Russia’s War in Ukraine: Part 5
Ukrainian biolabs and US attitude towards bioresearch
After that primer on the history of bioweapon research, time to look a little closer to the situation in Ukraine. (With a hat-tip to Cuebacca for her invaluable help.)
There is a serious concern about biolabs in Ukraine, run and/or funded by the US, as a background to any report of use of biological or chemical weapons in this conflict. Even before looking closer into those claims in the next part, we can note that when Russia brought some of their findings of such labs in Ukraine, as part of their Special Military Operation, to the attention of the UN Security Council, and asked for an official probe, China joined Russia in approving such a probe. The other three permanent members, with veto vote, US, UK, and France, predictably voted against (but why miss a chance to prove Russia wrong and discredit them completely before the whole international community?). Importantly, the 10 elected members of the council abstained. (!!) What does that show, if Russia risks openly being proven wrong and untrustworthy, and the US and their EU/NATO allies in the permanent council, vote against transparency and due-diligence to get the facts on the table, and the call by Russia makes China join, and all other countries abstain? Perhaps that doubt and concerns are present among the other countries on the council… (See this report by CBS)
What is it, that makes Western countries block investigating, and all other countries shy away from that?
Let’s take a quick closer look at this, even though I am not an expert on this, and haven’t followed this closely. (Feel free to correct me or add to my story, where needed.)
At the very beginning of the war, a blogger with the name ‘BioClandestine’ released this pair of maps, noting an overlap between the initial targets of Russian bombing strikes at the very beginning of the war, and the locations of US-run/paid biolabs.
His account on Twitter got blocked a few days after he posted his thread exploring this ‘coincidence’, and was going viral.
In that thread, he links to the website of the US embassy in Ukraine, showing that there are indeed US funded and run biolabs in Ukraine, labeled as ‘defense’. He points out that Russia had already warned the year before that they were aware of the US labs right at their border, in this article by Newsweek: “Russian President Vladimir Putin's chief security adviser has said Moscow has "good reason to believe" the U.S. is developing biological weapons along the borders of Russia and China. […] Russian President Vladimir Putin's chief security adviser has said Moscow has "good reason to believe" the U.S. is developing biological weapons along the borders of Russia and China.”
The US Embassy in Ukraine had a list of the different facilities on their website, which disappeared that same week. If you look now, the website has a list again, but in a different format then what it was before (and cleaned up?) and on different URLs, which disproves any claim that this was nothing but a temporary ‘glitch’.
He mentions the link to Covid-19, as such a bioweapon that was created and spread by the US. That it was created by the US, seems proven, as far as I can see.
BioClandestine was NOT the first to report on this, AT ALL.
A 2018 article by South Front https://maps.southfront.org/pentagon-bio-weapons/ already laid out, in very high detail the work of Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, a Bulgarian investigative journalist.
In a previous series of articles she had written about international weapons smuggling using the company Silk Way Airlines (an Azerbaijani state-run company), under diplomatic cover.
“Among the main customers of the “diplomatic flights for weapons” service provided by Silk Way Airlines are American companies, which supply weapons to the US army and US Special Operations Command. The common element in these cases is that they all supply non-US standard weapons; hence, the weapons are not used by the US forces.”
This got her attention from the Bulgarian National Security Agency, and got her suddenly fired from Bulgarian newspaper Trud Daily. Seems she was over the mark! This did not stop her, and she continued, in the same vein, to research the development of biological weapons, financed and controlled by the Pentagon, and carried out all over the world.
The summary by South Front reads like a Tom Clancy novel. Highly visible, the company Metabiota, among others, and sandfly research (later more about those).
It includes documents such as this one, from a US Report titled “An evaluation of entomological warfare as a potential danger to the UNited Stated and European NATO Nations” (partially redacted, but declassified):
Such a detailed list is not really needed to explain that the cost of manufacture and use of such insect based bioweapons is low and very accessible to nefarious non-state actors. On the contrary, such a breakdown of ‘cost per death’ reads like an advertisement to a bureaucracy!
