Found 30 biological labs in Ukraine, possibly for bioweapons, claim Russian forces

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The Russian military claims to have uncovered 30 biological laboratories in Ukraine.

Igor Kirillov, the chief of the Russian Armed Forces' radiation, chemical, and biological defence, told reporters that the laboratories were reportedly involved in biological weapons production. 

"The Russian Defense Ministry has repeatedly drawn attention to the military biological programs that are being implemented by the Pentagon in post-Soviet countries, including on the territory of Ukraine, where a network of more than 30 biological laboratories has been formed, which can be divided into research and sanitary-epidemiological ones," Kirillov said.

The Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) is the project's customer, and a corporation linked with the military department, notably Black and Veatch, is involved in project implementation, he stated.

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Kirillov noted that the work is being done in three primary areas.

The first is, according to the Pentagon, the monitoring of the biological situation in the proposed areas for the deployment of military contingents from NATO member states.

The second is the collecting of harmful microbe strains and their transfer to the United States.

According to him, the third direction is research into prospective biological weapons agents that are peculiar to a given place, have natural foci, and may be transmitted to humans. 

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Kirillov gave the following example: since 2021, the Pentagon has been implementing the project "Diagnostics, Surveillance and Prevention of Zoonotic Diseases in the Armed Forces of Ukraine" with a total funding of $11.8 million; in 2020-2021, the German Defense Ministry conducted a study of pathogens of the Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic disease in Ukraine. fever, leptospirosis, meningitis, hantaviruses as part of the Ukrainian-German initiative to ensure biological security at the external borders of the European Union.

Under the pretext of testing means for the treatment and prevention of the coronavirus infection, several thousand samples of serum from patients, primarily those belonging to the Slavic ethnic group, were taken from Ukraine to the Walter Reed Research Institute of the US Army, he added.

(With inputs from Sputnik News)