The nerve agent is classified as a chemical weapon, not a biological weapon, by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. To start with, these were not clinical trials of Sovaldi in Georgia in 2015. Such was the rapidity and depth of penetration of the attack that, by September, the Red Army's BW facility - the Sanitary Technical Institute (STI) - on Gorodomlya Island, was under immediate threat of capture. We know pathogens dont respect borders, so helping to put out public health fires before they become too big is an advantage to all of us, she said. Russia Continues To Lead On Chemical And Biological Warfare Military 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. Speaking at a press briefing in Moscow, Kirillov claimed that a shipment of chemical . An Unexpected Meeting: Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia spoke face-to-face for the first time since Moscow's invasion . Russia and chemical weapons: What you need to know | CNN Politics Yes, and yes. ??????? "Dead through spite, he will cause the others to shine." on about your day, ask yourself: How likely is it that the story you just read would have been produced by a different news outlet if The Intercept hadnt done it? It conducted its secret activities at numerous sites across the USSR and employed 30-40,000 people.[20]. Michel de Nostradamus: There Would be A Zombie Apocalypse Caused by 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. Marburg virus is also a Category A bio-warfare agent identified by the CDC's classification system and is hosted in African fruit bat. The UN high commissioner for disarmament, Izumi Nakamitsu, confirmed that the UN was not aware of any biological weapons programmes in Ukraine. According to Alibek, in 1928, the Revolutionary Military Council signed a decree about the weaponization of typhus. The Kremlin's Allegations of Chemical and Biological Weapons 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. [1] The program began in the 1920s and lasted until at least September 1992 but has possibly been continued by Russia after that. Lewitin explained that all of the bacterial strains mentioned in the documents were the kind of samples found in any public health lab or epidemiological institute. 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. How Russia Sowed A Conspiracy Theory About U.S. Bioweapons In - Forbes According to The Soviet Unions Agricultural Biowarfare Programme (2021), "The Pokrov biologics plant is the best-documented of the agricultural BW mobilisation facilities. 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. Nostradamus' 2021 predictions: From world-ending Asteroids and ZOMBIES ???????????? Russian bioweapons charge is 'bogus,' White House says 1. Zombies, asteroids and scholarship: Nostradamus predicts 2021 If you're dead, you're immobile and you rot. "It is a milestone for Russia's deception and lies," Thomas-Greenfield shot back. That possibility leaves even seasoned experts rattled. Conclusion. 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". [12] However, a number of prominent scholars have disputed Alibek's version of events. 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. 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. That, he said, is nonsense that echoes German Nazi propaganda.. The Leningrad Military Medical Academy began cultivating typhus in chicken embryos. Earlier 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. When Russias U.N. ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, presented those false claims to the Security Council last week, he scoffed at American denials by mentioning that the diplomats were in the very same room where, in 2003, Colin Powell had held up that famous test tube during his presentation of faulty intelligence on Iraqs suspected weapons of mass destruction. For instance, after Victoria Nuland, a State Department official, said that the U.S. was working with Ukraine to prevent biological research materials in Ukrainian labs from being seized by Russian forces, Carlson and Gabbard amplified the false claim made by the Russian military that the routine public health research in those labs was dangerous. ??????????? ?????????? UN says not aware of biological weapons programme in Ukraine Earlier this week, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, accused Russia under Putin of having a long and well-documented track record of using chemical weapons, pointing to the poisoning of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny and Russias support of the Syrian regime while it deployed chemical weapons. Alibek maintains that "Soviet leaders from Leonid Brezhnev to Mikhail Gorbachev personally authorized prohibited development, testing, and production efforts [and] cites several Gorbachev decrees stepping up the pace of work within the biological weapons complex, and directing the creation of mobile production facilities so that inspectors could not uncover the program. Although Russia has substantially reduced its stockpiles from Cold War peaks, it still controls one of the world's largest and deadliest nuclear forces, and deteriorating relations with the United States have stalled further arms control diplomacy. The only possible explanation for why the samples were disposed of in such haste, Kirillov insisted, must have been to prevent Russian experts from discovering that synthetic biology methods were being tested there to enhance the microorganisms pathogenic properties.. 