The Russian Defense Ministry on Thursday (March 10) accused the United States of funding Ukraine’s biological weapons program, saying it found evidence of it in Ukrainian labs.
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“The goal of this Pentagon-funded biological study in Ukraine was to create a mechanism for the covert spread of deadly pathogens,” ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said at a morning briefing on the conflict in Ukraine. According to him, Moscow seized “documents submitted by employees of Ukrainian laboratories,” which mention “the transfer of human biomaterials exported in Ukraine to foreign countries at the request of American representatives.” Igor Konashenkov also cited “an American project on the transmission of pathogens by migratory wild birds between Ukraine and Russia and other neighboring countries.”
Coronavirus, anthrax, swine fever
He assured that the United States plans to “carry out work on the pathogens of birds, bats and reptiles in Ukraine in 2022,” as well as “the possibility of the spread of African swine fever and anthrax.” “In the established and funded laboratories of Ukraine, documents indicate that experiments were carried out with bat coronavirus samples,” the Russian representative said.
The head of Russian diplomacy, Sergei Lavrov, also denounced from Turkey on Thursday “the absolutely outrageous facts about what the Pentagon is doing in biological laboratories created with its money.” He accused Washington of using “Ukrainian territory to conduct experiments on pathogens, which can then be used to create biological weapons.” Sergei Lavrov assured that the Americans “carry out this activity in the strictest secrecy”, creating laboratories “along the entire perimeter of Russia and China.”
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Both the United States and Ukraine deny the existence of biological weapons labs in the country, which has faced a Russian offensive led by tens of thousands of soldiers since February 24. In 2018, Russia already accused the United States of secretly conducting biological experiments in a laboratory in Georgia, another former Soviet republic that, like Ukraine, is seeking to join NATO and the EU. To justify its offensive, Moscow also considered that Ukraine had ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons, an idea it nevertheless voluntarily abandoned in the 1990s.
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