That such research was not just hypothesized in a bid to warn governments, is made clear in other parts of this document. It details several operations, where tests were done in the US (Utah Dugway Proving Ground, but also in urban areas of Savannah, Georgia) to test the “feasibility of mass-producing, storing, loading into munitions, and disseminating mosquitoes from aircraft”.
Dilyana points out that in 2014 Obama imposed a temporary ban on government funding of gain-of-function research, which proves that such was effectively going on, but that ban was lifted in 2017. Such research DID include “gain-of-function research projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route.” SARS viruses? That does include Covid (from the CDC: “SARS-CoV-2 has many lineages; all cause COVID-19”…
In her section on Ukraine, Dilyana presents official documents that show the interactions between DTRA, Black & Veach, the Ukrainian government, which did include veterinarian laboratories (see below for more on that, but to get you started: why would laboratories that are built to help Ukraine get rid or manage bioweapons from the Soviet Era include ‘veterinarian’ labs? That makes little sense…).
She goes on to detail that the agreement between the US and Ukraine includes that the “Ukrainian government is prohibited from public disclosure of sensitive information about the US program” and that the “establishment of the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine (STCU) – an International organization funded mainly by the US government which has been accorded diplomatic status.” Under diplomatic status. Why such high level of protection and secrecy?
Next, she details how in January 2016 “at least 20 Ukrainian soldiers have died and 200 are still hospitalised after the accidental leak of the ‘California flu’ virus from an American laboratory near Kharkov in eastern Ukraine.” This information I confirmed through an official question in the European Parliament. Next, an outbreak of the swine flu, also in 2016 (confirmed by the UK The Independent) where “364 deaths have been reported across Ukraine (81.3 % caused by Swine Flu A (H1N1) pdm09 – the same strain which caused the world pandemic in 2009)”. A virus that re-emerges 7 years after a first outbreak, unaltered? In a country full of high level biolabs? Where such a virus kept would NOT be covered by the agreement in regards to the control and management of Soviet era biological and chemical weapons, but be a new addition? Dilyana goes on to describe several other suspicious outbreaks of disease in Ukraine.
She then makes this link, leaving any conclusion to the reader:
“A new highly virulent variant of the cholera agent Vibrio cholera, with a high genetic similarity to the strains reported in Ukraine, hit Moscow in 2014. According to a 2014 Russian Research Anti-Plaque Institute genetic study the cholera strain isolated in Moscow was similar to the bacteria which caused the epidemic in neighboring Ukraine.”
While I recommend reading the whole article, I want to end with this last bit of information Dilyana provided.
The US Air Force placed an ad to collect synovial tissue and RNA from Russian/Caucasian individuals.
But this is not all, as she reports how “the National Cancer Institute has collected biological samples from 300 subjects from Linxian, Zhengzhou, and Chengdu in China”, as can be seen from this Federal Contract Opportunity. And that is just the beginning. All this raises “fears of a covert US ethnic bio-weapons program.”
And she is not alone in raising the alarm. In October 2015, as reported by RT “the head of Russia’s Security Council has warned of “a real problem” posed by the growing number of US-controlled laboratories that produce biological weapons.”
In September 2018, the Strategic Culture Foundation, a Russian based think tank, sounded the alarm on issues with the Lugar laboratory in Georgia. Among other claims, they wrote: “In 2013 a Chinese Air Force Colonel Dai Xu accused the US government of creating a new strain of bird flu now afflicting parts of China as a biological warfare attack. According to him, the American military released the H7N9 bird flu virus into China in an act of biological warfare. It has been reported that the source of Ebola virus in West Africa were US bio-warfare labs.”
The link to the ebola virus claim in that article is dead, but I could corroborate that with an article titled ‘Ebola virus epidemic: a deliberate accident?’ published in the Natural Library of Medicine from the NIH: “After making a quick comparison of the number of cases between this outbreak and previous ones, one could argue that something is different this time (Salvaggio & Baddley 2004). Is this epidemic disease a genuine natural disaster or something else?”