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]. Ukraine war: Fact-checking Russia's biological weapons claims Forget COVID-19? CDC offers tips on surviving zombie apocalypse - KSTU The Russian governments claim that the biological labs funded by the U.S. were experimenting with dangerous pathogens,thoughdebunked by the Russian biologists, was echoed by influential voices on Fox News like Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard. Two major Japanese offensive BW installations at Pingfang and Changchun were overrun by the Red Army. The article claims that Nostradamus, also known as Michel de Nostradame, predicted a Russian scientist would create a biological weapon and produce a virus that would turn humans into zombies, according to one of his prophecies from a book discovered at the National Library in Rome "which is believed to belong to him." The world's most dangerous bioweapons - Army Technology 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. Ukraine war: What chemical and biological weapons could Russia have 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. Defecting Soviet bioweaponeers such as Vladimir Pasechnik and Colonel Kanatjan Alibekov confirmed that the program had been massive and still existed. The ambassador endorsed a discredited conspiracy theory that the photographs had been staged. Five people died from inhaling anthrax and 17 others were infected after exposure in the following months, as envelopes stuffed with spores were mailed to U.S. officials and journalists. ??? It continued to utilise the biological weapons test site on Vozrozhdeniya Island in the Aral Sea. Ukraine does operate biological laboratories that receive US funding. 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. ???????????? ?????? Moscow went on to claim that it had found documents related to the secret US operation in laboratories in Kharkiv and Poltava. 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. And those who have read it will say: Well, yes, maybe there are no dangerous pathogens in these documents. Both the US and Ukraine have categorically denied they are developing biological weapons inside the country. 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. Favorov told me that older, Soviet-trained military biologists probably assume that the U.S. is still doing that sort of work. This program focused on anti-crop and anti-livestock biological weapons, with Soviet efforts starting with FMD virus, for which an institute was established on Gorodomlya Island. Unsecured bioweapons in a war zone are a bad idea, Carlson told his millions of viewers this week. 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. 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. After seeing the results of international investigations into chemical weapons use in Syria, Russia introduced a resolution to the United Nations last month that would have undermined future independent . ? [35], In the 2000s, the academician, "A.S.", proposed a new biological warfare program, called the "Biological Shield of Russia" to president Vladimir Putin. Over the next decade or so, dual-use BW production plants were created at Berdsk, Omutninsk, Penza and Kurgan. He points to evidence that infected rodents were the key to the large-scale outbreaks and that inhalationary tularaemia may have resulted from inhalation of dust from contaminated straw in matresses. Last week, both the Chinese statement and the Infowars video were promoted on Facebook as paid advertisements. These are the first 100 units of a gene in an influenza virus. The article claims that Nostradamus, also known as Michel de Nostradame, predicted a Russian scientist would create a biological weapon and produce a virus that would turn humans into. The Fox host, whose commentaries have become a staple of Russian state TV, also claimed, wrongly, that Nuland had all but said that theres a military application to this research, that they were working on bioweapons. Carlson then took the bait offered by the Russian militarys reference to coronavirus to make the wild claim that the mundane public health research in Ukraine was identical to dangerous experiments on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, China, funded by the U.S. before the Covid-19 pandemic. "And the world sees it." At a meeting in September of the 197 state parties to the biological weapons convention, she said, "Russia failed to provide any credible evidence to support these false allegations" and an overwhelming number of countries that spoke "considered that the issues raised by . ? On the House floor, Greene repeated the claims that have jumped from Russian state media to Infowars to Fox News as she introduced the Stopping the Spread of Taxpayer-Funded Bioweapon Act., Greene talks about Biolabs in Ukraine and announces her bill to prevent US taxpayer funding for Bioweapons pic.twitter.com/IJZDb9Tsop, Greene argued that her legislation was necessary because, in her words, there are reports of possibly deadly pathogens escaping these biolabs in places like Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan that is [sic] responsible for killing people. She did not mention that those reports were from Russian state media, quoting claims Russian officials made based on faulty evidence. Spearheaded by the Vector State Research Centre of. At least one of the pilots was a Russian Foreign Intelligence Service officer". 