https://www.naturalblaze.com/2018/01/bi ... tagon.html
Biting Flies in Dagestan, Russia
Since the start of the Pentagon project in 2014 flies similar to those in Georgia have appeared in neighboring Dagestan (Russia). According to local people, they bite and cause rashes. Their breeding habitats are house drains.
Flies in Georgia (on the left). The same fly in Dagestan (on the right)
Flies from the Phlebotomine family carry dangerous parasites in their saliva which they transmit through a bite to humans. The disease, which these flies carry, is of high interest to the Pentagon. In 2003 during the US invasion of Iraq American soldiers were severely bitten by sand flies and contracted Leishmoniasis. The disease is native to Iraq and Afghanistan and if left untreated the acute form of Leishmoniasis can be fatal.
A 1967 US Army report “Arthropods of medical importance in Asia and the European USSR” lists all local insects, their distribution and the diseases that they carry. Biting flies, which live in drains, are also listed in the document. Their natural habitats, though, are the Philippines, not Georgia or Russia.
Operation Whitecoat: Infected flies tested to bite humans
In 1970 and 1972, Sand Fly Fever tests were performed on humans according to a declassified US Army report – US Army Activities in the US, Biological Warfare Programs, 1977, vol. II, p. 203.During operation Whitecoat volunteers were exposed to bites by infected sand flies. Operation Whitecoat was a bio-defense medical research program carried out by the US Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland between 1954 and 1973.
Despite the official termination of the US bio-weapons program, in 1982 USAMRIID performed an experiment if sand flies and mosquitoes could be vectors of Rift Valley Virus, Dengue, Chikungunya and Eastern Equine Encephalitis – viruses, which the US Army researched for their potential as bio-weapons.
Killer Insects
he Pentagon has a long history in using insects as vectors for diseases. According to a partially declassified 1981 US Army report, American bio warfare scientists carried out a number of experiments on insects. These operations were part of the US Entomological Warfare under the Program for Biological Weapons of the US.
The Pentagon: How to kill 625,000 people for just $0.29 cost per deat
A US Army report in 1981 compared two scenarios – 16 simultaneous attacks on a city by A. Aegypti mosquitoes, infected with Yellow Fever, and Tularemia aerosol attack, and assesses their effectiveness in cost and casualties.
what do we really know about the Ukraine war?
Re: what do we really know about the Ukraine war?
links of interest
https://govtribe.com/award/federal-cont ... dc16j00164
https://govtribe.com/contract/award/hsh ... dc16j00161
https://govtribe.com/contract/award/hsh ... dc17j00483
https://govtribe.com/contract/award/hsh ... dc16j00164
https://govtribe.com/contract/award/hsh ... dc16j00164
https://biosecurity.fas.org/resource/do ... Agents.pdf
https://biosecurity.fas.org/resource/do ... Agents.pdf
https://govtribe.com/contract/award/hdtra112c0024
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents ... Viral.html
https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a360311.pdf
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA068311.pdf
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEB ... USABWP.pdf
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA068311.pdf
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/file/entomological-weapons
https://govtribe.com/contract/award/hshqdc07c00020
https://govtribe.com/award/federal-cont ... dc16j00164
https://govtribe.com/contract/award/hsh ... dc16j00161
https://govtribe.com/contract/award/hsh ... dc17j00483
https://govtribe.com/contract/award/hsh ... dc16j00164
https://govtribe.com/contract/award/hsh ... dc16j00164
https://biosecurity.fas.org/resource/do ... Agents.pdf
https://biosecurity.fas.org/resource/do ... Agents.pdf
https://govtribe.com/contract/award/hdtra112c0024
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents ... Viral.html
https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a360311.pdf
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA068311.pdf
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEB ... USABWP.pdf
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA068311.pdf
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/file/entomological-weapons
https://govtribe.com/contract/award/hshqdc07c00020
Re: what do we really know about the Ukraine war?
https://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/09/04/g ... index.html
U.S. germ research for 'defensive purposes'
September 5, 2001 Posted: 10:37 AM EDT (1437 GMT)
By Jamie McIntyre
CNN Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The United States has several scientific research programs looking into germ warfare, but they are for "defensive purposes" and are allowed under the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, Pentagon officials said Tuesday.
Pentagon spokeswoman Torie Clarke said one of the programs -- known as the Jefferson project -- involved using "simulants" of a Russian strain of anthrax, but not producing actual strains themselves.
"The purpose is to protect the men and women of the armed services and the American people from what we see as a real threat," Clarke said.
The biological warfare pact allows germ research for peaceful purposes. The New York Times reported Tuesday that the Pentagon's secret research may "test the limits" of the treaty, because the pact doesn't fully define what constitutes "defensive" research or spell out what studies are prohibited.
Pentagon officials declined to provide details of the ongoing research, but a spokesman said the current programs were reviewed by the State Department, Defense Department, Justice Department, and the National Security Council in late 1999, and found to be fully treaty compliant.
The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention permits, "working with biological agents of types and quantities that are consistent with the prophylactic, protective, or other peaceful purposes."
Officials say current Pentagon research includes studying "minute quantities of known agents for the purpose of protecting U.S. personnel from its use."
U.S. officials say that a companion program by the CIA to test a mock "bomblet" designed to disperse biological agents was temporarily halted in late 2000, but that a decision to continue the research is expected soon from the Bush administration.
The program, known as "Clear Vision" may be moved over to the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, officials said.
The mock bomblet design was based on intelligence gathered about a Soviet weapon.
Officials said the CIA tests on the bomb model did not violate the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, although the New York Times reported that some officials in the Clinton administration believed it could have done so.
U.S. germ research for 'defensive purposes'
September 5, 2001 Posted: 10:37 AM EDT (1437 GMT)
By Jamie McIntyre
CNN Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The United States has several scientific research programs looking into germ warfare, but they are for "defensive purposes" and are allowed under the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, Pentagon officials said Tuesday.
Pentagon spokeswoman Torie Clarke said one of the programs -- known as the Jefferson project -- involved using "simulants" of a Russian strain of anthrax, but not producing actual strains themselves.
"The purpose is to protect the men and women of the armed services and the American people from what we see as a real threat," Clarke said.
The biological warfare pact allows germ research for peaceful purposes. The New York Times reported Tuesday that the Pentagon's secret research may "test the limits" of the treaty, because the pact doesn't fully define what constitutes "defensive" research or spell out what studies are prohibited.
Pentagon officials declined to provide details of the ongoing research, but a spokesman said the current programs were reviewed by the State Department, Defense Department, Justice Department, and the National Security Council in late 1999, and found to be fully treaty compliant.