The article concludes with a reference to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC): “There is little hope the BWC will ever be strengthened to have teeth. With no verification mechanism, the US military bio-warfare labs will always be a matter of concern.”
Where any US funded research into gain of function was at first denied, The Intercept reported early September 2021 that FOIA documents showed that “Wuhan Institute of Virology and the nearby Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment, along with their collaborator, the U.S.-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, have engaged in what the U.S. government defines as “gain-of-function research of concern,” intentionally making viruses more pathogenic or transmissible in order to study them, despite stipulations from a U.S. funding agency that the money not be used for that purpose.”
Just the News reported early 2022 how the “NIH deleted COVID info from public view at Wuhan researcher's request, emails show”, as learned from another FOIA request. While this deletion, at the beginning of the pandemic in the US, raised concerns, the NIH tried to hide it, by directing reporters to ‘more favorable’ coverage. This by itself doesn’t prove anything, but it underscores a pattern of secrecy, which makes it very hard to ignore the feeling we’re being lied to, that vital information is being hidden.
A lot has happened since, up to and including Russia repeatedly bringing this officially before the United Nations Security Council, the highest international instance where this can be brought to, where Western countries used their veto powers to block any investigations.
Yet a lot of other information has come out, as well, and has been independently confirmed. Strangely, Hunter Biden and his laptop have been mixed up in all of this, connecting Ukrainian energy giant Burisma (where Hunter was a Board Member, despite no experience with the energy sector) with investment fund Rosemont Seneca (lead by Hunter Biden), and Metabiota, a biotech firm that is also a DoD contractor, specialized in ‘research on pandemic-causing diseases that could be used as bioweapons’…
This has been learned from recent reports by Russia that show links between the Ukrainian labs and Metabiota, something FOIA requests in the US have also revealed. Add to that the knowledge that Hunter Biden, the president’s son. The British DailyMail reported:
“Moscow’s claim that Hunter Biden helped finance a US military 'bioweapons' research program in Ukraine is at least partially true, according to new emails obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com.
The commander of the Russian Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Forces, claimed there was a 'scheme of interaction between US government agencies and Ukrainian biological objects' and pointed to the 'financing of such activities by structures close to the current US leadership, in particular the investment fund Rosemont Seneca, which is headed by Hunter Biden.'
Intelligence experts say the Russian military leader's allegations were a brazen propaganda ploy to justify president Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine and sow discord in the US.
But emails from Hunter's abandoned laptop show he helped secure millions of dollars of funding for Metabiota, a Department of Defense contractor specializing in research on pandemic-causing diseases that could be used as bioweapons.
He also introduced Metabiota to an allegedly corrupt Ukrainian gas firm, Burisma, for a 'science project' involving high biosecurity level labs in Ukraine. And although Metabiota is ostensibly a medical data company, its vice president emailed Hunter in 2014 describing how they could 'assert Ukraine's cultural and economic independence from Russia' – an unusual goal for a biotech firm.” (The article has some very interesting source material they show, worth a closer look if you want to learn more.)
A report by Cuebacca on Substack detailed documents on the building of 2 biolabs in Kiev and Odessa, early 2019. She wrote “Dated JULY 28, 2021 (remember that), this is a document (redacted, boo, but it leaves something to the imagination right?) released by the DEFENCE THREAT REDUCTION AGENCY (DTRA), COOPERATIVE THREAT REDUCTION (CTR), and BIOLOGICAL THREAT REDUCTION PROGRAM (BTRP), to amend the length of a previous extension request needed in order to bring both the KYIV and ODESA facilities up to compliance with WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION standards before opening.”
and
“They also state that the facilities were 90% complete, but “did not plan for “THIS TYPE” of work to be preformed” at these facilities, so additional safety measures were needed, which was the reason the extension was made in the first place.”
She points that 7 months after July 28, 2021 was February 28, 2022. 4 days after the start of Russia’s Special Military Operation. What was the goal of those 2 new labs that was so urgent, and is there indeed a link between those labs about to come online, and Russia’s invasion? Perhaps not as a main reason, but as added weight to nudge Putin’s decision to move forward?