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. Russian scientists to 'extract zombie viruses from dead bodies of Imagine you come to a certain office and see an inscription on one of the rooms:Instruction for the cleaner. Russian officials have repeatedly invoked the fact that the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 on the false pretext that the country had weapons of mass destruction including mobile biological research laboratories as a reason to distrust the Americans now. He didnt take part, but some of his contemporaries did. While the unfunded CDC proposal to monitor diseases in bats in Ukraine and Georgia obtained by the Russian military mentioned surveillance of diseases, including coronaviruses, the idea that any viral strains obtained by the researchers would be manipulated in gain-of-function research was wholly invented by the Russian military, Carlson, and Gabbard. Bioweapons designed to kill only people of particular race Journal articles by scientists suggest that in 1999 the experiments were still being continued. When Gabbard was criticized for saying things about the type of work done in the labs for which there is no evidence, Carlson defended her in a statement that echoed the false claims made by Russian officials. Two years earlier, the same nerve agent had been used in a botched attempt to murderSkripal in England. Russia claimed to discover U.S.-funded biological weapon facilities in Ukraine this week, an evidence-free allegation the United States quickly denied and cast as another Kremlin attempt . Russia to Witness 'Zombie' Anthrax Outbreak? Here's what he said: "Few young people: halfdead to give a start. So what is the dispute all about, and what is actually happening inside Ukraine? 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. What if these labs are creating viruses just like COVID-19?. [34], In the 1990s, specimens of deadly bacteria and viruses were stolen from western laboratories and delivered by Aeroflot planes to support the Russian biological weapons program. ????????? Here they aimed to develop strains of plague that remained viable when loaded into artillery shells, aerial bombs and other means of dispersal. The visits occurred in January 1991. Russia was reportedly developing smallpox-based weapons as late as 1988. The Russian team is this week reportedly taking samples from a collection of beasts preserved in ice that have been found in recent years.. Nostradamus terrifying predictions for 2021 - Strange Sounds What if strange outbreaks surrounding U.S.-funded biolabs are the result of these labs and the work that is taking place in them? Greene asked. UK and US intelligence officials have warned there is "serious concern" Russia could use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine. ???????? General Professor Peter Burgasov, former Chief Sanitary Physician of the Soviet Army, and a senior researcher within the program of biological weapons described this incident: Spores of Bacillus anthracis (the causative agent of anthrax) were accidentally released from a military facility in Sverdlovsk in April 1979. 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. [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. A total of fourteen highly detailed reports on the Soviet BW programme were issued in the period 1924-1927. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Kremlin spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told reporters: "We can conclude that in Ukrainian laboratories close to our borders, components of biological weapons were being developed. 2. the poisoning of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny. [21] The Soviet bioweapon effort became a huge program rivaling its considerable investment in nuclear arms. He also alleges that human experimentation occurred with typhus, glanders and melioidosis in the Solovetsky camp. Tens of thousands of scientists, researchers, doctors, engineers, technicians, and . 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. 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 . Maybe there are dangerous strains in other documents that cannot be published openly., When I asked Lewitin in an online chat this week what he made of the other documents, on research projects involving American experts from the CDC and USDA, he replied: I would say that this is a hash of scattered information with no relevance to the subject [of] bioweapons. [29] On 11 April 1992, Yeltsin decreed "the termination of research on offensive biological weapons, the dismantlement of experimental technological lines for the production of biological agents and the closure of biological weapons testing facilities",[23][30] and in September 1992 Yeltsin agreed in a Joint Statement on Biological Weapons with the United States and the United Kingdom that the two Western nations would "have a blanket invitation to visit