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Scott A. Miller/Getty Images CNN An explosion has caused a fire at a Russian. The Russian Federation is known to possess or have possessed three types of weapons of mass destruction: nuclear weapons, biological weapons, and chemical weapons.It is one of the five nuclear-weapon states recognized under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.. Russia possesses a total of 5,977 nuclear warheads as of 2022, the largest stockpile of nuclear warheads in the . In a statement sent to The Intercept, the institute rejected the Russian claims. The Russian biological weapons program in 2022 By Robert Petersen October 5, 2022 On February 24, Russia launched a war of conquest against Ukraine after it had already illegally annexed Crimea in 2014 and waged war for eight years in the Donbas. "Biological weapons have been outlawed since the BWC entered into force in 1975," she added. Topline. The documents from Ukraine, Lewitin wrote inan open letterposted on Facebook and Change.org, do not imply any development of biological weapons or even the use of particularly dangerous pathogens in the laboratories. During the period 1947-1949 a new military biological weapons facility, the USSR Ministry of Defence's Scientific-Research Institute of Hygiene, was established in Sverdlovsk, It occupied the site of the former Cherkassk-Sverdlovsk Infantry Academy on Ulitsa Zvezdnaya, 1. However, the largest epidemic of anthrax in Russia took place in Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg) in April 1979. Kirillov also stated, without evidence, that a swine flu outbreak in 2007 and increased cases of measles, rubella, diphtheria, and tuberculosis in Ukraine had somehow been caused by biological research at U.S.-funded labs in Ukraine and the former Soviet republic of Georgia. [22] It comprised various institutions operating under an array of different ministries and departments including the Soviet Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Health, USSR Academy of Sciences, and KGB. Scientists from the. The Russian military, Lewitin told Aronova, had simply lied about what the Ukrainian documents meant. 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]. She warned that Moscows claim of a secret biological weapons programme in Ukraine could in fact be laying the foundations for a Russian chemical or biological weapons assault. ???????:#?????? Scientists warn that humans should be worried about being wiped out by a killer pathogen that is specifically designed to kill people of only a particular race, based on their genetic material/. 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. 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. In 2012, they fought anthrax in the Altai Territory. Russia to Witness 'Zombie' Anthrax Outbreak? Lewitin offered a more detailed debunking of the evidence in an interview with Marina Aronova, a correspondent for Siberia.Realities, a regional news outlet of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which is funded by the U.S. government. Away from television screens, the unfounded Russian allegations were echoed by the Chinese foreign ministrys spokesman, Zhao Lijian, and amplified in a conspiratorial Infowars video that was viewed more than 650,000 times. 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 . In April 1979, a mysterious biological weapon escaped from a lab in the Soviet Union, killing at least 66 people and an unknown number of animals in what is now central Russia. [25], It has been reported that Russia made smallpox available to Saddam Hussein in the beginning of the 1990s. That quickly made it a priority for the U.S. to help secure dangerous pathogens, particularly in some of the impoverished former Soviet states where anthrax is naturally occurring but had also been used in biological weapons experiments before the collapse of the USSR in 1991. [26], The NunnLugar Cooperative Threat Reduction aimed to secure and dismantle weapons of mass destruction, including the Soviet biological weapons program. This article has been revised to correct the description of the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok used in two high-profile assassination attempts attributed to Russian intelligence agents by Western governments and journalists. 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. ??????? On the 9 August 1945, the Soviet Union launched its invasion of Japanese-controlled Manchuria. As part of their work the labs do seem to hold dangerous pathogens. That, he said, is nonsense that echoes German Nazi propaganda.. [36], As of 2021, the United States "assesses that the Russian Federation (Russia) maintains an offensive BW program and is in violation of its obligation under Articles I and II of the BWC. By 1960, numerous BW research facilities existed throughout the Soviet Union. WASHINGTON (AP) The Biden administration publicly warned Wednesday that Russia might seek to use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine as the White House rejected Russian claims of illegal chemical weapons development in the country it has invaded. [12], The Soviet Union reportedly had a large biological weapons program enhancing the usefulness of the Marburg virus. Soon after the broadcast, the same documents were also presented to the Russian public on the big screen at a defense ministry briefing led by Konashenkov and Kirillov. The list of destroyed strains published by RIA Novosti and other Russian media outlets contains not a single particularly dangerous strain. The Russian strategy, of loudly making claims about biological weapons research and pointing to documents that do not, in any way, confirm that to be true has been employed multiple times in recent years. Conclusion. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. The Leningrad Military Medical Academy began cultivating typhus in chicken embryos. About 30 minutes after this article was published on Thursday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who appears to also represent the extreme reaches of the internet, introduced Russian disinformation about bioweapons in U.S.