The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention permits, "working with biological agents of types and quantities that are consistent with the prophylactic, protective, or other peaceful purposes."
Officials say current Pentagon research includes studying "minute quantities of known agents for the purpose of protecting U.S. personnel from its use."
U.S. officials say that a companion program by the CIA to test a mock "bomblet" designed to disperse biological agents was temporarily halted in late 2000, but that a decision to continue the research is expected soon from the Bush administration.
The program, known as "Clear Vision" may be moved over to the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, officials said.
The mock bomblet design was based on intelligence gathered about a Soviet weapon.
Officials said the CIA tests on the bomb model did not violate the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, although the New York Times reported that some officials in the Clinton administration believed it could have done so.
Re: what do we really know about the Ukraine war?
https://ua.usembassy.gov/embassy/kyiv/s ... n-program/
Biological Threat Reduction Program
The U.S. Department of Defense’s Biological Threat Reduction Program collaborates with partner countries to counter the threat of outbreaks (deliberate, accidental, or natural) of the world’s most dangerous infectious diseases. The program accomplishes its bio-threat reduction mission through development of a bio-risk management culture; international research partnerships; and partner capacity for enhanced bio-security, bio-safety, and bio-surveillance measures. The Biological Threat Reduction Program’s priorities in Ukraine are to consolidate and secure pathogens and toxins of security concern and to continue to ensure Ukraine can detect and report outbreaks caused by dangerous pathogens before they pose security or stability threats.
Current executive agents of the Biological Threat Reduction Program in Ukraine are the Ministry of Health, the State Service of Ukraine for Food Safety and Consumer Protection, the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences, and the Ministry of Defense.
Ministry of Defense (MOD) COVID-19 Response Assistance
Sanitary-Epidemiological Department (SED) of the Medical Command of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense received four mobile laboratories from DTRA with the goal of reinforcing the system of epidemiological surveillance in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense received an official Order from the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine concerning the deployment of the mobile labs to the regions of Kyiv, Lviv and Eastern Ukraine to help with the COVID-19 response.
On April 11, 2020, President Zelenskyy visited the SED unit in Pokrovskoye City, Donetsk Oblast, and familiarized himself with the capabilities of the mobile laboratories to help military and civilian people during the COVID-19 epidemic. (News article)
Laboratory Construction
BTRP has upgraded many laboratories for the Ministry of Health and the State Food Safety and Consumer Protection Service of Ukraine, reaching Biosafety Level 2. In 2019, BTRP constructed two laboratories for the latter, one in Kyiv and one in Odesa.
Science Writing Mentorship Program (www.SWMProgramUA.com)
The Science Writing Mentorship Program (SWMP) was initiated at the beginning of 2016. The overall focus of SWMP is to advance One Health initiatives and disease risk mitigation in Ukraine through effective dissemination of scientific findings at BTRP-supported laboratories. The program seeks to improve the science writing skills of participants to afford them the opportunity for publishing and obtaining grants for projects.
In addition, there is an annual Ukraine Regional One Health Research Symposium that features participants of SWMP and many others. In 2019, the Symposium had a total of 553 participants and 446 presentations.
Active Research Projects
BTRP supports many collaborative research projects through which Ukrainian and American scientists work together. A few recent examples are:
“Risk Assessment of Selected Avian EDPs Potentially Carried by Migratory Birds over Ukraine”
“Prevalence of Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever virus and hantaviruses in Ukraine and the potential requirement for differential diagnosis of suspect leptospirosis patients”
“The Spread of African Swine Fever Virus (ASFV) in Domestic Pigs and Wild Boars in Ukraine – Building Capacityfor Insight into the Transmission of ASFV through Characterization of Virus Isolates by Genome Sequencing and Phylogenetic Analysis”
“ASFBiosurveillanceand ASF Regional Risk Assessment: A Field to Plate Survey”
Conferences
BTRP invites Ukrainian scientists to participate in scientific conferences worldwide where they have the opportunity to present their work and integrate into the international science community.
Biosurveillance Network of the Silk Road (BNSR)
In 2016 the Ministry of Health of Ukraine and the State Service of Ukraine on Food Safety and Consumer Protection signed a memorandum on joining a multi-national working group with the goal to strengthen global health security and create well-functioning disease surveillance networks in the Eastern European region that includes Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llnXM36POEs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ9cCqChMLs
https://ua.usembassy.gov/wp-content/upl ... -Sheet.pdf
https://ua.usembassy.gov/wp-content/upl ... -Sheet.pdf
https://ua.usembassy.gov/wp-content/upl ... -sheet.pdf
https://ua.usembassy.gov/wp-content/upl ... al-ENG.pdf
https://ua.usembassy.gov/wp-content/upl ... al-ENG.pdf
Biological Threat Reduction Program
The U.S. Department of Defense’s Biological Threat Reduction Program collaborates with partner countries to counter the threat of outbreaks (deliberate, accidental, or natural) of the world’s most dangerous infectious diseases. The program accomplishes its bio-threat reduction mission through development of a bio-risk management culture; international research partnerships; and partner capacity for enhanced bio-security, bio-safety, and bio-surveillance measures. The Biological Threat Reduction Program’s priorities in Ukraine are to consolidate and secure pathogens and toxins of security concern and to continue to ensure Ukraine can detect and report outbreaks caused by dangerous pathogens before they pose security or stability threats.
Current executive agents of the Biological Threat Reduction Program in Ukraine are the Ministry of Health, the State Service of Ukraine for Food Safety and Consumer Protection, the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences, and the Ministry of Defense.
Ministry of Defense (MOD) COVID-19 Response Assistance
Sanitary-Epidemiological Department (SED) of the Medical Command of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense received four mobile laboratories from DTRA with the goal of reinforcing the system of epidemiological surveillance in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense received an official Order from the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine concerning the deployment of the mobile labs to the regions of Kyiv, Lviv and Eastern Ukraine to help with the COVID-19 response.
On April 11, 2020, President Zelenskyy visited the SED unit in Pokrovskoye City, Donetsk Oblast, and familiarized himself with the capabilities of the mobile laboratories to help military and civilian people during the COVID-19 epidemic. (News article)
Laboratory Construction
BTRP has upgraded many laboratories for the Ministry of Health and the State Food Safety and Consumer Protection Service of Ukraine, reaching Biosafety Level 2. In 2019, BTRP constructed two laboratories for the latter, one in Kyiv and one in Odesa.
Science Writing Mentorship Program (www.SWMProgramUA.com)
The Science Writing Mentorship Program (SWMP) was initiated at the beginning of 2016. The overall focus of SWMP is to advance One Health initiatives and disease risk mitigation in Ukraine through effective dissemination of scientific findings at BTRP-supported laboratories. The program seeks to improve the science writing skills of participants to afford them the opportunity for publishing and obtaining grants for projects.
