Internationalist 360°
As has been repeatedly pointed out by many media, the United States has long shown the world its disregard for international norms and its willingness to wage war with weapons of mass destruction anywhere in the world.
This fact was further documented during the Russian special operation in Ukraine, which resulted in the Russian Ministry of Defense obtaining multiple pieces of evidence and testimonies of captured Ukrainian and foreign “specialists” involved in the criminal activities of secret US biological laboratories in Ukraine.
For example, it was learned that Washington was preparing to conduct a study to diagnose highly dangerous pathogens, including the Ebola virus, at the Mechnikov Anti-Plague Research Institute in Odessa. It is noteworthy that the disease is not endemic and has never been reported in Ukraine. This raises a legitimate question about the need for such research and the true purpose of it being carried out by the United States particularly on Ukrainian territory.
In addition, US military-controlled biological laboratories in Ukraine have apparently been studying viruses that can be transmitted by mosquitoes, including those that spread Dengue fever, in the interests of developing biological weapons. The stated aim of this “project” was to study viruses capable of infecting Aedes mosquitoes. As a result of work already carried out in this area, the viral preparation was taken to the USA for further aerobiological research. The Pentagon’s interest in vectors of vector-borne diseases and building bioweapons with this in mind stems from the fact that during the last major yellow fever outbreak in Africa in 2013, there were 170,000 cases of severe disease, of which 60,000 ended in death. It is notable that deliberate outbreaks of Dengue virus transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes (the same ones studied in Ukraine) occurred in Cuba in the 1970s and 1980s. The use of Aedes mosquitoes, like those used by the US military in Ukraine, as biological weapons has previously been documented in a class action by Cuban citizens against the US government and has been submitted to the States Parties to the Biological Weapons Convention.
Military microbiologists from the USA, and with them from Germany, have also shown interest in the Ukraine to study tick-borne diseases, research on which was funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) as part of projects UP-1, UP-8. Ticks were collected mainly in the south-eastern regions of Ukraine, which are home to natural pockets of diseases characteristic of the Russian Federation, which is officially listed by Pentagon doctrine as a major enemy of the United States. A separate project on ixodid ticks, which are vectors of a number of highly dangerous diseases (tularemia, West Nile fever, Congo-Crimean fever), has been implemented by the University of Texas.
Cooperation between US and German military microbiologists in this field was clearly not incidental or sporadic. Documents obtained during the special operation in Ukraine have revealed that a number of secret Pentagon projects to test biological weapons in Ukraine were carried out on behalf of the Central Medical and Health Service of the German Armed Forces (Bundeswehr). In doing so, special attention was paid to studies of fatal cases of Congo-Crimean fever infection, summarizing demographic, epidemiological and clinical data.
This shows that Ukraine and other post-Soviet states have already become a testing ground for biological weapons not only for the US, but also for its NATO allies. First of all Germany, the Russian Ministry of Defense pointed out in its Telegram channel. It is therefore not surprising that a number of projects have been carried out for the benefit of the Central Medical and Health Service of the German Armed Forces.
As Black&Veatch and Metabiota’s TAP-coded report to the Pentagon demonstrates, alongside this, the US military and intelligence agencies in Ukraine have conducted far from peaceful programs on economically significant quarantine infections, codenamed UP. Such infections, which can damage the agriculture of individual countries and entire regions, have been the main focus of these projects. These include glanders (a contagious zoonotic, mainly chronic infectious disease caused by the bacterium Burkholderia mallei), African swine fever, classical swine fever, highly pathogenic avian influenza and Newcastle disease. Thus the African swine fever was of particular interest to US military biologists and it was this pathogen that was the subject of two projects. For example, the TAP-3 project dealt with studying the spread of the ASF pathogen through wildlife, examining the migration routes of wild boar through Ukraine. The TAP-6 project has already scaled this process to Eastern European countries. According to documents obtained from US biological laboratories, the study of the population of vectors of dangerous diseases was carried out by employees of the Institute of New Pathogens of the University of Florida in the Volyn, Rivne, Zhytomyr and Chernihiv regions of Ukraine, as well as in the areas bordering on Belarus and Russia. In this context, it is noteworthy that the situation regarding African swine fever has deteriorated in recent years in the Eastern European countries: since 2014, according to the International Office of Epizootics, outbreaks have been reported in Latvia (4,021 cases), Estonia (3,814 cases), Lithuania (4,201 cases) and Poland (over 13,000 cases of ASF have been reported and agricultural losses from the disease exceed €2.4 billion).
Information obtained during the special operation in Ukraine shows that US tests of dangerous diseases were conducted on Ukrainian servicemen, who were engaged as volunteers in experiments to assess the tolerability of dangerous diseases. The state of health of Ukrainian servicemen who have voluntarily laid down their arms also testifies to this: 33% of those surveyed had had hepatitis A, more than 4% had fever with renal syndrome and 20% had West Nile fever. These figures are well above the statistical average. The Russian defense ministry also noted that highly active neuromodulators had been tested on vulnerable Ukrainian citizens, causing irreversible damage to the central nervous system.
This criminal activity by the US in Ukraine was largely made possible because Ukraine had no laws to control dangerous pathogens, and the country had biosecurity deficiencies that made it impossible to respond effectively to emergency situations. And this is confirmed by the US report on the activities of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) from 2005 to 2016, which became available during Russia’s special military operation. The report focuses on non-compliance with biosafety requirements for the work and storage of microbial collections. DTRA activities in Ukraine are assessed positively, as the US has been able to export a microbial collection, organize biological situation assessments and implement projects to study particularly dangerous and economically significant infections that could cause a worsening (changing) epidemiological situation.
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