-funded labs in Ukraine into the Congressional record. German intelligence reported that the institute was engaged in experiments focused on Francisella tularensis (the causative agent of tularaemia) and Yersinia pestis (the causative agent of plague). "[30] Yeltsin promised to end the Russian bio-weapons program and to convert its facilities for benevolent scientific and medical purposes. After the Soviet Union was dissolved, Favorov said, most of the former Soviet states outside Russia were in dire need of better laboratories to perform modern disease surveillance and research, and to safely store strains of deadly endemic diseases known as special pathogens that they needed to study and describe to protect their populations from outbreaks. The White House on Wednesday warned that Russia could use "chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine" or could create a "false flag operation" using them, after the Kremlin accused the U.S. of . Moscow went on to claim that it had found documents related to the secret US operation in laboratories in Kharkiv and Poltava. The scheme was originally known as Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) but is now more commonly referred to as biological engagement. I hope that this is more of a disinformation talking point than an actual thing, Gronvall said. 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. 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. Those records were obtained and made public by a former head of Georgian intelligence living in exile in Russia, Igor Giorgadze. Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov presented documents on recent biological research projects at labs in Ukraine supported by U.S. funding at a briefing in Moscow on March 10, 2022. [1] The program began in the 1920s and lasted until at least September 1992 but has possibly been continued by Russia after that. Marburg virus is also a Category A bio-warfare agent identified by the CDC's classification system and is hosted in African fruit bat. Sverdlovsk bioweapons production facility (Military Compound 19). Just four years after the creation of the Zagorsk facility, the CPSU and the USSR Council of Ministers issued a decree "for strengthening scientific-research work in the field of microbiology and virology". In the first two years of the program, more than 90 percent of the first 30,000 patients to be treated were cured of the illness. The documents, and the Russian claims that public health research in the lab in Georgia was a cover for sinister activities, was amplified at the time by Chinese state media. Russia was reportedly developing smallpox-based weapons as late as 1988. A total of fourteen highly detailed reports on the Soviet BW programme were issued in the period 1924-1927. He also alleges that human experimentation occurred with typhus, glanders and melioidosis in the Solovetsky camp. [16] This conclusion is not surprising, since it was precisely at this moment, that both the fate of the Soviet Union and the Third Reich hung precariously in the balance during the build-up to, and the outcome of, the Battle of Stalingrad. At that time about 100 people died from infected beef. Zlatogorov was in fact one of the world's leading authorities on pneumonic plague and had studied 40 strains of plague bacilli from around the world. ? 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. FilippaLentzos, a biologist and a scholar at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studiesreported in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that year that she had been part of a group of international experts that visited the lab in Tbilisi. Kirillov also claimed that in a joint Ukrainian-American project called R-781, bats are considered as carriers of potential biological weapons agents. However, the document describing that project, which was projected on the big screen behind the general, just outlined a proposal for an expert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta to collaborate with a veterinary medicine specialist in Kharkiv and a researcher in Tbilisi on routine disease surveillance of bats in Ukraine and Georgia, including testing for bacterial and viral infections (such as coronaviruses) and performing genomic sequencing. The issue of compliance by Russia with the BWC has been of concern for many years". Unsecured bioweapons in a war zone are a bad idea, Carlson told his millions of viewers this week. The new facility became operational in July 1949. Among his terrifying prophecies for 2021, the 16th century astrologer hinted that Russian scientists would create a biological weapon that will create a virus which turns people into zombies - and will eventually leave us extinct. Tens of thousands of scientists, researchers, doctors, engineers, technicians, and . Russia's mission in New York called for an emergency meeting Friday, 24 hours after its defense ministry falsely claimed it uncovered "U.S. secret military biological projects in Ukraine," per . He didnt take part, but some of his contemporaries did. The Soviet Union conducted experimentations with the Marburg virus in aerosol form to transform it into a strategic-operational biological weapon. At considerable risk to their own safety, 10 Russian biologists, including researchers who remain in Russia, have publicly accused the Russian government of lying about having proof that biological weapons were being developed in Ukrainian labs funded by the United States. [19], In 1953 the management of the Soviet BW programme was assigned to the USSR Ministry of Defence's Fifteenth Administration. Nakamitsu pointed to the Biological Weapons Convention, which has prohibited the development and use of biological weapons since 1975. Konashenkovadditionally stated as a matter of fact something for which none of the documents presented at the briefing backs up: that American-financed studies of bird, bat, and reptile pathogens planned for later this year would include experiments on the ability of the animals to be used to covertly transmit weaponized African swine fever and anthrax. 