In addition, there is an annual Ukraine Regional One Health Research Symposium that features participants of SWMP and many others. In 2019, the Symposium had a total of 553 participants and 446 presentations.
Active Research Projects
BTRP supports many collaborative research projects through which Ukrainian and American scientists work together. A few recent examples are:
“Risk Assessment of Selected Avian EDPs Potentially Carried by Migratory Birds over Ukraine”
“Prevalence of Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever virus and hantaviruses in Ukraine and the potential requirement for differential diagnosis of suspect leptospirosis patients”
“The Spread of African Swine Fever Virus (ASFV) in Domestic Pigs and Wild Boars in Ukraine – Building Capacityfor Insight into the Transmission of ASFV through Characterization of Virus Isolates by Genome Sequencing and Phylogenetic Analysis”
“ASFBiosurveillanceand ASF Regional Risk Assessment: A Field to Plate Survey”
Conferences
BTRP invites Ukrainian scientists to participate in scientific conferences worldwide where they have the opportunity to present their work and integrate into the international science community.
Biosurveillance Network of the Silk Road (BNSR)
In 2016 the Ministry of Health of Ukraine and the State Service of Ukraine on Food Safety and Consumer Protection signed a memorandum on joining a multi-national working group with the goal to strengthen global health security and create well-functioning disease surveillance networks in the Eastern European region that includes Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llnXM36POEs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ9cCqChMLs
https://ua.usembassy.gov/wp-content/upl ... -Sheet.pdf
https://ua.usembassy.gov/wp-content/upl ... -Sheet.pdf
https://ua.usembassy.gov/wp-content/upl ... -sheet.pdf
https://ua.usembassy.gov/wp-content/upl ... al-ENG.pdf
https://ua.usembassy.gov/wp-content/upl ... al-ENG.pdf
Re: what do we really know about the Ukraine war?
https://thebulletin.org/2022/02/us-offi ... ogens/amp/
US official: Russian invasion of Ukraine risks release of dangerous pathogens
By Matt Field, February 25, 2022
The Russian invasion of Ukraine may put at risk a network of US-linked labs in Ukraine that work with dangerous pathogens, said Robert Pope, the director of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, a 30-year-old Defense Department program that has helped secure the former Soviet Union’s weapons of mass destruction and redirect former bioweapons facilities and scientists toward peaceful endeavors.
The labs in Ukraine are not bioweapons facilities. The US government maintains that they are public and animal health labs operated by host countries. Although a long-running Russian disinformation campaign has painted a picture of a network of US military labs in Ukraine, Georgia, and other former Soviet republics involved in bioweapons or risky research, Pope said the labs conduct peaceful scientific research and disease surveillance. Outside experts have also said Pope’s program is not a covert bioweapons operation.
While the United States isn’t maintaining bioweapons facilities, Pope said, war could put pathogen collections in Ukraine at risk.
“I would say from every facility that we have worked with them in, we have confidence that as long as the electrical power is turned on and the people we have trained are present at the facility, the biosafety officers, that these pathogens are safe and secure to international standards,” Pope said. “Should these facilities be damaged by conflict, that could change.”
The pathogens with which the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program labs work are generally kept frozen, so they can’t replicate and become infectious. The risk the pathogens pose would increase if a building lost power and suffered damage. “If you lose the electrical power, the pathogens in the freezers warm up,” he said. “If the ventilation system is damaged, or the building itself is damaged, and these now ambient-temperature pathogens are able to escape the facility, then they can be potentially infectious in the region around the facility.”
Although Russian officials and media have misrepresented the US-supported labs in Ukraine and other former Soviet countries in disinformation campaigns, Pope doesn’t believe the Russians will deliberately aim weapons at the labs during the invasion.
“I think the Russians know enough about the kinds of pathogens that are stored in biological research laboratories that I don’t think they would deliberately target a laboratory,” Pope said. “But what I do have concerns about is that they would … be accidentally damaged during this Russian invasion.”
The invasion could also provide fodder for new disinformation narratives around the labs, Pope feared. The Russians, he said, “could potentially go to one of these facilities and fabricate something that they call evidence of nefarious activity at the facility.”
The pathogens in Ukrainian labs vary by facility, Pope said, but some can be characterized as presenting a concern in the Ukrainian environment. As an example, he cited African swine fever virus, which is highly contagious in pigs and has caused hundreds of outbreaks in Ukraine since 2012. Some labs, he said, may hold pathogen strains left over from the Soviet bioweapons program, preserved in freezers for research purposes.
“There is no place that still has any of the sort of infrastructure for researching or producing biological weapons,” Pope said. “Scientists being scientists, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of these strain collections in some of these laboratories still have pathogen strains that go all the way back to the origins of that program.”
The program is encouraging host countries to reduce the scope of their pathogen holdings to as small of a collection as necessary for legitimate scientific research, Pope said.
“What we have today and what these countries maintain are small amounts of various pathogens that by and large are things that are collected out of their environment that they need for research to be able to legitimately surveil disease and develop vaccines against,” he said.
This work, Pope said, continued in Ukraine until recently. “They have more pathogens in more places than we recommend,” he said. The program had been helping Ukrainian researchers sift through their frozen pathogen collections, with the goal of persuading the Ukrainians to preserve their genetic information of samples via sequencing before destroying the live samples.
Pope said his program had been close to an agreement with the Ukrainians on consolidating samples, but the invasion has now made that project uncertain. “All of that, obviously, has been derailed here with the recent events,” he said.
The Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, Pope said Thursday, has not had contact with biosafety staff at the labs in Ukraine since the Russian invasion. Phone lines have been jammed in Ukraine, he said, and “I don’t know what kind of contact we will have in these labs in the near future.”
Some Ukrainian labs, like the Ukrainian Ministry of Health’s Public Health Center, Pope said, are major facilities, others small. Some are new, while others date back to the Soviet-era and the country’s bioweapons program.
The US government has worked with 26 facilities in Ukraine. Before the invasion, the program provided direct material support to six Ukrainian labs. The program also provides biosafety and scientific mentorship training to Ministry of Health personnel throughout the country.
Researchers consider the Soviet bioweapons program to be the most extensive and sophisticated to have existed, employing some 65,000 scientists. While both the United States and the Soviet Union signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention banning biological weapons, the Soviet Union went on to secretly expand its program. The country’s program had a forward-looking orientation; it sought, for instance, to develop chimeric viruses that had the genetic properties of two viruses and even to create viral/bacterial hybrids, biosecurity experts Milton Leitenberg and Raymond Zilinskas wrote a well-regarded history of the program in 2012.
The Cooperative Threat Reduction Program began with heavy Russian involvement. In the early 1990s, “employees at the multiple former biological weapon facilities operated by Biopreparat, the non-military part of the program, were increasingly desperate to support themselves and their families,” according to a 2020 account published by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. An agreement among the European Union, the United States, Russia, and Japan led to the development of the International Science and Technology Center in Moscow, which channeled US Cooperative Threat Reduction Program resources and funds from other countries into scientific projects involving former biological weapons experts.
The technology center supported thousands of “former weaponeers,” who worked on projects in areas such as lab safety, infectious disease research, medical countermeasures, and diagnostic test development.
The Pentagon even sponsored Western scientists to work in former Russian bioweapons labs. By 2012, however, the arrangement between Russia, the United States, and others began to unravel, and Russia ended its agreement to host the International Science and Technology Center, which has since moved to Kazakhstan.
Cooperative Threat Reduction Program efforts have continued in the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia. After 9/11, the program began to focus more on how terrorists could misuse biological research and the program’s biological threat reduction component, as opposed to programs involving nuclear or chemical weapons, Pope said. Now, 62 percent of the program’s $360 million budget for this fiscal year is focused on biological issues.
At some point after Russia pulled out of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, disinformation campaigns involving Russian officials, state media, and others began to allege that the United States was running a bioweapons program on Russia’s periphery, or that it was jeopardizing the health of local citizens with dangerous experimentation. As Russia’s march to war in Ukraine heated up, so too did a campaign to discredit US-affiliated labs in the country.
Pope suspects the Russian disinformation campaign against the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program stems from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s vision of wielding influence in the countries surrounding Russia
“You look at the partners we have in several of the former Soviet republics, like Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, where we have had great partnerships over many years—I think Vladimir Putin looks at that as a zero-sum game of, ‘if they are partnering with the US, then that is a threat to the Russian sphere of influence,’” Pope said.
Putin’s end game in Ukraine remains unclear. On the second day of the invasion, Russian troops had reportedly advanced into the capital Kyiv. By any measure, Ukraine’s popular government is teetering on the edge. Pope said he’s anxious to resume working with his partners in Ukraine. That is not a sure prospect at this point.
US official: Russian invasion of Ukraine risks release of dangerous pathogens
By Matt Field, February 25, 2022
The Russian invasion of Ukraine may put at risk a network of US-linked labs in Ukraine that work with dangerous pathogens, said Robert Pope, the director of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, a 30-year-old Defense Department program that has helped secure the former Soviet Union’s weapons of mass destruction and redirect former bioweapons facilities and scientists toward peaceful endeavors.
The labs in Ukraine are not bioweapons facilities. The US government maintains that they are public and animal health labs operated by host countries. Although a long-running Russian disinformation campaign has painted a picture of a network of US military labs in Ukraine, Georgia, and other former Soviet republics involved in bioweapons or risky research, Pope said the labs conduct peaceful scientific research and disease surveillance. Outside experts have also said Pope’s program is not a covert bioweapons operation.
While the United States isn’t maintaining bioweapons facilities, Pope said, war could put pathogen collections in Ukraine at risk.
“I would say from every facility that we have worked with them in, we have confidence that as long as the electrical power is turned on and the people we have trained are present at the facility, the biosafety officers, that these pathogens are safe and secure to international standards,” Pope said. “Should these facilities be damaged by conflict, that could change.”
The pathogens with which the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program labs work are generally kept frozen, so they can’t replicate and become infectious. The risk the pathogens pose would increase if a building lost power and suffered damage. “If you lose the electrical power, the pathogens in the freezers warm up,” he said. “If the ventilation system is damaged, or the building itself is damaged, and these now ambient-temperature pathogens are able to escape the facility, then they can be potentially infectious in the region around the facility.”
Although Russian officials and media have misrepresented the US-supported labs in Ukraine and other former Soviet countries in disinformation campaigns, Pope doesn’t believe the Russians will deliberately aim weapons at the labs during the invasion.
“I think the Russians know enough about the kinds of pathogens that are stored in biological research laboratories that I don’t think they would deliberately target a laboratory,” Pope said. “But what I do have concerns about is that they would … be accidentally damaged during this Russian invasion.”
The invasion could also provide fodder for new disinformation narratives around the labs, Pope feared. The Russians, he said, “could potentially go to one of these facilities and fabricate something that they call evidence of nefarious activity at the facility.”
The pathogens in Ukrainian labs vary by facility, Pope said, but some can be characterized as presenting a concern in the Ukrainian environment. As an example, he cited African swine fever virus, which is highly contagious in pigs and has caused hundreds of outbreaks in Ukraine since 2012. Some labs, he said, may hold pathogen strains left over from the Soviet bioweapons program, preserved in freezers for research purposes.
“There is no place that still has any of the sort of infrastructure for researching or producing biological weapons,” Pope said. “Scientists being scientists, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of these strain collections in some of these laboratories still have pathogen strains that go all the way back to the origins of that program.”
The program is encouraging host countries to reduce the scope of their pathogen holdings to as small of a collection as necessary for legitimate scientific research, Pope said.
“What we have today and what these countries maintain are small amounts of various pathogens that by and large are things that are collected out of their environment that they need for research to be able to legitimately surveil disease and develop vaccines against,” he said.
This work, Pope said, continued in Ukraine until recently. “They have more pathogens in more places than we recommend,” he said. The program had been helping Ukrainian researchers sift through their frozen pathogen collections, with the goal of persuading the Ukrainians to preserve their genetic information of samples via sequencing before destroying the live samples.
Pope said his program had been close to an agreement with the Ukrainians on consolidating samples, but the invasion has now made that project uncertain. “All of that, obviously, has been derailed here with the recent events,” he said.
The Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, Pope said Thursday, has not had contact with biosafety staff at the labs in Ukraine since the Russian invasion. Phone lines have been jammed in Ukraine, he said, and “I don’t know what kind of contact we will have in these labs in the near future.”
Some Ukrainian labs, like the Ukrainian Ministry of Health’s Public Health Center, Pope said, are major facilities, others small. Some are new, while others date back to the Soviet-era and the country’s bioweapons program.
The US government has worked with 26 facilities in Ukraine. Before the invasion, the program provided direct material support to six Ukrainian labs. The program also provides biosafety and scientific mentorship training to Ministry of Health personnel throughout the country.