facilities of concern in Russia under ground rules that guarantee unprecedented access, including access to the entire facility, the ability to take samples, the right to interview the workers and scientists, and the right to record the visits on video and audio tape. For the past six years, the BNITM has instead been working with public health officials in Ukraine to investigate seroprevalence, the existence of antibodies, on various infectious diseases occurring in this region. Russia - The Nuclear Threat Initiative By signing up, I agree to receive emails from The Intercept and to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. These worked in close collaboration with Soviet military virologists and focused on both animal pathogens such as FMD and exotic zoonotic infections. Russians test a gun that turns people into zombies Russian President Vladimir Putin says a mind-control gun may be ready within a decade. The Russian Bioweapons program would be the most capable, deadliest program in the world. Topline. Photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images. Ukraines ambassador to the world body, Sergiy Kyslytsya, called the idea being advanced by Russia a bunch of insane delirium. [12], The Soviet Union reportedly had a large biological weapons program enhancing the usefulness of the Marburg virus. Nakamitsu pointed to the Biological Weapons Convention, which has prohibited the development and use of biological weapons since 1975. 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,. In. 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. The list of destroyed strains published by RIA Novosti and other Russian media outlets contains not a single particularly dangerous strain. In a phone call this week, Favorov told me that he suspects some of the Russian militarys wild ideas about what is happening in U.S.-funded labs in former Soviet countries is likely projection. In a statement sent to The Intercept, the institute rejected the Russian claims. The statement of the official representative of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, Igor Konashenkov, in combination with the documents attached to this statement, produces just such an impression., Thats how propaganda works, he added. Around 100 personnel from Velikanov's Biotechnical Institute participated in the experiments. House. "[33] They conclude that "In hindsight, we know that with the ultimate failure of the [negotiations] process and the continued Russian refusal to open the facilities to the present day, neither the Yeltsin or Putin administrations ever carried out 'a visible campaign to dismantle once and for all' the residual elements of the Soviet bioweapons program". ???????????? The assessment of the US state department is that Russia continues to maintain an offensive biological weapons programme in violation of the convention it signed. Carlson distorted Nulands statement into an admission that, in his words, Ukraine has secret bio labs and that falsely asserted that Nuland said whatever theyre doing in those labs is so dangerous and so scary that she is quite concerned that the so-called research material inside those bio labs might fall into the hands of Russian forces.. "Biological weapons have been outlawed since the BWC entered into force in 1975," she added. They are working with the remains of extinct woolly . pic.twitter.com/LiFrprWAUt. Those records were obtained and made public by a former head of Georgian intelligence living in exile in Russia, Igor Giorgadze. Russia's Reform of its Biological Weapons Complex and the Implications for Western Security", "The Soviet Union's Offensive Program: The Implications for Contemporary Arms Control", "Next Generation Bioweapons: Genetic Engineering and BW", "Anthrax genome reveals secrets about a Soviet bioweapons accident", "Interviews With Biowarriors: Sergei Popov", Soviet Defector Warns of Biological Weapons, Statement by Dr. Kenneth Alibek before the Joint Economic Committee of United States Congress, Post-World War II Programs of Biological Weapons. Domaradskij, Igor V. and Wendy Orent (2003), All-Union Scientific-Research Institute of Microbiology, State Research Centre for Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, All-Union Scientific-Research Institute of Molecular Biology, All-Union Scientific-Research Institute of Highly Pure Biopreparations, Stepnogorsk Scientific Experimental-Industrial Base, Vector State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology, All-Union Scientific-Research Institute of Veterinary Virology and Microbiology, Poison laboratory of the Soviet secret services, Ministry of Agriculture and Food (Soviet Union) Role in offensive Soviet biological warfare programme, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jbscf.30, "2021 Adherence to and Compliance With Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments", "The Trilateral Agreement: lessons for biological weapons verification", "What happened after an explosion at a Russian disease research lab called VECTOR? Now, the Biden White House has taken the extraordinary step of calling out both countries on their coordinated propaganda campaign and saying they might be providing cover for a potential .
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