Tens of thousands of scientists, researchers, doctors, engineers, technicians, and . In April 1974, a new agency, the All-Union Science Production Association Biopreparat, was created under the Main Administration of the Microbiological Industry (Glavmikrobioprom) to spearhead the Soviet offensive BW programme. The first Russian biologist to make his analysis of the evidence widely known wasEugene Lewitin, who holds advanced degrees in biology from Moscow State University and GosNIIgenetika, a biotechnology research institute. United States. Another innovation was the "mobilization production facilities"ostensibly civil manufacturing plantswhich incorporated capacity for production of weapons in wartime emergency." Ivanovskii Institute of Virology. I hope that this is more of a disinformation talking point than an actual thing, Gronvall said. Aralsk-7 was part of a. German intelligence independently identified the secret BW programme allegedly managed by Zlatogorov and Maslakovets. ?????? Written by Tuan Nguyen, Contributor on April 8, 2012. At least one of the pilots was a Russian Foreign Intelligence Service officer". In a statement sent to The Intercept, the institute rejected the Russian claims. Both the US and Ukraine have categorically denied they are developing biological weapons inside the country. But they dont tell us about it for nothing. Speaking at a press briefing in Moscow, Kirillov claimed that a shipment of chemical . [12] However, a number of prominent scholars have disputed Alibek's version of events. ????? When Steve Rosenberg of the BBC put it to Zakharova in late 2018 that there was no evidence in the documents tracking the Sovaldi project that any biological weapons experiments on humans had been performed in the U.S.-funded lab, the Russian diplomat unwittingly echoed Donald Rumsfelds infamous remarks in 2002 on the lack of evidence for Iraqi WMD, in her reply. Russian bioweapons program from 1920s to 1990s, List of Soviet/Russian biological weapons institutions, programs and projects, Notable biological agent outbreaks and accidents, Leitenberg, M., Zilinskas, R., & Kuhn, J. He also alleges that human experimentation occurred with typhus, glanders and melioidosis in the Solovetsky camp. It continued to utilise the biological weapons test site on Vozrozhdeniya Island in the Aral Sea. The threat of chemical and nuclear warfare loomed large over most militaries during the Cold War. 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. It asserted that "the bacterial option could be successfully used in war" and proposed a plan for the organisation of Soviet military bacteriology. 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. Consider what the world of media would look like without The Intercept. 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. 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]. In July 1931, the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU), a forerunner of the NKVD, seized control of the Convent of the Intercession in Suzdal and then the following year created a special prison laboratory, or sharashka, where around nineteen leading plague and tularaemia specialists were forced to work on the development of biological weapons. [19], In 1953 the management of the Soviet BW programme was assigned to the USSR Ministry of Defence's Fifteenth Administration. The development of new nerve agents during the 1940s, as well as advanced delivery systems later on. Who would hold party elites accountable to the values they proclaim to have? [35], In the 2000s, the academician, "A.S.", proposed a new biological warfare program, called the "Biological Shield of Russia" to president Vladimir Putin. Soviet officials, including Boris Yeltsin, lied about what caused the outbreak until 1992. 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. But Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, the Russian defense ministry spokesperson, told the state news agency that the attempt to secure the labs was itself evidence that Ukrainian and American scientists had been secretly plotting to weaponize dangerous pathogens. [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. 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 . Ukraine does operate biological laboratories that receive US funding. [2], "Pokrov, Berdsk and Omutninsk all revealed evidence of biological activity since 1975, such as large-scale production in hardened facilities, aerosol test chambers, excessive containment levels for current activity and accommodation for weapons-filling lines."[4]. The new strain, called "Variant U", had been successfully weaponized and approved by the Soviet Ministry of Defense in 1990.[12]. 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. ? ????? We are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces.. Those records were obtained and made public by a former head of Georgian intelligence living in exile in Russia, Igor Giorgadze. Russia's claims about secret American biological warfare labs in Ukraine are taking root in the United States too, uniting COVID-19 conspiracy theorists, QAnon adherents and some . The new facility became operational in July 1949. [25] This triggered George H. W. Bush and Margaret Thatcher to pressure Gorbachev into opening for inspection several of his facilities. Germany launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 and following the capture of nearby Kalinin in October, the BW facility on Gorodomlya Island was evacuated and eventually relocated to Kirov. The principal architect of the Soviet Union's first military biological programme was Yakov Moiseevich Fishman[ru]. He knows therell be severe consequences because of the united Nato front but the point is: its real.. 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. ", 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. Topline. This would not have sudden onset, like the movies. [12] (aka Kanatjan Alibekov). [23][41], A Soviet-era agricultural biowarfare programme was pursued from 1958 through to the collapse of the USSR in 1991. That too, is impossible. Alibek maintains that "Soviet leaders from Leonid Brezhnev to Mikhail Gorbachev personally authorized prohibited development, testing, and production efforts [and] cites several Gorbachev decrees stepping up the pace of work within the biological weapons complex, and directing the creation of mobile production facilities so that inspectors could not uncover the program. Russian scientists who have looked at the documents Russia calls proof of bioweapons labs in Ukraine say there is no evidence for such claims. And weapons developed in secret Soviet labs are still used to poison Russian dissidents and defectors. He had been a leading participant of a Russian team despatched to combat the October 1910 to February 1911 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Manchuria. The program reportedly includes institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences from Pushchino. Now hes talking about new false flags hes setting up, including hes asserting that, we, in America, have biological as well as chemical weapons in Europe. [26], The NunnLugar Cooperative Threat Reduction aimed to secure and dismantle weapons of mass destruction, including the Soviet biological weapons program. [15], In his history of the Soviet Union in the Second World War, Christopher Bellamy argues that if either side was going to break the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting the use of gas and bacteriological warfare, then 1942 was the most likely year. "I'm not . What if these labs are creating viruses just like COVID-19?. 