Researchers consider the Soviet bioweapons program to be the most extensive and sophisticated to have existed, employing some 65,000 scientists. While both the United States and the Soviet Union signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention banning biological weapons, the Soviet Union went on to secretly expand its program. The country’s program had a forward-looking orientation; it sought, for instance, to develop chimeric viruses that had the genetic properties of two viruses and even to create viral/bacterial hybrids, biosecurity experts Milton Leitenberg and Raymond Zilinskas wrote a well-regarded history of the program in 2012.
The Cooperative Threat Reduction Program began with heavy Russian involvement. In the early 1990s, “employees at the multiple former biological weapon facilities operated by Biopreparat, the non-military part of the program, were increasingly desperate to support themselves and their families,” according to a 2020 account published by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. An agreement among the European Union, the United States, Russia, and Japan led to the development of the International Science and Technology Center in Moscow, which channeled US Cooperative Threat Reduction Program resources and funds from other countries into scientific projects involving former biological weapons experts.
The technology center supported thousands of “former weaponeers,” who worked on projects in areas such as lab safety, infectious disease research, medical countermeasures, and diagnostic test development.
The Pentagon even sponsored Western scientists to work in former Russian bioweapons labs. By 2012, however, the arrangement between Russia, the United States, and others began to unravel, and Russia ended its agreement to host the International Science and Technology Center, which has since moved to Kazakhstan.
Cooperative Threat Reduction Program efforts have continued in the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia. After 9/11, the program began to focus more on how terrorists could misuse biological research and the program’s biological threat reduction component, as opposed to programs involving nuclear or chemical weapons, Pope said. Now, 62 percent of the program’s $360 million budget for this fiscal year is focused on biological issues.
At some point after Russia pulled out of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, disinformation campaigns involving Russian officials, state media, and others began to allege that the United States was running a bioweapons program on Russia’s periphery, or that it was jeopardizing the health of local citizens with dangerous experimentation. As Russia’s march to war in Ukraine heated up, so too did a campaign to discredit US-affiliated labs in the country.
Pope suspects the Russian disinformation campaign against the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program stems from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s vision of wielding influence in the countries surrounding Russia
“You look at the partners we have in several of the former Soviet republics, like Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, where we have had great partnerships over many years—I think Vladimir Putin looks at that as a zero-sum game of, ‘if they are partnering with the US, then that is a threat to the Russian sphere of influence,’” Pope said.
Putin’s end game in Ukraine remains unclear. On the second day of the invasion, Russian troops had reportedly advanced into the capital Kyiv. By any measure, Ukraine’s popular government is teetering on the edge. Pope said he’s anxious to resume working with his partners in Ukraine. That is not a sure prospect at this point.
Re: what do we really know about the Ukraine war?
https://thebulletin.org/2018/11/the-rus ... al-danger/
The Russian disinformation attack that poses a biological danger
By Filippa Lentzos | November 19, 2018
n a series of increasingly confrontational statements, Russia has suggested that the Pentagon is establishing a chain of bio-weapons labs on its borders. At the heart of the accusations is the Richard Lugar Center for Public Health Research in the Republic of Georgia. Named after US Senator Richard Lugar, who initiated the renovation of lab networks in former Soviet states, the Lugar Center became operational in 2013. It has the first high-containment laboratory in the region that meets Biosafety Level 3 standards, meaning it is equipped to study serious or lethal human diseases, and it serves Georgia and the wider region with detection and diagnostic capacity for disease outbreaks.
The Russian charges that the Lugar Center and other biological labs in the Caucasus and Central Asia are making banned bioweapons are unfounded. Last week a group of international experts, including this author, visited the Lugar Center by invitation of the Georgian government. We were given access to all areas of the site, examined relevant documentation, and interviewed staff, and concluded that the Center demonstrates significant transparency. Our group observed nothing out of the ordinary, or that we wouldn’t expect to see in a legitimate facility of this sort.
The Russian allegations appear to be part of a disinformation campaign that has grown in response to scrutiny of Moscow for using and enabling the use of chemical weapons. It is also likely that part of Russia’s goal is to discredit Western influence in former Soviet states by spreading fear and dividing public opinion. The charges are probably aimed at a domestic audience as well, as a biological weapons threat on Russia’s doorstep could motivate military investments to counter it.
To be sure, Russia and before it the Soviet Union have perpetrated many disinformation campaigns with the deliberate goal of sowing confusion and mistrust, including interference in the US 2016 presidential election. The current claims about the Georgia lab are not even Moscow’s first disinformation campaign about supposed US biological agents. In the 1980s, KGB agents disseminated the nonsense claim that the US government had invented the AIDS virus in a lab, as a new documentary from the New York Times reports.
Disinformation attacks bring with them many dangers. Beyond sowing distrust and political dissent, they can prime a population for physical conflict, and in the case of Georgia, Russia may even be trying to justify future military interference with its neighbor. False claims about biological weapons in particular, though, create an additional grave danger: They erode the international norm against using them, making countries more likely to do so. While it is easy to dismiss the Russian messaging as nonsense, as the US Embassy in Georgia has done, it is important to actively counter the effect it will likely have on the norm against using biological weapons.
An intensifying, multi-channel attack. Stories about supposed US bioweapon labs in neighboring countries, and in particular about the Lugar Center, have circulated for a number of years in the Russian media. Indeed, Russia’s official national security strategy identifies the network of public health laboratories in the Caucasus and Central Asia funded by the US Defense Department as a strategic threat. That said, messaging about the Lugar Center significantly ramped up after Britain identified Russia as the perpetrator of a botched March 2018 murder attempt in Salisbury, England using the nerve agent novichok. (Russian agents tried to kill former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, without success, but ended up inadvertently killing an English civilian.) In early April, embattled Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who Russia supports militarily, attacked civilians in Douma with chlorine gas.
In April, within weeks of Britain pinpointing the Russian state as culpable for the Salisbury attack, and a day after Trump threatened Russia with US missile strikes on Syria in response to the Douma attack, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova questioned the “real goals” of the American “chain of microbiological laboratories” in former Soviet states and of “the Pentagon’s large-scale medical-biological activities near Russian borders.” After British counter-terrorism police presented findings from six months of evidence-gathering on the Skripal case, and issued domestic and European arrest warrants for two Russian suspects on September 4, the accusations drastically intensified.
Within a week, Igor Giorgadze, a former Georgian state security minister who now resides in Russia, launched a heavily publicized campaign in the Russian media against the Lugar Center. In a news briefing from Moscow on September 11, he claimed he had thousands of pages of secret documents indicating that US Defense Department biologists and private contractors at the Lugar Center may be engaged in illegal medical experiments on the Georgian people, and that the facility could be a cover for a biological weapons lab. “These documents need to be reviewed and evaluated by experts,” Giorgadze said in an open letter, and called on the US president and Congress to investigate the laboratory’s activities. Giorgadze created a website containing an initial batch of documents to support his allegations; he claims more documents are forthcoming. (Links in Russian.)
