RTThu, 17 Mar 2022 20:03 UTC
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The Russian Defense Ministry said on Thursday it will soon release additional documents pertaining to the operation of Pentagon-funded biolabs in Ukraine. Moscow believes they have been involved in bioweapons research.
Russian military specialists in weapons of mass destruction are analyzing documents obtained from staff members of the Ukrainian labs, ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in a daily briefing. He claimed they detailed "implementation by the US in Ukraine of a secret project to study the ways humans can be infected from bats," which was done in Kharkov.The official said the same Institute of Experimental and Clinical Veterinary Medicine in the Ukrainian city worked for years to study under which conditions wild birds carrying flu could cause an epidemic in humans and to assess the damage that would result.Konashenkov didn't explain why such research should be considered military in nature, as assessed by the defense ministry.
The spokesman further said more Ukrainian documents will soon be released on the transfer of human samples from Ukraine to the UK and other European nations. The materials will be accompanied by Russian military assessments of the work they detail, he said.
The Pentagon sponsors dozens of labs around the world under the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). The work they do, the US government claims, is benign and is meant to monitor emergence of new dangerous infections. Countries like Russia and China believe they may be more sinister in nature.
US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland said under oath that labs in Ukraine have been destroying research materials to prevent Russia from seizing them. It was not clear why Washington saw the scenario as dangerous. US officials claimed that the pathogens in question were remnants of Soviet bioweapons programs, which Moscow would presumably already have access to.
Some American public figures, such as Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, were attacked for asking questions about the Ukrainian labs, which supposedly amounts to repeating "Russian propaganda."
Utah Senator Mitt Romney accused Gabbard of spreading "treasonous lies" with her concerns about the safety of pathogen samples in Ukraine. The hosts of The View television show suggested people asking such questions should be arrested and investigated as possible Russian agents.
Comment: A senior Russian general, Igor Kirillov,
presented documents and imagery that the general says proves the US was making biological weapons components in Ukraine, but that local staff at the labs were kept in the dark (SOP for imperial black ops). More from RT:
He noted that the documents he was presenting "have the signatures of real officials and are certified by the seals of organizations," for those journalists and experts in the West doubting their veracity.
One document, dated March 6, 2015 confirms the "direct participation of the Pentagon in the financing of military biological projects in Ukraine," Kirillov said. The US officially funded the projects through the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, according to the Agreement on Joint Biological Activities. However, the evidence shows that the real recipients of some $32 million in funds were Ukrainian Defense Ministry laboratories in Kiev, Odessa, Lvov and Kharkov.
These facilities were chosen by the US Department of Defense's Threat Reduction Administration (DTRA), and the contractor Black and Veatch, to carry out the U-P-8 project, aimed at studying the pathogens of Crimea-Congo hemorrhagic fever, leptospirosis, and hantaviruses, Kirillov said, pointing to a slide with the Pentagon's request.
"From our point of view, the interest of US military biologists is due to the fact that these pathogens have natural foci both in Ukraine and in Russia, and their use can be disguised as natural disease outbreaks," the general said.
According to the evidence, the labs isolated three bacterial pathogens (causing plague, brucellosis and leptospirosis) and six families of viruses, including coronaviruses, all of which were drug-resistant and spread rapidly from animals to humans. A number of documents confirmed the samples taken in Ukraine to other countries - Georgia, Germany, and the UK.
Kirillov showed official documents confirming the transfer of 5,000 samples of blood serum taken from Ukrainian citizens to the Pentagon-backed Richard Lugar center in Tbilisi, Georgia. Another 773 biological assays were transferred to the UK, while an agreement was signed for the transfer of "unlimited quantities" of infectious materials to the Friedrich Loeffle
Comment: A senior Russian general, Igor Kirillov, presented documents and imagery that the general says proves the US was making biological weapons components in Ukraine, but that local staff at the labs were kept in the dark (SOP for imperial black ops). More from RT: