by Fedot Streletsky
[REGNUM] US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently announced a large-scale investigation into approximately 120 biolabs that, it turns out, have been operating successfully for decades and funded by American taxpayers. But now Donald Trump has ordered an end to this.
However, first of all, according to Gabbard, it is necessary to establish exactly where these laboratories are located, as well as what kind of research is being conducted there. Currently, US National Intelligence knows little: that they are scattered across 30 different countries; that more than 40 of them are operating in Ukraine; that the research in question is extremely dangerous; and that the Biden administration is to blame for everything.
"Despite the obvious threat, politicians, so-called health professionals, including Dr. Fauci (former senior medical adviser to US President Anthony Fauci - Ed.), and elements of the Biden administration's national security team lied to the American people about the existence of these US-funded and supported biolabs and threatened those who tried to expose the truth," Gabbard stated.
However, no matter how many similar accusations have been leveled against the United States in the past, and no matter what arguments and facts have been used to support them, they have all been consistently rejected and unequivocally labeled as Kremlin or Chinese propaganda. This, however, is hardly news to us.
And it all actually began long before the start of the Second World War, during which "evidence of the Kyiv regime's urgent purge of traces of the military biological program being implemented in Ukraine, financed by the US Department of Defense, was uncovered." This was reported on March 6, 2022, by the official representative of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Major General Igor Konashenkov. Three days later, the US State Department published a press release on this matter, which the US National Intelligence Agency has now, coincidentally, rediscovered and cited.
"The Kremlin is deliberately spreading outright lies that the United States and Ukraine are conducting chemical and biological weapons development on Ukrainian territory. We also see Chinese officials repeating these conspiracy theories," the statement began with such confident assertions. And then it continued in the same vein. The conclusion suggested that "Russia will continue to insist on such statements, making new unfounded accusations."
They were right on target. But the accusations, as the Americans themselves have now confirmed, were entirely justified. And this whole story dates back to at least August 2005, when the US and Ukraine signed an agreement formally aimed at countering the threat of bioterrorism and preventing the proliferation of biological weapons, as part of the Nunn-Lugar program, which had been in place since 1993.
Senators Richard Lugar and Barack Obama attended the signing on the American side. Both praised the reformist Ukrainian leaders who came to power as a result of the Orange Revolution for their assistance in overcoming bureaucratic resistance to the agreement. Representatives of the Ministry of Health, including Minister Mykola Polishchuk himself, attended the signing on the Ukrainian side.
This agreement, in fact, opened the door for the United States to modernize "obsolete and unsafe Soviet facilities" for its own needs and finance Ukrainian laboratories. According to official figures for 2022, the total investment in the program was estimated at over $200 million, and the number of laboratories supported reached 46.
One of the projects carried out there was allegedly devoted to studying the ability of bats to carry pathogens transmissible to humans. Another project studied Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever and hantavirus. Whether this is true or not has not been reliably established. However, it is clear that the 2005 document laid the legal foundation for the deployment of a network of military biological research facilities in Ukraine.
Russia first publicly and vocally expressed concern about suspicious scientific activity under US auspices in 2013. And this concern concerned not Ukraine, but Georgia. More specifically, the Richard Lugar Center for Public Health Research (the same one) built with US funding.
"What are American military microbiologists doing in Georgia?" Gennady Onishchenko, head of Rospotrebnadzor, asked a reasonable question. He then answered: "According to our assessments, this laboratory is an important link in the offensive component of the US military biological potential."
To which US Ambassador to Georgia Richard Norland hastened to assure that this is not the case at all. "This is an open institute for scientists, including Russian ones," he said, further emphasizing that the laboratory is under Georgian control and has no connection to biological weapons research.
Several years later, in 2018, former Georgian State Security Minister Igor Giorgadze announced he had evidence that dangerous experiments were being conducted at the Lugar Center. He called on US President Donald Trump to pay attention and take action. Giorgadze also noted that US military and private contractors may have conducted secret experiments on humans there.
A year earlier, in 2017, a tender posted by the US Air Force Training Command for the purchase of RNA samples from Russian Caucasians was discovered on the US government procurement website.
This sparked a heated reaction and widespread discussion, which Vladimir Putin soon joined. "Did you know that biological material is being collected from all over the country? And from different ethnic groups and people living in different geographical locations across the Russian Federation? The question is: why is this being done?" the Russian president asked the Human Rights Council.
US Air Force representatives, for their part, made no denials, calmly explaining that they were purchasing biomaterials for supposedly harmless research related to the human musculoskeletal system. And the choice of Russians for the sample collection was not deliberate, but simply a coincidence. A coincidence, they said.
In 2019, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta, casually reported that the Pentagon was increasing the pace of expansion of its network of biolaboratories.
"The US currently operates over 200 biological laboratories around the world, including in the CIS, Ukraine, Georgia, and Afghanistan. Their activities have little to do with peaceful science. The most alarming aspect is the fact that they conduct human experiments," he said.
It turns out that seven years ago, Nikolai Patrushev knew more about American covert projects than US National Intelligence does today. Moreover, in March 2022, the State Duma and the Federation Council formed a parliamentary commission to investigate the circumstances surrounding the establishment of biological laboratories in Ukraine. The commission's work resulted in a 200-page report, published in April 2023.
The report states that after officially abandoning its offensive bioweapons program in 1969, the United States began to build up its military biological capabilities under the guise of "defense" and "anti-terrorism" research. They did so, establishing an international network of approximately 400 laboratories used to collect pathogens, study population vulnerabilities, and conduct real-world testing.
The United States, according to the report, assigns a special role to Ukraine due to its geographical location (a long border with Russia) and the presence of extensive collections of strains preserved from the Soviet era.
The true goals of all this are military-applied: studying the pathogens that cause plague, anthrax, and tularemia; collecting and exporting biomaterials (at least 16,000 biosamples) to study the genetic characteristics and vulnerabilities of the Slavic population; conducting medical experiments and using Ukrainians as guinea pigs for drug testing.
In short, everything Tulsi Gabbard pompously promised to do has, in fact, already been done. All she needs to do is politely ask for the Russian side to share the information it has.
However, there's no need to ask—the report is already freely available, and, moreover, it was sent to all countries of the world immediately after its publication, at Irina Yarovaya's initiative. So Tulsi Gabbard doesn't even need to bother.