The Russian Ministry of Defense said it was analyzing Giorgadze’s documents, and according to Sputnik News, claimed on September 14 that they point to serious violations of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). Commenting on Giorgadze’s statement, Vladimir Yermakov, director of the Department for Non-Proliferation and Arms Control at the Russian Foreign Ministry, told media that Russia will not allow biological experiments to be carried out “on its borders” by the Americans. (Link in Russian.)
A day after Giorgadze’s news briefing, Bulgarian investigative journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, who has previously accused the Pentagon of setting up bioweapons labs in the Caucuses and Central Asia, published an article on her website that seemed to corroborate Giorgadze’s claims about secret and illegal medical experiments at the Lugar lab. The story was picked up in the Russian media. It was also broadcast on Al Mayadeen, a satellite television channel viewed as pro-Assad and pro-Hezbollah, and on Zvezda, a television network run by the Russian Ministry of Defense, as the debunking project Myth Detector reports. A systematic study of social media posts with the words “biological weapon” and “in Georgia” over the past year indicates a significant peak in October 2018, underscoring how the messaging was intensifying.
Georgia responded to Russia’s claims in a September 27 memo circulated to the Geneva missions of states party to the BWC. It highlighted that the Lugar Center is an open civilian institution under the auspices of the National Center for Disease Control and Public Health of Georgia. The memo maintained that Georgia complies with the Convention, and that, as a further voluntary transparency measure, it had invited international experts and observers from treaty states to visit the facility on November 14 and 15 to see for themselves.
Meanwhile the BBC was investigating Giorgadze’s claims about “secret” documents, and on November 12 broadcast the results. Giorgadze said the documents he released showed the lab had experimented on Georgian citizens with non-clinically approved drugs. In fact, the BBC found, while the documents were real, they only showed evidence of an above-board program to treat Hepatitis C with drugs that are used and approved worldwide, including by the United States and World Health Organization.
Nevertheless, Russia’s messaging has only become more aggressive over the course of the fall. In early October, the head of Russian special forces for nuclear, biological, and chemical protection, Major-General Igor Kirillov, claimed that the Lugar lab is part of a larger US effort to build up its military-biological potential and gain control of national collections of dangerous pathogens. Russia views this as a direct security threat. Going a step further, the chair of the Russian parliament’s committee on defense, Colonel-General Vladimir Shamanov, threatened that “Russia will take diplomatic and military measures in response to the deployment of the large-scale US military-biological program in states bordering the Russian Federation, in particular Georgia.” (Links in Russian.)
In Geneva, Russia circulated a reply memo on October 10 to BWC states party missions, claiming the Georgian side was attempting to create “a distorted image” of the Lugar Center. It noted that the lab was built by the Pentagon, that the United States covers the laboratory’s operating costs including its security, and that Americans finance dual-use research conducted there. Somewhat ironically, considering the vast, ostensibly civilian, network of public health laboratories that concealed the Soviet offensive biological weapons program, the memo goes on to claim that, “in order to conceal the true character and mission of this facility it has been formally incorporated into Georgia’s public health system.” Georgia’s goal in inviting BWC states to visit, the Russian memo claims, is “to create an illusion of legitimacy and transparency,” and Russia does “not see any value in participating in such a politically biased event.”
When the UN General Assembly committee on disarmament and international security met this fall for its annual four-week deliberations in New York, the diplomatic exchanges between Georgian and Russian representatives turned hostile. Before that happened, the Syrian representative, likely with Russian encouragement, on several ocasions insinuated or outright accused Georgia of hosting secret US biological laboratories in violation of the BWC. In a prepared statement on October 30, Elene Agladze, the deputy permanent representative of Georgia to the United Nations, said:
“Our empirical experience has shown that although absurd, Russian allegations have been not just a propaganda tool, but lately even part of hybrid warfare in terms of laying a political groundwork for future aggressive actions. Therefore, statements that Russia will not tolerate bio experiments along its border should be considered as a direct threat to Georgian security … These observations reflect the trend not only in Georgia, but in nearby areas. I recall the wide-scale military build-up in the temporarily occupied Crimea and the city of Sevastopol, as well as the Sea of Azov, which has grave regional security implications and clearly manifest that we are not talking about isolated cases here, but of the wider pattern of Russian aggressive policy towards its neighbors.”
In an impromptu reply, the deputy head of the Russian delegation, Andrey Belousov, again threw doubt on Georgia’s transparency initiatives, and questioned the research carried out at the Lugar lab, saying: “Georgia has already admitted that yes, indeed, these labs are carrying out experiments, including on people. The statistics are such that in one experiment, on a very dangerous disease, more than 9,000 volunteers were involved, and as a result of this experiment around 10 percent of these volunteers died.” The Georgian representative’s response to these allegations focused on the timing of the propaganda. She said internationally recognized Russian experts had visited the Lugar Center on a number of occasions over the last few years to check the facility for themselves, but hadn’t found anything suspicious. “So why this issue is being raised right now is very questionable,” she said.
Open lines of communication. Russia’s repeated and coordinated insinuations and unsupported allegations about American-sponsored secret labs are alarming—even beyond the fact that they could have very real consequences for stability in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Until now, the international norm against biological weapons has been very strong. It is enshrined in the BWC, which completely prohibits biological weapons. Agreed in 1972, the BWC is still gaining membership—in the last two years, seven new states have joined, bringing total membership to 182. The international community most recently reaffirmed the norm by consensus at the United Nations General Assembly on November 5. Such regular reaffirmations are important, particularly against the background of hostile diplomatic exchanges. Global support for the BWC suggests that the vast majority of nations see biological weapons as taboo. By claiming that biological weapon labs exist where they do not, Russia is hastening the death of that taboo—creating the appearance that reliance on these weapons is greater than it actually is, possibly encouraging other nations to pursue them.
Georgia’s diplomatic pushback and active transparency efforts are important steps in the right direction too. But other governments and members of the global academic and science communities should also take steps to counteract the damage being caused by Moscow’s false claims. Specifically, they should work to maintain current lines of communication with counterparts in Russia, as well as open up new ones. Creating opportunities for informal dialogue between Russian and Western government representatives, biosecurity experts, and the next generation is essential. Links between Russian and Western scientific and technical institutions, as well as personal relationships fostered through joint projects and scientist exchanges, build confidence that prohibited activities are not taking place.
