The new facility became operational in July 1949. Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine, presentation of faulty intelligence on Iraqs suspected weapons of mass destruction. Ivanovskii Institute of Virology. [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. [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. Germany launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 and following the capture of nearby Kalinin in October, the BW facility on Gorodomlya Island was evacuated and eventually relocated to Kirov. "Few young people: half-dead to give a start," Nostradamus mentioned in his writing. 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. 48 - a tsarist-era red-brick manor house located in Cherntsy (Ivanovo region). This would not have sudden onset, like the movies. 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. Under Putin, Russia has a biological weapons program, one that it has clearly used to target its opponents. 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. The SIS reports indicate that Zlatogorov and Maslakovets conducted some of their research on a so-called Plague Fort - Fort Alexander 1, located at Kronstadt. "[24], In 1989 the defector Vladimir Pasechnik convinced the British that the Soviets had genetically engineered a strain of Yersinia pestis to resist antibiotics. [6] Upon ratification of the Geneva Protocol, several countries made reservations regarding its applicability and use in retaliation. 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." "[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". "He's already used. The latest claims come just hours . Russian officials accused the U.S. of funding biowarfare efforts in Ukraine, drawing concern from Western officials who fear that a crescendo of allegations about weapons of mass destruction. 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 . However, the officers, doctors and other personnel from Unit 731 were in fact transferred to the comparative comfort of the NKVD special prison camp No. 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. Moscow claimed its invading forces discovered evidence of an emergency clean-up. [1] The program began in the 1920s and lasted until at least September 1992 but has possibly been continued by Russia after that. 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. ATLANTA, GA. (THECOUNT) Forget the current worldwide pandemic, according to CDC, there may also be a zombie apocalypse coming in 2021. 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. [12] (aka Kanatjan Alibekov). 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 to Witness 'Zombie' Anthrax Outbreak? The safe and effective drug was being administered to Georgians for free as part of an effort to eliminate hepatitis C from Georgia,and the project was overseen by the CDC with donated drugs from Gilead. The Russian Bioweapons program would be the most capable, deadliest program in the world. The US undersecretary of state Victoria Nuland affirmed those facts in a Senate foreign relations committee hearing this week, in which the Republican senator Marco Rubio asked directly if Ukraine had biological weapons. Tucker Carlson took the bait offered by the Russian militarys reference to coronavirus. An outbreak of weaponized smallpox occurred during testing in 1971. House. Aralsk-7 was part of a. In the 1980s and 1990s, many of these agents were genetically altered to resist heat, cold, and antibiotics. 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. Both the US and Ukraine have categorically denied they are developing biological weapons inside the country. the poisoning of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Updated: 15:41, 28 Dec 2020 EXPERTS fear Russian scientists are experimenting with the deadly Ebola virus as part of a terrifying "Doomsday" chemical weapons project. 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. In that case too, documents supposedly proving the allegations were published in the state media records from the lab which showed that dozens of Georgians had died in 2015 while taking the American-made drug Sovaldi. [14], By 1939, with the USSR on a war footing, the Soviet leadership is reported to have believed that the "imperialistic and fascistic countries" had actively undertaken BW preparations and that the use of such weapons, in case of emergency, was a foregone conclusion. Those records were obtained and made public by a former head of Georgian intelligence living in exile in Russia, Igor Giorgadze. At some point around the 25 September, the facility was evacuated and the buildings partially destroyed. Russia is seeking to unlock unknown prehistoric viruses up to 50,000-years-old by extracting biological material from carcasses of ancient animals frozen in permafrost. 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. [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. 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 . ?????????? You know, if theres no evidence right now, that doesnt mean that no evidence exists, Zakharova said. Congress. (Most of that long thread was translated into English by Ilya Lozovsky, an editor at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. 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. [20], The USSR was a signatory of 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). Fox News ??????? The list of destroyed strains published by RIA Novosti and other Russian media outlets contains not a single particularly dangerous strain. "I'm not . Symptoms. At least one of the pilots was a Russian Foreign Intelligence Service officer". The destruction of the pathogens listed on orders sent to the labs, Konashenkov said, was a desperate effort to conceal any traces of the military-biological program financed by the U.S. Department of Defense in Ukraine., At a defense ministry briefing in Moscow the next day, Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov the head of the Russian militarys radiation, chemical, and biological protection force displayed these documents on a huge screen. These weapons could be . By signing up, I agree to receive emails from The Intercept and to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. The goal of this and other Pentagon-funded biological studies in Ukraine was the creation of a mechanism for the covert spread of deadly pathogens., On March 10, Russian defense ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov claimed, falsely, that documents seized in Ukraine indicated that U.S. and Ukrainian researchers were plotting to use birds to covertly send deadly pathogens to Russia pic.twitter.com/83nNA897kc. Topline. There are various accounts regarding the relocation of STI, with official Russian sources indicating that it was initially transferred to Saratov. How many covert wars, miscarriages of justice, and dystopian technologies would remain hidden if our reporters werent on the beat? By 1960, numerous BW research facilities existed throughout the Soviet Union. ?????????? Here they aimed to develop strains of plague that remained viable when loaded into artillery shells, aerial bombs and other means of dispersal. Biodefense: Worldwide Threats and Countermeasure Efforts for the Department of Defense: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities of the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, One Hundred Thirteenth Congress, First Session, Hearing Held October 11, 2013. p. 34. #??????? 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. 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. Putin comments on US-led biolabs in Ukraine pic.twitter.com/oqO4WDDxSr. The most important difference between biological weapons development, and the mundane but vital work of identifying, describing, and studying the viruses and bacteria that occur in nature and pose a threat to public health, Favorov told me, is that none of these labs have any type of equipment for the modification of the strain., In all these labs, he said, you only have the equipment which might describe what you have, but not to modify it., Update: Friday, March 18, 3:05 a.m. In his account of the Soviet BW programme, Alibek, a former senior manager of Biopreparat, raises the intriguing possibility that in the late summer of 1942 the Red Army engaged in the deliberate aerosol dissemination of Francisella tularensis (the causative agent of tularaemia) against German panzer troops near Stalingrad. 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 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? Imagine you come to a certain office and see an inscription on one of the rooms:Instruction for the cleaner. A state lab in Russia's Siberia is beginning research into prehistoric viruses preserved in the remains of animals found in melting permafrost. In 2012, they fought anthrax in the Altai Territory. Slightly more feasible is the "28 Days" scenario, where people go into a state of crazed rage; sort of a super hydrophobia. 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. That too, is impossible. ???????:#?????? Another innovation was the "mobilization production facilities"ostensibly civil manufacturing plantswhich incorporated capacity for production of weapons in wartime emergency." However, the largest epidemic of anthrax in Russia took place in Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg) in April 1979. ????? Forty years after the UN General Assembly gave the secretary-general broad authority to investigate allegations of chemical and biological weapons use, that power is still under threat. Zombie apocalypse According to Nostradamus, a scientist from Russia will create a biological weapon that create a virus that will turn people into zombies. 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. No. 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]. ???????????? The first set of Ukrainian documents to be made public by the Russian military were published by the Russian government news agency RIA Novosti on March 6. Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya held up images of pregnant women injured by Russian shelling of a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine. Project Bonfire was the codename for the budget to develop antibiotic-resistant microbial strains. A total of fourteen highly detailed reports on the Soviet BW programme were issued in the period 1924-1927. The paperwork even indicated that some of the strains had been purchased from Russian labs. [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. 12 Mar 2022. On the 9 August 1945, the Soviet Union launched its invasion of Japanese-controlled Manchuria. The defendants were found guilty and sentenced to terms ranging from two to twenty-five years in Soviet labour correction camps. ), Pettersson and her colleagues converted the screenshots of the original documents ordering the destruction of pathogens at the labs published in the Russia media into a Google Docs spreadsheet that is easier to read and pointed out that, despite claims from the Russian military, there are no deadly pathogens on this list no plague, anthrax, cholera., In their detailed debunking of the Russian claims, the researchers explained that any effort to create biological weapons would require a much larger base of strains than those listed. The documents indicate that the Kharkiv lab destroyed only 40 test tubes and the Poltava lab destroyed 24. The group also agreed with Lewitins conclusion that creating a military bacterium specific only for a certain nationality and especially for Russians is absolutely evolutionarily impossible., In conclusion, the researchers said, the statements published in the Russian state media, and attributed to senior Russian officials, are unsubstantiated anti-scientific bullshit., We thank Russian biologists for not being afraid to tell the truth, Serhiy Leshchenko, a Ukrainian investigative journalist and an adviser to the Ukrainian presidents office, said in a statement on YouTube from embattled Kyiv. Fears are growing Vladimir Put Tens of thousands of scientists, researchers, doctors, engineers, technicians, and . 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. [15], In his history of the Soviet Union in the Second World War, Christopher Bellamy argues that if either side was going to break the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting the use of gas and bacteriological warfare, then 1942 was the most likely year. As for the year ahead, a Russian scientist will create a biological weapon that will turn people into zombies, DublinLive reported on Saturday, based on a prophecy warning of the "half-dead to . Following the end of the Soviet Union, the movement seemed to have lost its relevance. The convention was backed by Richard Nixon, who in 1969 also put a stop to the US developing its own offensive biological weapons. ? The Soviet Union's 1991 collapse made Russia the inheritor of the vast majority of the USSR's weapons of mass destruction. If you're dead, you're immobile and you rot. 