At the G20 summit on the Indonesian island of Bali, Russia raised the issue of biosecurity in connection with the programs being pursued by the United States. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, Moscow intends to achieve the creation of a mechanism to control this activity of the Pentagon.
“We touched upon the problem of biological security, primarily in the context of the military biological activity that the United States, under Pentagon programs, has deployed in dozens of countries, in all regions of the world, especially in Eurasia along the perimeter of the borders with Russia and China,” Lavrov said.
The minister drew attention to the fact that earlier attempts to figure out what exactly they are doing in those laboratories have encountered resistance both within the framework of the Convention on the Prohibition of Biological Weapons and within the UN Security Council.
Lavrov assured that Russia “will continue to strive for the creation of an effective transparent control mechanism for such programs.”
The number of threats to humanity has increased in recent years. The list of critical issues is now augmented with new problems, for instance, those of industry-related and climatic nature. Despite technological and scientific progress of the last two centuries, no one can describe the environment as a totally safe one. Biological threats, both man-caused and natural, still pose threats: there is no universal remedy. This kind of threat is almost fully concealed – even biological research of the most dangerous viruses (let alone malicious ones!) may jeopardize humanity.
The actions of the United States of America to establish biological research centers, the activities of which have almost nothing in common with biological science,in the post-Soviet area meet the aforementioned trend to the full extent.
Since 1998, the US Department of Defense (DoD) has been running the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which is responsible for countering the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and developing nuclear, biological, and chemical protection assets and measures for the United States and its allies.
In the early 1990s, Washington involved several former Soviet republics in hazardous biological experiments: in particular, the Pentagon launched the Biological Threat Reduction Program and the Cooperative Biological Engagement Program. Under the aforementioned programs, the sides signed a number of agreements to jointly counter biohazardous threats (including outbreaks of both man-caused and natural diseases) and to establish biological laboratories in order to research viruses and other pathogens.
Several activities of these laboratories are being coordinated through the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine (STCU), which was established in 1993 by the United States, Canada and Sweden to support those scientists connected with the Soviet programs of WMD development and missile technologies. The STCU now combines the efforts of Azerbaijan, Canada, Georgia, Moldova, Sweden, Ukraine, the United States and the European Union.
On August 29, 2005, the US DoD and Ukraine Ministry of Health signed a biological threat reduction agreement, which envisaged establishing a network of laboratories to recognize agents of infectious diseases.
Since 2005, DTRA has helped Ukraine modernize a number of laboratories in Odesa, Kharkiv, Lviv, Kyiv, Vinnitsa, Kherson, and Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro) regions. These biological research complexes, accidentally or intentionally, were based along the Russian and Belarusian borders and adjacent to the Black Sea.
According to a press release issued by the U.S. DoD on June 9, 2022, the U.S. military acknowledged having financed Ukrainian biological laboratories since 1991. This assistance was provided on the basis of the Act on the Cooperative Threat Reduction, which was signed in 1991.
A number of foundations and companies (including Black &Veatch and Metabiota Headed by Robert Hunter Biden, the son of President of the United States Joseph Biden) is involved in the financing of the Ukrainian biological laboratories; the total US expenditures on the activities have exceeded USD250 million.
Being not controlled by conventions, the World Health Organization, and other international bodies, the laboratories have dispatched more than 16,000 collected pathogenic agents and blood samples to the United States, Germany, and Australia. It is widely considered that the laboratories have been doing research on the congenital immunity of local residents in order to find the most hazardous pathogens for the population of some designated regions.
The employees of the US laboratories in Ukraine (Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa) were doing research (under the UP-4) program to estimate the spread of highly infectious diseases through the medium of migratory birds. The routes of bird migrations from Kherson to Tyumen and Sverdlovsk regions were purposefully traced. Between November 2019 and January 2020, 991 biological samples were collected.
The Ukrainian biologists also delivered no less than 140 containers with bat parasites to Germany under the UP-8 program (the research of ortho hantaviruses, leptospirosis, and the Crimean–Congo hemorrhagic fever). The transmission of infections via insects was of special interests to the researchers under this study.
DTRA and a number of Ukrainian biological institutions (including STCU, Lviv Research and Scientific Institute of Epidemiology and Hygiene, Ukrainian Research and Scientific Counter-Plague Institute, and the Central Health Inspection Station) also signed a partner agreement to conduct the UP-1 biological program to research the rickettsiae and tick-borne encephalitis virus.
It should be mentioned that the Ukrainian side made no obstacles to the use of local residents and the servicemen of the Ukrainian Armed Forces as the objects during the tests organized by US specialists. For instance, an undefined agent of hemorrhagic pneumonia claimed the lives of 450 Ukrainians in Ternopil. In 2011 and 2014, there were two outbreaks of cholera with several dozen victims. In 2012, the Ukrainians unexpectedly started to suffer from measles (more than 13,000 cases were registered); in 2017, there was another outbreak of this disease. Since 2012, Ukraine has been suffering from the African swine fever (ASF). The map of ASF spread apparently shows that the locations of this disease are adjacent to the borders of Ukraine with Russia, Belarus, and Transnistria. By March 2016, 364 Ukrainians (including 20 servicemen of the Ukrainian Armed Forces) died from the ASF. In 2016, an outbreak of an unknown intestinal infection was seen in Izmail (Odesa Region); some 400 Ukrainians were infected. In 2017, Kyiv and Kherson saw an outbreak of botulism with several victims.
Considering the aforementioned facts, one can suggest that the US biological activities in the post-Soviet area and, in particular, in Ukraine pose a direct and hazardous threat at the global, not only regional, level.
The author is an independent military analyst.
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