Pentagon's hand found in labs trail

Files uncovered by Russia show US' role on biological weapons in Ukraine

Russia's Defense Ministry said on Thursday that the Pentagon was directly involved in developing and financing biological weapons components in Ukraine.

Documents received from Ukrainian employees working at the laboratories in question have been studied by Russian experts and show that Ukrainian biological projects were directly developed and approved by the Pentagon, the ministry's spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in a news briefing in Moscow.

One of these projects was aimed at carrying out molecular analysis of particularly dangerous infections endemic in Ukraine and involved sampling pathogens from old animal burial sites to obtain new strains of anthrax.

Furthermore, a pharmaceutical company contracted by the United States' defense establishment worked with the Ukrainian Defense Ministry to test unregistered medical drugs on Ukrainian service members, according to Konashenkov.

Igor Kirillov, the head of the Russian Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Force, presented documents at the news conference that indicated an investment fund of Rosemont Seneca Partners sponsored the military-biological program in Ukraine.

"The scale of the program is impressive. In addition to the US Department of Defense, the US Agency for International Development, the George Soros Foundation, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are directly involved in the program's implementation in Ukraine," he said. "All these activities are carried out under the full control of the Pentagon."

Apart from experiments with viruses, the biolabs studied pathogens and information that can be used to develop biological weapons, the document said.

In the framework of a project called UP-8 conducted in Lviv, Kharkiv, Odessa and Kyiv, 4,000 servicemen were tested for hantavirus antibodies and 400 others for the presence of antibodies for the Congo-Crimean Fever virus.

In total, more than 16,000 biological tests taken in Ukraine were transferred abroad.

On March 10, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed it obtained documents indicating that US-sponsored biolabs in Ukraine conducted experiments with bat coronavirus samples.

Economic war

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday that the economic war waged against Russia by the US government had threatened to completely collapse bilateral relations.

"This, of course, is not in our interests, because we proceed from the fact that diplomatic relations and, in principle, relations between states should serve national interests, the interests of the peoples living on the territory of our countries," Zakharova said.

Earlier, the US embassy in Russia was handed a note with a list of US employees declared personae non gratae, a measure that Russia said was taken in retaliation for Washington's expulsion of diplomats from Russia to the United Nations.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday that the US must stop expelling Russian diplomats "if it wants Russia to stop expelling American ones".

"Our actions are not the root cause of this crisis. They are forced and retaliatory measures," Peskov said.