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. 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. 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. Over the course of its history, the Soviet program is known to have weaponized and stockpiled the following bio-agents[3] (and to have pursued basic research on many more): These programs became immense and were conducted at dozens of secret sites employing up to 65,000 people. We dont have ads, so we depend on our members 35,000 and counting to help us hold the powerful to account. The Russian team is this week reportedly taking samples from a collection of beasts preserved in ice that have been found in recent years.. ", United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, "Disarmament Treaties Database: 1925 Geneva Protocol", "Russian Federation: Ratification of 1925 Geneva Protocol", "The Shortcomings of Indeterminacy in Arms Control Regimes: The Case of the Biological Weapons Convention", "Ex-Soviet Bioweapons Labs Are Fighting COVID-19. RUSSIA could unleash a bioweapon on Ukraine more lethal than Covid from a Ukrainian lab, the former head of the British Army's chemical weapons unit has warned. The discussion came amid Russia's ongoing military invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24. 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. ????? The existence of these chimeric viruses programmes was one reason why Alibek defected to the United States in 1992. The Russian military, Lewitin told Aronova, had simply lied about what the Ukrainian documents meant. Photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images. 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. 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. The threat of chemical and nuclear warfare loomed large over most militaries during the Cold War. It has also shown a willingness to. That possibility leaves even seasoned experts rattled. Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the head of the Russian militarys radiation, chemical and biological protection force, described documents on recent biological research in Ukraine at a briefing in Moscow on Thursday. 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. Early programs at the military lab focused on Francisella tularensis (the causative agent of tularaemia). He had been a leading participant of a Russian team despatched to combat the October 1910 to February 1911 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Manchuria. Asked why the Pentagon provided the money beyond the obvious fact that the Department of Defense is the one part of the U.S. government that is lavishly funded Favorov said that the Pentagon took the lead in the effort to upgrade biosecurity in those countries partly in response to the anthrax attacks in the U.S. that started just a week after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. At a U.N. Security Council meeting on March 11, 2022, Russia U.N. On Monday, Biden said Russia was "also suggesting that Ukraine has biological and chemical weapons in Ukraine That's a clear sign he is considering using both of those. After US intelligence accurately predicted Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it's disturbing that Americans now fear Russia is preparing to use chemical weapons during the conflict. 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 . In 1926, at a small laboratory controlled by VOKhIMU, Fishman initiated research on Bacillus anthracis (the causative agent of anthrax). 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". 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. [10] It was at this time that Ivan Mikhailovich Velikanov[ru], an expert on botulinum toxin and botulism, emerged as the lead scientist in the early Soviet biological weapons program. This week, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria . [12] It was reported to use chicken eggs for the cultivation of the virus. We were given access to all areas of the site, examined relevant documentation, and interviewed staff, and concluded that the Center demonstrates significant transparency, Lentzosreported in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. And those who have read it will say: Well, yes, maybe there are no dangerous pathogens in these documents. 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. ?????????? Russian officials, and state-controlled Russian television, repeated the allegations again and again throughout 2018. In the early 1950s the Soviet leadership became concerned that the USSR was vulnerable to attack by a new generation of virus-based biological weapons. Nostradamus predicted a zombie apocalypse in 2021, citing a Russian scientist who created a biological weapon that produces a virus that - Turns humans zombies. 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. The Intercept is an independent nonprofit news outlet. The UN security council met on Friday to discuss Moscows claims the US is funding military biological activities in Ukraine. Who would hold party elites accountable to the values they proclaim to have? Biopreparat pursued offensive research, development, and production of biological agents under the guise of legitimate civil biotechnology research. Over the next decade or so, dual-use BW production plants were created at Berdsk, Omutninsk, Penza and Kurgan. It says material is being destroyed to conceal . But because dissenting views have been repressed, and independent broadcasters shut down, Russian scientists have been forced to post their findings on social networks that are mainly blocked in Russia. The World Health Organization (WHO) has said it is unaware of activity by Ukraine violating any international treaty, including the ban on biological weapons. This work was allegedly initiated in the 1920s at the Leningrad Military Medical Academy under the control of OGPU (see above). Sverdlovsk bioweapons production facility (Military Compound 19). 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 . Put another way, what this senior Russian diplomat said in 2018 holds true today: Russia will not be deterred by a lack of evidence from claiming that the U.S. operated biological weapons labs in .
