the production of smallpox virus was established in Zagorsk. 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. Nakamitsu pointed to the Biological Weapons Convention, which has prohibited the development and use of biological weapons since 1975. Those documents were orders from Ukraines health minister, issued on the second day of the Russian invasion, directing labs in two cities, Kharkiv and Poltava, to destroy collections of bacterial pathogens used for research. Marburg virus is also a Category A bio-warfare agent identified by the CDC's classification system and is hosted in African fruit bat. 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 former Soviet states on its borders. 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. 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. 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. ? Two special ships and two aircraft were assigned to Khatanever for use in tests focused on the dissemination of tularaemia bacteria. [12] (aka Kanatjan Alibekov). This would not have sudden onset, like the movies. [11] By 1936, scientists working on BW at both Vlasikha and Suzdal were transferred to Gorodomlya Island where they occupied an institute for the study of foot-and-mouth disease which had been built originally for the Peoples Commissariat of Agriculture (Narkomzem). 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. Chief among these is Erhardt Geissler who notes that tularaemia is endemic in the region and in any case a large outbreak occurred during the winter of 1941-1942. Moscow went on to claim that it had found documents related to the secret US operation in laboratories in Kharkiv and Poltava. 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. 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. [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. Robert Mackey[emailprotected]theintercept.com@RobertMackey. [12] Another, possibly more reliable source, regarding the Soviet BW programme in Leningrad are a series of secret reports generated by the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) - commonly known as MI6. Speaking at a press briefing in Moscow, Kirillov claimed that a shipment of chemical . In February 1928, Fishman prepared a key report for Kliment Efremovich Voroshilov (the People's Commissar for Military and Navy Affairs and Chairman of the USSR's Revolutionary Military Council) on the Soviet Union's preparedness for biological warfare. In 1992, a Trilateral Agreement was signed with the United States and the United Kingdom promising to end biological weapons programs and convert facilities to benevolent purposes, but compliance with the agreementand the fate of the former Soviet bio-agents and facilitiesis still mostly undocumented. 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. 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. Russia was reportedly developing smallpox-based weapons as late as 1988. 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. In that case too, documents supposedly proving the allegations were published in the state media records from the lab which showed that dozens of Georgians had died in 2015 while taking the American-made drug Sovaldi. 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. 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. [20], The USSR was a signatory of 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). 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. The scheme was originally known as Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) but is now more commonly referred to as biological engagement. 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). 1. At some point around the 25 September, the facility was evacuated and the buildings partially destroyed. Russia has been saying in recent weeks that Ukraine might possess chemical or biological weapons. 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? 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. The safe and effective drug was being administered to Georgians for free as part of an effort to eliminate hepatitis C from Georgia,and the project was overseen by the CDC with donated drugs from Gilead. Topline. 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. (11 October 2013). 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.. 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? 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. [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. 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." Soviet officials, including Boris Yeltsin, lied about what caused the outbreak until 1992. United States. Imagine you come to a certain office and see an inscription on one of the rooms:Instruction for the cleaner. At this time the country only possessed a single facility focused on viruses, the Moscow-based D.I. Scientists warn that humans should be worried about being wiped out by a killer pathogen that is specifically designed to kill people of only a particular race, based on their genetic material/. Nulands comments were seized upon by far-right commentators as evidence of a secret plot. A screenshot of a talk show on Russian state television in 2019. In August 1925, he was appointed the first head of the Red Army's Military-Chemical Directorate (Voenno-khimicheskoe upravlenie, abbreviated to VOKhIMU). It says material is being destroyed to conceal . 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. [1][2], During World War II, Joseph Stalin was forced to move his biological warfare (BW) operations out of the way of advancing German forces and may have used tularemia against German troops in 1942 near Stalingrad.