While such cooperation is difficult, it is not impossible. In the early post-Cold War days, American and Russian scientists cooperated to keep nuclear weapons safe and secure. In the bio-weapons realm, trail blazer virologist Jens Kuhn negotiated access in 2001 to work in the heart of the former Soviet bioweapons establishment, the first Western scientist to do so. From 1991 to 2015, the American Defense Threat Reduction Agency ran a cooperative biological engagement program with Russia. While that may have run its course, there could now be opportunities for other actors to step in. An increasing number of BWC states are, like Georgia, inviting experts from other countries to visit their high containment facilities with the aim of strengthening transparency and building confidence between peers. These visits could be designed to politically enable Russia to participate. At a stretch, perhaps Russia could be persuaded to host one itself, as a means to start technical discussions on agreed standards for the sort of transparency visits it has regularly criticized. There is contemporary precedent for this sort of thing: The World Health Organization carries out safety inspections at Russia’s maximum-security smallpox repository in Novosibirsk every two years.
Over the years, international efforts to devalue biological weapons as a military option have been substantial and in many ways successful. Russia, as one of the BWC’s three depositary states along with the United States and Britain, should take special care of the treaty and the taboo against bioweapons. If it is genuinely concerned about a bioweapons threat from Georgia, it should use existing BWC mechanisms to raise the issue, rather than circulate insinuations and unfounded allegations that only damage the treaty. With Moscow actively undermining the established norm through its disinformation campaign, it is up to the international community to actively push back.
The Russian disinformation attack that poses a biological danger
By Filippa Lentzos | November 19, 2018
n a series of increasingly confrontational statements, Russia has suggested that the Pentagon is establishing a chain of bio-weapons labs on its borders. At the heart of the accusations is the Richard Lugar Center for Public Health Research in the Republic of Georgia. Named after US Senator Richard Lugar, who initiated the renovation of lab networks in former Soviet states, the Lugar Center became operational in 2013. It has the first high-containment laboratory in the region that meets Biosafety Level 3 standards, meaning it is equipped to study serious or lethal human diseases, and it serves Georgia and the wider region with detection and diagnostic capacity for disease outbreaks.
The Russian charges that the Lugar Center and other biological labs in the Caucasus and Central Asia are making banned bioweapons are unfounded. Last week a group of international experts, including this author, visited the Lugar Center by invitation of the Georgian government. We were given access to all areas of the site, examined relevant documentation, and interviewed staff, and concluded that the Center demonstrates significant transparency. Our group observed nothing out of the ordinary, or that we wouldn’t expect to see in a legitimate facility of this sort.
The Russian allegations appear to be part of a disinformation campaign that has grown in response to scrutiny of Moscow for using and enabling the use of chemical weapons. It is also likely that part of Russia’s goal is to discredit Western influence in former Soviet states by spreading fear and dividing public opinion. The charges are probably aimed at a domestic audience as well, as a biological weapons threat on Russia’s doorstep could motivate military investments to counter it.
To be sure, Russia and before it the Soviet Union have perpetrated many disinformation campaigns with the deliberate goal of sowing confusion and mistrust, including interference in the US 2016 presidential election. The current claims about the Georgia lab are not even Moscow’s first disinformation campaign about supposed US biological agents. In the 1980s, KGB agents disseminated the nonsense claim that the US government had invented the AIDS virus in a lab, as a new documentary from the New York Times reports.
Disinformation attacks bring with them many dangers. Beyond sowing distrust and political dissent, they can prime a population for physical conflict, and in the case of Georgia, Russia may even be trying to justify future military interference with its neighbor. False claims about biological weapons in particular, though, create an additional grave danger: They erode the international norm against using them, making countries more likely to do so. While it is easy to dismiss the Russian messaging as nonsense, as the US Embassy in Georgia has done, it is important to actively counter the effect it will likely have on the norm against using biological weapons.
An intensifying, multi-channel attack. Stories about supposed US bioweapon labs in neighboring countries, and in particular about the Lugar Center, have circulated for a number of years in the Russian media. Indeed, Russia’s official national security strategy identifies the network of public health laboratories in the Caucasus and Central Asia funded by the US Defense Department as a strategic threat. That said, messaging about the Lugar Center significantly ramped up after Britain identified Russia as the perpetrator of a botched March 2018 murder attempt in Salisbury, England using the nerve agent novichok. (Russian agents tried to kill former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, without success, but ended up inadvertently killing an English civilian.) In early April, embattled Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who Russia supports militarily, attacked civilians in Douma with chlorine gas.
In April, within weeks of Britain pinpointing the Russian state as culpable for the Salisbury attack, and a day after Trump threatened Russia with US missile strikes on Syria in response to the Douma attack, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova questioned the “real goals” of the American “chain of microbiological laboratories” in former Soviet states and of “the Pentagon’s large-scale medical-biological activities near Russian borders.” After British counter-terrorism police presented findings from six months of evidence-gathering on the Skripal case, and issued domestic and European arrest warrants for two Russian suspects on September 4, the accusations drastically intensified.
Within a week, Igor Giorgadze, a former Georgian state security minister who now resides in Russia, launched a heavily publicized campaign in the Russian media against the Lugar Center. In a news briefing from Moscow on September 11, he claimed he had thousands of pages of secret documents indicating that US Defense Department biologists and private contractors at the Lugar Center may be engaged in illegal medical experiments on the Georgian people, and that the facility could be a cover for a biological weapons lab. “These documents need to be reviewed and evaluated by experts,” Giorgadze said in an open letter, and called on the US president and Congress to investigate the laboratory’s activities. Giorgadze created a website containing an initial batch of documents to support his allegations; he claims more documents are forthcoming. (Links in Russian.)
The Russian Ministry of Defense said it was analyzing Giorgadze’s documents, and according to Sputnik News, claimed on September 14 that they point to serious violations of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). Commenting on Giorgadze’s statement, Vladimir Yermakov, director of the Department for Non-Proliferation and Arms Control at the Russian Foreign Ministry, told media that Russia will not allow biological experiments to be carried out “on its borders” by the Americans. (Link in Russian.)
A day after Giorgadze’s news briefing, Bulgarian investigative journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, who has previously accused the Pentagon of setting up bioweapons labs in the Caucuses and Central Asia, published an article on her website that seemed to corroborate Giorgadze’s claims about secret and illegal medical experiments at the Lugar lab. The story was picked up in the Russian media. It was also broadcast on Al Mayadeen, a satellite television channel viewed as pro-Assad and pro-Hezbollah, and on Zvezda, a television network run by the Russian Ministry of Defense, as the debunking project Myth Detector reports. A systematic study of social media posts with the words “biological weapon” and “in Georgia” over the past year indicates a significant peak in October 2018, underscoring how the messaging was intensifying.
