“We know pathogens don’t respect borders, so helping to put out public health fires before they become too big is an advantage to all of us,” she said. 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. “This is one of the best things that we do,” Dr Gigi Gronvall, senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told the Guardian. It has been successful in helping former Soviet and other countries fulfill public health obligations. The scheme was originally known as Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) but is now more commonly referred to as biological engagement. In fact, US funding to the laboratories had its roots in the fall of the Soviet Union, after which money was pumped into Ukraine and other countries to help them transfer scientific skills away from weapons towards public health. Nuland’s comments were seized upon by far-right commentators as evidence of a secret plot. “We are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces.” “Ukraine has biological research facilities,” she said, adding that there was concern that Russian forces were trying to gain control of the labs. Nuland did not answer the question head on. 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. Ukraine does operate biological laboratories that receive US funding. So do bio labs exist inside Ukraine, and is the US supporting them? The convention was backed by Richard Nixon, who in 1969 also put a stop to the US developing its own offensive biological weapons. Nakamitsu pointed to the Biological Weapons Convention, which has prohibited the development and use of biological weapons since 1975. The UN high commissioner for disarmament, Izumi Nakamitsu, confirmed that the UN was not aware of any biological weapons programmes in Ukraine. The World Health Organization (WHO) has said it is unaware of activity by Ukraine violating any international treaty, including the ban on biological weapons. Photograph: Lev Radin/Pacific Press/REX/Shutterstock What are independent world bodies saying? Representative to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield warned that Russia’s claim could be a pretext for it launching its own biological weapons attack on Ukraine. “Now he’s talking about new false flags he’s setting up, including he’s asserting that, we, in America, have biological as well as chemical weapons in Europe. “His back is against the wall,” said Biden, mentioning the false claims about US-funded biolabs in Ukraine. This week, speaking to business leaders in Washington, Joe Biden warned that Vladimir Putin could use biological weapons. Ukraine’s ambassador to the world body, Sergiy Kyslytsya, called the idea being advanced by Russia “a bunch of insane delirium”. “It is Russia that has long maintained a biological weapon program in violation of international law.” Thomas-Greenfield said: “I will say this once: ‘Ukraine does not have a biological weapons program.’” She went on to turn the accusation back on Moscow. How have the US and Ukrainian governments responded?īoth the US and Ukraine have categorically denied they are developing biological weapons inside the country. 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 Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon and the Fox News primetime show hosted by Tucker Carlson. The allegations were quickly amplified by China, which supported the claims during the UN security council debate. Moscow went on to claim that it had found documents related to the secret US operation in laboratories in Kharkiv and Poltava. Moscow claimed its invading forces discovered evidence of an “emergency clean-up”. So what is the dispute all about, and what is actually happening inside Ukraine? How did ‘bio labs’ become the latest front in the Ukraine information war?Įarlier in March, the Russian ministry of foreign affairs posted a tweet accusing the US and Ukraine of running a secret “military-biological programme” inside the stricken country. His American counterpart, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, warned that Russia’s claim could be a pretext for launching its own biological weapons attack on Ukraine. The Russian ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, evoked the specter of an “uncontrolled spread of bio agents from Ukraine”.
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