Then you get into reports that DARPA, the US military research arm, had a program called ‘Insect Allies’. From their website, we learn about the aims of this program: “The Insect Allies program is pursuing scalable, readily deployable, and generalizable countermeasures against potential natural and engineered threats to the food supply with the goals of preserving the U.S. crop system.” Did you notice? “Engineered threats”… This means that somewhere they were also researching how to engineer those threats themselves! This is part of that research philosophy used to justify gain-of-function: you cannot prepare effective countermeasures, if you do not know what is possible/feasible in the realm of threats/weapons.
It doesn’t stop there: “To develop such countermeasures, Insect Allies performer teams are leveraging a natural and efficient two-step delivery system to transfer modified genes to plants: insect vectors and the plant viruses they transmit.” So they are researching how to use insects to insert genetic material into targets. If you can do this with ‘plant material’ to ‘make sick plants healthy again’, you can also insert any other genetic material targeting any other organism. They admit that they have achieved ‘mounting technical breakthroughs that are providing foundational knowledge in plant virus gene editing and disease vector biology’. Yes, disease vector biology. The way diseases and infections transfer to other organisms. This is exactly what I described as the philosophy of such research: study the threat, as well as the counter. And knowing how the threat works, means that you can easily weaponize it, yourself.
The European counterpart of the CDC, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), explains:
“Vector-borne diseases are infections transmitted by the bite of infected arthropod species, such as mosquitoes, ticks, triatomine bugs, sandflies, and blackflies.”
Sandflies? There they are again.
And of course we now think about the absolutely inhumane research Fauci carried out when he had beagles eaten alive by sandflies! (Even fact-check organizations could not fully deny this story, even if some iterations of it proved incorrect) What is that about? Checking if a vaccine could help stop a fly/mosquito borne parasitic disease, and the level of toxic effects after receiving the experimental treatment.
And then a whole other set of news comes to mind. Do you remember the news about hiding human research in veterinary laboratories (with much lower reporting and oversight/safety rules), such as found at Mariupol (“An RCB Troops investigation of samples from a veterinary laboratory in Mariupol has concluded that it also may have been involved in the broader US-led biological research activities, Kirillov said, pointing to the presence of pathogens uncharacteristic of veterinary diseases, such as typhoid fever, paratyphoid fever, and gas gangrene at the lab.”), the authorization Nicaragua gave to Russian troops to enter their country among other things to help ‘combating organized crime and drug trafficking’, knowing that Nicaragua houses a US funded BSL-3 veterinary laboratory.
What about the Gates Foundation funding of genetically modified mosquitoes?
Or the monkeys that carried dangerous pathogens, sent into the country to a CDC facility, but had an accident in Danville, Pennsylvania, that released several of the monkeys into the population?
Or the 2003 outbreak of monkey pox in domesticated prairie dogs after they shared bedding and caging with a shipment of infected small mammals from West Africa? And the subsequent 2022-2023 monkeypox outbreak in the US and the EU, strangely only there, and not elsewhere in the world?
Where this disease is mostly spread through sexual contact (anal), to the point that a lot of prevention messages were aimed directly at the gay community, leading to insane headlines such as this from the WaPo: ‘Monkeypox dilemma: How to warn gay men about risk without fueling hate’? And the government tried to make this into a new public health emergency? Or the claims by Russia about US funded research in Ukraine about the migration routes of birds and the risks of disease spread?
To make things worse, this 2019 article by the Guardian appeared. What they wrote was a warning: “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/ Deoxy ribonucleic Acid (DNA).” The scientists they cited, claim that “world governments have failed when it comes to preparing against threats like futuristic bioweapons powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and genetic manipulation.” And what happens when governments DO research ‘against’ such threats? Right, they ALSO research the threat itself, how to do it, the pathways, mechanisms, etc.
Interestingly, the article does mention specifically how the US is doing similar research. Of course, only for benign purposes, such as ‘the use of biological agents to force the eradication of drug production crops’, without damaging other crops and creating famine, as the US uses in Colombia in the war against the drug cartels.