Georgia responded to Russia’s claims in a September 27 memo circulated to the Geneva missions of states party to the BWC. It highlighted that the Lugar Center is an open civilian institution under the auspices of the National Center for Disease Control and Public Health of Georgia. The memo maintained that Georgia complies with the Convention, and that, as a further voluntary transparency measure, it had invited international experts and observers from treaty states to visit the facility on November 14 and 15 to see for themselves.
Meanwhile the BBC was investigating Giorgadze’s claims about “secret” documents, and on November 12 broadcast the results. Giorgadze said the documents he released showed the lab had experimented on Georgian citizens with non-clinically approved drugs. In fact, the BBC found, while the documents were real, they only showed evidence of an above-board program to treat Hepatitis C with drugs that are used and approved worldwide, including by the United States and World Health Organization.
Nevertheless, Russia’s messaging has only become more aggressive over the course of the fall. In early October, the head of Russian special forces for nuclear, biological, and chemical protection, Major-General Igor Kirillov, claimed that the Lugar lab is part of a larger US effort to build up its military-biological potential and gain control of national collections of dangerous pathogens. Russia views this as a direct security threat. Going a step further, the chair of the Russian parliament’s committee on defense, Colonel-General Vladimir Shamanov, threatened that “Russia will take diplomatic and military measures in response to the deployment of the large-scale US military-biological program in states bordering the Russian Federation, in particular Georgia.” (Links in Russian.)
In Geneva, Russia circulated a reply memo on October 10 to BWC states party missions, claiming the Georgian side was attempting to create “a distorted image” of the Lugar Center. It noted that the lab was built by the Pentagon, that the United States covers the laboratory’s operating costs including its security, and that Americans finance dual-use research conducted there. Somewhat ironically, considering the vast, ostensibly civilian, network of public health laboratories that concealed the Soviet offensive biological weapons program, the memo goes on to claim that, “in order to conceal the true character and mission of this facility it has been formally incorporated into Georgia’s public health system.” Georgia’s goal in inviting BWC states to visit, the Russian memo claims, is “to create an illusion of legitimacy and transparency,” and Russia does “not see any value in participating in such a politically biased event.”
When the UN General Assembly committee on disarmament and international security met this fall for its annual four-week deliberations in New York, the diplomatic exchanges between Georgian and Russian representatives turned hostile. Before that happened, the Syrian representative, likely with Russian encouragement, on several ocasions insinuated or outright accused Georgia of hosting secret US biological laboratories in violation of the BWC. In a prepared statement on October 30, Elene Agladze, the deputy permanent representative of Georgia to the United Nations, said:
“Our empirical experience has shown that although absurd, Russian allegations have been not just a propaganda tool, but lately even part of hybrid warfare in terms of laying a political groundwork for future aggressive actions. Therefore, statements that Russia will not tolerate bio experiments along its border should be considered as a direct threat to Georgian security … These observations reflect the trend not only in Georgia, but in nearby areas. I recall the wide-scale military build-up in the temporarily occupied Crimea and the city of Sevastopol, as well as the Sea of Azov, which has grave regional security implications and clearly manifest that we are not talking about isolated cases here, but of the wider pattern of Russian aggressive policy towards its neighbors.”
In an impromptu reply, the deputy head of the Russian delegation, Andrey Belousov, again threw doubt on Georgia’s transparency initiatives, and questioned the research carried out at the Lugar lab, saying: “Georgia has already admitted that yes, indeed, these labs are carrying out experiments, including on people. The statistics are such that in one experiment, on a very dangerous disease, more than 9,000 volunteers were involved, and as a result of this experiment around 10 percent of these volunteers died.” The Georgian representative’s response to these allegations focused on the timing of the propaganda. She said internationally recognized Russian experts had visited the Lugar Center on a number of occasions over the last few years to check the facility for themselves, but hadn’t found anything suspicious. “So why this issue is being raised right now is very questionable,” she said.
Open lines of communication. Russia’s repeated and coordinated insinuations and unsupported allegations about American-sponsored secret labs are alarming—even beyond the fact that they could have very real consequences for stability in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Until now, the international norm against biological weapons has been very strong. It is enshrined in the BWC, which completely prohibits biological weapons. Agreed in 1972, the BWC is still gaining membership—in the last two years, seven new states have joined, bringing total membership to 182. The international community most recently reaffirmed the norm by consensus at the United Nations General Assembly on November 5. Such regular reaffirmations are important, particularly against the background of hostile diplomatic exchanges. Global support for the BWC suggests that the vast majority of nations see biological weapons as taboo. By claiming that biological weapon labs exist where they do not, Russia is hastening the death of that taboo—creating the appearance that reliance on these weapons is greater than it actually is, possibly encouraging other nations to pursue them.
Georgia’s diplomatic pushback and active transparency efforts are important steps in the right direction too. But other governments and members of the global academic and science communities should also take steps to counteract the damage being caused by Moscow’s false claims. Specifically, they should work to maintain current lines of communication with counterparts in Russia, as well as open up new ones. Creating opportunities for informal dialogue between Russian and Western government representatives, biosecurity experts, and the next generation is essential. Links between Russian and Western scientific and technical institutions, as well as personal relationships fostered through joint projects and scientist exchanges, build confidence that prohibited activities are not taking place.
While such cooperation is difficult, it is not impossible. In the early post-Cold War days, American and Russian scientists cooperated to keep nuclear weapons safe and secure. In the bio-weapons realm, trail blazer virologist Jens Kuhn negotiated access in 2001 to work in the heart of the former Soviet bioweapons establishment, the first Western scientist to do so. From 1991 to 2015, the American Defense Threat Reduction Agency ran a cooperative biological engagement program with Russia. While that may have run its course, there could now be opportunities for other actors to step in. An increasing number of BWC states are, like Georgia, inviting experts from other countries to visit their high containment facilities with the aim of strengthening transparency and building confidence between peers. These visits could be designed to politically enable Russia to participate. At a stretch, perhaps Russia could be persuaded to host one itself, as a means to start technical discussions on agreed standards for the sort of transparency visits it has regularly criticized. There is contemporary precedent for this sort of thing: The World Health Organization carries out safety inspections at Russia’s maximum-security smallpox repository in Novosibirsk every two years.
Over the years, international efforts to devalue biological weapons as a military option have been substantial and in many ways successful. Russia, as one of the BWC’s three depositary states along with the United States and Britain, should take special care of the treaty and the taboo against bioweapons. If it is genuinely concerned about a bioweapons threat from Georgia, it should use existing BWC mechanisms to raise the issue, rather than circulate insinuations and unfounded allegations that only damage the treaty. With Moscow actively undermining the established norm through its disinformation campaign, it is up to the international community to actively push back.