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. Hes already used chemical weapons in the past, and we should be careful of whats about to come. Russia has claimed without any evidence that biological weapons are being developed in laboratories in Ukraine with support from the United States. Here they aimed to develop strains of plague that remained viable when loaded into artillery shells, aerial bombs and other means of dispersal. 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. 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. 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. Thats all it takes to support the journalism you rely on. These worked in close collaboration with Soviet military virologists and focused on both animal pathogens such as FMD and exotic zoonotic infections. 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. Last week, both the Chinese statement and the Infowars video were promoted on Facebook as paid advertisements. [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. Even reporters for state-run outlets, Lewitin said, have a duty to study what the state calls proof and consult experts to make sure official claims about science are accurate. Project Factor was the codename for the budget to develop microbial weapons with new properties of high virulence, improved stability, and new clinical syndromes. Biden said those accusations were not merely false, but a sign that President Vladimir Putin. You know, if theres no evidence right now, that doesnt mean that no evidence exists, Zakharova said. Georgia also invited international experts to examine the lab in person in November, 2018. And those who have read it will say: Well, yes, maybe there are no dangerous pathogens in these documents. He points to evidence that infected rodents were the key to the large-scale outbreaks and that inhalationary tularaemia may have resulted from inhalation of dust from contaminated straw in matresses. Nakamitsu pointed to the Biological Weapons Convention, which has prohibited the development and use of biological weapons since 1975. 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. The Soviet Union conducted experimentations with the Marburg virus in aerosol form to transform it into a strategic-operational biological weapon. In May 1941, a number of measures codenamed Yurta were implemented to counter the perceived threat of biological sabotage by the German and Japanese intelligence services. ???????????? 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. Ukraines ambassador to the world body, Sergiy Kyslytsya, called the idea being advanced by Russia a bunch of insane delirium. 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. 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. Russia was reportedly developing smallpox-based weapons as late as 1988. Here's what he said: "Few young people: halfdead to give a start. 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. 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. For starters, a Russian scientist will successfully develop a biological weapon in 2021, and create a virus that morphs humankind into zombies. [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). 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. 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. pic.twitter.com/LiFrprWAUt. Fears are growing Vladimir Put [12], The Soviet Union reportedly had a large biological weapons program enhancing the usefulness of the Marburg virus. 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? [1] Annualized production capacity for weaponized smallpox, for example, was 90 to 100 tons. 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.. "Biological weapons have been outlawed since the BWC entered into force in 1975," she added. This was later to manifest itself as a key feature of the subsequent Biopreparat programme". It was complete with viruses and pathogens that were genetically-altered and antibiotic resistant, with sophisticated delivery systems. WASHINGTON White House officials have dismissed Russian allegations, recently leveled again by a top Kremlin general, that the United States developed biological weapons in Ukraine,. For instance, after Victoria Nuland, a State Department official, said that the U.S. was working with Ukraine to prevent biological research materials in Ukrainian labs from being seized by Russian forces, Carlson and Gabbard amplified the false claim made by the Russian military that the routine public health research in those labs was dangerous. "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. 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 . Finally, Russia has a track record of accusing the West of the very crimes that Russia itself is perpetrating. Marburg virus is also a Category A bio-warfare agent identified by the CDC's classification system and is hosted in African fruit bat. According to The Soviet Unions Agricultural Biowarfare Programme (2021), "The Pokrov biologics plant is the best-documented of the agricultural BW mobilisation facilities. Unfortunately, a bioweapon made using an artificial virus has recently become feasible, making the possibility of a zombie virus seem real. It is Russia that has long maintained a biological weapon program in violation of international law.. 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. Spearheaded by the Vector State Research Centre of. That, he said, is nonsense that echoes German Nazi propaganda.. 1. 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. Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokesperson, said that the documents made public by Giorgadze again raise questions about the U.S. militarys true aims and objectives in Georgia. The documents Giorgadze publicized were described as a bombshell on Russian state television, in a report that quoted a former Russian military biologist speculating that Georgians were being used as guinea pigs in biological weapons experiments. 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 drug had already been approved by the FDA in 2013. Favorov recalled that there was pressure on Soviet scientists to look for potential military applications for their research. Carlsons claims about what Nuland said were quickly translated into Russian by the state broadcaster in Moscow and shared on Twitter by Russian diplomats. ???????????? 12 Mar 2022. If you're dead, you're immobile and you rot. 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. Updated: 15:41, 28 Dec 2020 EXPERTS fear Russian scientists are experimenting with the deadly Ebola virus as part of a terrifying "Doomsday" chemical weapons project. 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. [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.