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. Biblical famine As well as a deadly zombie virus, Earth apparently 'will be hit with a famine of biblical proportions.' Rimmington argues that this "was in fact a pivotal period in the Soviet programme, when BW production technology was being transferred from the military to facilities concealed within civil manufacturing plants. The Russian team is this week reportedly taking samples from a collection of beasts preserved in ice that have been found in recent years.. Under Putin, Russia has a biological weapons program, one that it has clearly used to target its opponents. In the later summer of 1942, in the face of the German offensive to capture Stalingrad, there was a second evacuation of STI, which was eventually permanently relocated to Kirov, located some 896 kilometres north-east of Moscow on the Vyatka river. ? [15], In the immediate post-war period, Lavrenty Beria, the Soviet minister of internal affairs, maintained control of the Soviet BW programme and further developed its offensive capabilities. Committee on Armed Services. 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. [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]. It conducted its secret activities at numerous sites across the USSR and employed 30-40,000 people.[20]. A state lab in Russia's Siberia is beginning research into prehistoric viruses preserved in the remains of animals found in melting permafrost. Symptoms. [31][4], Compliance with the agreement, as well as the fate of the former Soviet bio-agents and facilities, is still mostly undocumented. Asked why she thought the Russian officials expected to get away with so inaccurately describing the contents of the documents they made public, Pettersson suggested that they might have guessed many Russians would not look too closely at the lists of bacterial strains used in the Ukrainian labs because they were all written in Latin. 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. Finally, Russia has a track record of accusing the West of the very crimes that Russia itself is perpetrating. [23], In the 1980s, the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture successfully developed variants of foot-and-mouth disease and rinderpest against cows, African swine fever for pigs, and psittacosis to kill chicken. Photo: Russian Ministry of Defense via YouTube. However, General Otoz Yamada, Commander of the Kwantung Army had already ordered the destruction and evacuation of these facilities. It is Russia that has active chemical and biological weapons programs and is in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention and Biological Weapons Convention. [1] [2] ??? Carlsons claims about what Nuland said were quickly translated into Russian by the state broadcaster in Moscow and shared on Twitter by Russian diplomats. Russian ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, accused Ukraine of operating chemical and biological labs with US support. On March 13, Gabbard tweeted a video viewed nearly 3 million times, in which she falsely claimed that the public health labs were conducting research on dangerous pathogens and were engaged in that she called dangerous research, including gain of function, similar to the lab in Wuhan where Covid-19 may have originated from.. and the kicker is it will eventually leave us extinct. (Most of that long thread was translated into English by Ilya Lozovsky, an editor at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. The accidental release of anthrax in 1979 from a Soviet military research facility in Yekaterinburg, which was known as Sverdlovsk in Soviet times, killed at least 66 people. The Soviet Union's 1991 collapse made Russia the inheritor of the vast majority of the USSR's weapons of mass destruction. (11 October 2013). 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 Trumps former adviser Steve Bannon and the Fox News primetime show hosted by Tucker Carlson. The fact that the Pentagon has provided much of the funding for labs built by the United States in former Soviet states also fuels suspicion in Russia, and elsewhere. And weapons developed in secret Soviet labs are still used to poison Russian dissidents and defectors. The Russian ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, evoked the specter of an uncontrolled spread of bio agents from Ukraine. 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,. [27], In the 1990s, the President of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, admitted to an offensive bio-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. International restrictions on biological warfare began only with the June 1925 Geneva Protocol, which prohibits the use but not the possession or development of chemical and biological weapons. 2. Crucially, Geissler notes that there are no contemporary accounts by the German army or intelligence services regarding the use of F. tularensis as a biological weapon at Stalingrad. Ukraines ambassador to the world body, Sergiy Kyslytsya, called the idea being advanced by Russia a bunch of insane delirium. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "biological weapons, also called germ weapons, are any number of disease-producing agents, such as bacteria, viruses, rickettsiae, fungi, toxins, or other biological agents, that may be utilized as weapons against humans, animals, or plants." 