Russia confirms Ukraine biolabs

The Russian Ministry of Defense recently exhibited what they claim is documentary proof that biological weapons development laboratories in Ukraine, with American funding, American direction, and American staffs, did exist. Worse still, these laboratories had samples of avian influenza virus strains, some of which were extremely lethal to humans.

Russia reports its discoveries

The newsletter Patriot Clash carried several tweets from the Russian Foreign Affairs and Defense Ministries. Last Friday, Russia announced the seizure of several documents from a laboratory in the Kherson region. This laboratory called itself the Kharkov Institute of Veterinary Medicine. This tweet from the Russian Embassy embeds a collage of documents with American and Ukrainian markings. They speak of several projects, all involving gain-of-function research on zoonotic viruses (that primarily infect animals).

The Russia Ministry of Foreign Affairs tweeted out the same photograph late Friday afternoon (Eastern Time):

The tweet also contains a link to a message on the MFA Russia Telegram channel. That message has the particular embedded photograph, and many more. It also had a link to this briefing by Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov of the Russian Army. He is Chief of Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Protection of Troops. In his briefing he repeated much of what he initially charged fourteen months ago. Then he added that now the Ministry has further documentary evidence of the projects he described earlier.

This is nothing new to CNAV, which first noted these allegations, and evidence for them, last year. Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) has noted this for a long time.

The restoration of the “WarClandestine” account on Twitter ended the suppression by Twitter of much of this evidence.

Attempts to debunk the story

To be sure, this story had its doubters from the start. Among them: Robert Mackey of The Intercept, who said flatly the Russians were lying. But the attempts to debunk the story raise even more questions. For example, a writer variously called Eugene Koonin or Eugene Lewitin, who calls himself a dissident biologist, sent this to Change.org. Among other things, he said of certain samples that Russian troops destroyed:

The list contains only strains common to microbiological and even more so to epidemiological laboratories.

That statement begs the question of what kind of work such laboratories do with such strains.

But more than that, General Krillov described 32 outbreaks of avian inflenza in all federal districts of Russia. Moscow itself has been under quarantine since May 17. Then the general noted this strange finding:

African swine fever and foot-and-mouth disease, which pose a serious threat to food security, have never been recorded in the U.S., despite the fact that the U.S. has seen avian influenza epizootics since 2003. At the same time, the U.S. military is actively studying these economically significant infections outside the national territory in bio-laboratories located along the borders of its geopolitical adversaries.

This demonstrates once more that the U.S. is creating biological weapons components abroad, notably in Ukraine.

General Kirillov also explained the real activities of the so-called Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which CNAV described here.