Then the article cites some very interesting information:
“The US is developing infectious agents that kill drug plants. This controversial strategy carries great dangers of undermining international prohibitions on biological weapons, presenting risks for human health and posing dangers to the environment. The 1925 Geneva Protocol outlawed the use of biological weapons as well as chemical ones. However, it contains serious limitations: it does not prohibit the development, production and stockpiling of biological weapons, and some countries assert the right to retaliate if attacked with biological weapons.”
The article continues: “However, unlike the Chemical Weapons Convention, the treaty lacks verification and compliance procedures, and there is no implementing body to monitor observance. An attempt was made in 1991 to establish a verification system, but the talks collapsed due essentially to a withdrawal of cooperation by the USA.” Why would the US block the implementation of such procedures to guard verification and compliance? Oh no, you’re not thinking they were covering for themselves, are you? And then, of course, we read about how Russia is concerned that the US is funding biolabs targeting Slavs, and of course Putin is the crazy one… The US would never!
Or would they?
A very interesting article that is available on the CIA website, reveals ‘The Invisible Third World War’, marked ‘Declassified in part- Sanitized Copy Approved for Release’. It minces no words: “A wide range of invisible warfare experiments conducted on unwitting citizens by the United States Government has already been exposed”, and then goes on to cite several examples. It states that ‘Despite an internal treaty forbidding the use of biological warfare, some nations today are cheating, using it anyway’ and then names the Soviet Union. Yet in the very next paragraph, it recounts the leaking of Army ‘Weteye’ nerve gas in Colorado, showing the US itself has such bombs. Importantly, the article stated also "Current genetic developments in what is called "Recombinant DNA" threaten to unleash mutant biological warfare strains from which the world may never recover."
The Washington Examiner cited this speech:
“There are now weapons under development, and developed, that are designed to target specific people,” Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), a member of the committees that oversee the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community, said Friday at the Aspen Security Forum in Aspen, Colorado. “That's what this is, where you can actually take someone's DNA, you know, their medical profile, and you can target a biological weapon that will kill that person or take them off the battlefield or make them inoperable.”
Crow did not indicate who is developing those weapons, but if US enemies can make those, so can the US. Title 50 Section 1520 of the US Code contains this text:
“1520. Use of human subjects for testing of chemical or biological agents by Department of Defense; accounting to Congressional committees with respect to experiments and studies; notification of local civilian officials (a) Not later than thirty days after final approval within the Department of Defense of plans for any experiment or study to be conducted by the Department of Defense, whether directly or under contract, involving the use of human subjects for the testing of chemical or biological agents, the Secretary of Defense shall supply the Committees on Armed Services of the Senate and House of Representatives with a full accounting of such plans for such experiment or study, and such experiment or study may then be conducted only after the expiration of the thirty-day period beginning on the date such accounting is received by such committees.
(b)(1) The Secretary of Defense may not conduct any test or experiment involving the use of any chemical or biological agent on civilian populations unless local civilian officials in the area in which the test or experiment is to be conducted are notified in advance of such test or experiment, and such test or experiment may then be conducted only after the expiration of the thirty-day period beginning on the date of such notification.
(2) Paragraph (1) shall apply to tests and experiments conducted by Department of Defense personnel and tests and experiments conducted on behalf”
The fact that such text exists, that openly speaks about our own government conducting the testing of chemical or biological agents on their own population? I am no legal expert, at all, and I might completely misinterpret this document. But I don’t like what I see, especially not in light of all the rest I have exposed here. A possible first source is BioClandestine.
That should be enough to talk about US activity involving labs and biological research. A whole lot more could be said, but I will leave it at this.
The involvement of the US on Ukrainian soil with such research, shows a willingness of at least part of the Ukrainian military and/or civilian leadership to have and research/develop such bioweapons. Is it a stretch to also assume a willingness to use such weapons? Especially when they are getting desperate under a military onslaught that is grinding away their equipment and troops?
I don’t think so.