1 Throughout history, pathogens have proven to be the most The WHO has worked in Ukraine for several years helping bio labs improve safety and security, so it knows what it is talking about. The United Nations security council met earlier this month at Russias request, to discuss Moscows claims that the US is funding military biological activities in Ukraine in other words, secretly developing biological weapons in Ukrainian laboratories. And those who have read it will say: Well, yes, maybe there are no dangerous pathogens in these documents. The BNITM has never and will never work directly or indirectly on bio weapons, the statement said. 48 - a tsarist-era red-brick manor house located in Cherntsy (Ivanovo region). Both America and the Soviet Union experimented with anthrax, which can kill people when inhaled. [23][41], A Soviet-era agricultural biowarfare programme was pursued from 1958 through to the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Russian authorities said that no biological material was present in the lab at the time of the explosion. Velikanov was placed in command of the Gorodomlya Island facility which was named as the Biotechnical Institute, also known by the code designation V/2-1094. [28] Soviet defectors, including Colonel Kanatjan Alibekov, the first deputy chief of Biopreparat from 1988 to 1992, confirmed that the program had been massive and that it still existed. Tucker Carlson took the bait offered by the Russian militarys reference to coronavirus. Running parallel to the work underway at Vlasikha, BW research was also being pursued in an institution controlled by the state security apparatus. Whatever their expectations, it is beyond doubt that the Russian government has succeeded in generating a global media frenzy of speculative commentary on the supposed existence of bioweapons labs in Ukraine despite the fact that the documents they have pointed to as evidence offer no support for the allegations. "[24], In 1989 the defector Vladimir Pasechnik convinced the British that the Soviets had genetically engineered a strain of Yersinia pestis to resist antibiotics. Moscow Doesn't Like It", "Russia Commits to End Biological Weapons Program", Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland, "Interview: Alexander Kouzminov, Author of Biological Espionage", "From Offence to Defence? When Russian news outlets repeated these claims, Lewitin,the veteran Russian biologist, wrote that they had been duped into printing what he called deliberately false information,fed to them by the military, about what was in the documents. Defecting Soviet bioweaponeers such as Vladimir Pasechnik and Colonel Kanatjan Alibekov confirmed that the program had been massive and still existed. Buildings at the site belonging to a smallpox institute, subordinate to the People's Commissariat of Health, were transferred to the military facility. These worked in close collaboration with Soviet military virologists and focused on both animal pathogens such as FMD and exotic zoonotic infections. By way of example, Lewitin, who has a Ph.D. in genetics, pointed to the absolutely wild idea of the existence of special DNA of the Slavs, which could be used to target ethnic Russians with a biological weapon. We are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces.. It was transferred to the control of the USSR Ministry of Defence in March 1954. The Ministry of Defense made a false, unfounded statement and now, if I talk to people, 90percent of them will say: Bioweapons were made in Ukraine. No one has read the attached documents. In a related report by the Inquisitr, if the Ebola virus did become airborne, this feat would require genetic engineering, since evolutionary theory seems to indicate the scenario would not happen naturally. With recent advances in gene editing, it may be possible for bioterrorists to design viruses capable of altering our behaviour, spreading such a disease and ultimately killing us. The paperwork even indicated that some of the strains had been purchased from Russian labs. [32] Leitenberg and Zilinskas, in The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History (2012), state flatly that "In March 1992Yeltsin acknowledged the existence of an illegal bioweapons program in the former Soviet Union and ordered it to be dissolved. The Council last discussed the issue of alleged biological materials in Ukraine in a meeting on 11 March.. United States-Ukraine agreement Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia, told the Council that his delegation is in possession of new evidence of a United States-Ukrainian agreement to conduct biological weapons research on Ukrainian territory, dating back as far as 2005. Yet it tried to provide cover for its activities by repeatedly charging that the. Russian President Vladmir Putin confirmed that his country is working on the creation of an electromagnetic gun that attacks its target's central nervous system, putting them in what we hope is a. Russian scientists who have looked at the documents Russia calls proof of bioweapons labs in Ukraine say there is no evidence for such claims. Red Lies: Biological warfare and the Soviet Union, An Obscure Weapon of the Cold War Edges Into the Limelight, Soviet Army used 'rat weapon' during WWII, Memories of bioweapons developer Domaradsky (Russian), Re-Evaluating Russia's Biological Weapons Policy, as Reflected in the Criminal Code and Official Admissions: Insubordination Leading to a President's Subordination, Bioweapons from Russia: Stemming the Flow, Stepnagorsk Scientific and Technical Institute, Institute of Ultra Pure Biochemical Preparations, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Soviet_biological_weapons_program&oldid=1135331140, Short description is different from Wikidata, All Wikipedia articles written in American English, Articles with unsourced statements from August 2021, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. 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. Russia has been saying in recent weeks that Ukraine might possess chemical or biological weapons. 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. ?????????? The nerve agent is classified as a chemical weapon, not a biological weapon, by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. The development and production were conducted by a main directorate ("Biopreparat") along with the Soviet Ministry of Defense, the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture, the Soviet Ministry of Health, the USSR Academy of Sciences, the KGB, and other state organizations. The development of new nerve agents during the 1940s, as well as advanced delivery systems later on. The leniency with which the Japanese BW specialists were treated - the longest sentence any served was seven years - has led a number of scholars to conclude that some sort of deal was struck between the Soviet authorities and the Unit 731 personnel held captive in the USSR.