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Originally Posted by Why_Yes_I_Do
After arguing that were NOT in fact any bio-labs in Ukraine, they now admit that there are about 46. Bear in mind that Hunter Biden, son of F Joe Biden, helped secure funding for some of them and Putin had released documents from some he had captured - yet they still denied any existed.
Conspiracy Theorists - 1 vs Disinformation Board - 0
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You sure are a gullible SOB, aintcha? Here's the REAL story:
Pentagon’s Work With Ukraine’s Biological Facilities Becomes Flashpoint in Russia’s Information War
Moscow falsely accuses U.S. of funding biowarfare in Ukraine despite Kremlin once benefiting from Pentagon program
By Sharon Weinberger
March 20, 2022 5:30 am ET
On his first official visit abroad, the new senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, was taken to a facility in Ukraine where the U.S. helped scientists working with dangerous biological materials. But rather than produce biological weapons, U.S. officials in that ramshackle building were trying to prevent lethal pathogens from falling into the hands of terrorists.
“I removed a tray of glass vials containing Bacillus anthracis, which is the bacterium that causes the anthrax,” recalls Andrew Weber, the Pentagon official who was in charge of the U.S.-funded program that worked with the Ukrainian government. Mr. Weber said he showed the tray “to a very concerned-looking young senator.”
Mr. Obama himself recalled seeing in his 2005 trip to Ukraine “test tubes filled with anthrax and the plague lying virtually unlocked and unguarded.”
A decades-old Pentagon program that was used to secure biological weapons across the former Soviet Union—and to build trust between Washington and Moscow after the Cold War—has instead become a new flashpoint in an information war between the two countries in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Moscow has accused the Pentagon of funding weapons work in Ukraine’s biological laboratories. “These were not peaceful experiments,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said earlier this month.
China, whose leader Xi Jinping has cultivated a close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, has echoed those allegations. “Russia has found during its military operations that the U.S. uses these facilities to conduct bio-military plans,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman told reporters.
U.S. officials have flatly denied those claims and warned that Moscow could use its allegations to justify its own use of weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine.
“We believe that Moscow may be setting the stage to use a chemical weapon and then falsely blame Ukraine to justify escalating its attacks on the Ukrainian people,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last week. “Manufacturing events and creating false narratives of genocide to justify greater use of military force is a tactic that Russia has used before.”
The allegations have shocked those who are most familiar with the Pentagon’s post-Cold War initiative, called the Cooperative Threat Reduction program. That is because not only has Russia been aware of the Pentagon’s work securing chemical, biological and nuclear facilities across the former Soviet Union, but it had also been its beneficiary for many years.
“They’re outrageous claims,” said Robert Pope, the head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, or DTRA, the arm of the Pentagon in charge of running the program. “We were created 30 years ago to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, and Russia knows well we eliminate weapons of mass destruction.”
The program, which dates back to 1991 and continues today, stretches across the former Soviet Union. Since the program started, the Pentagon has spent approximately $12 billion on securing material used in weapons of mass destruction in post-Soviet republics, according to a DTRA spokeswoman. Of those funds, about $200 million has been spent on the biological work in Ukraine since 2005. The funds have supported dozens of labs, health facilities and diagnostic sites around the country, the DTRA spokeswoman said.
Mr. Weber, who was in charge of negotiating the initial agreement with Kyiv to work on securing the country’s biological materials and facilities, said that
work expanded to Ukraine after the 9/11 attacks, when al Qaeda terrorists hijacked aircraft and crashed them into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. U.S. policy makers grew worried about the potential for terrorists to steal biological materials—fears that were heightened after letters containing anthrax were sent in the U.S. mail to congressional offices and media outlets. The FBI eventually concluded that an American scientist employed at a military lab sent the letters.
The president of Ukraine at the time, Leonid Kuchma, concerned about the threat of terrorism in his own country, asked the U.S. for help. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade earlier,
Ukraine had been starved of the funds needed to secure its biological facilities.
Mr. Weber put together a team that visited Ukraine’s biological and chemical facilities, which
ranged from large laboratories to small veterinary research centers. “We found that a number of them had dangerous pathogen collections left over from Soviet days,” he said. “They were in pretty bad shape.”
Ukraine’s laboratories—unlike some in other former Soviet republics—weren’t directly involved in the Cold War biological-weapons program, but they did have pathogens that fed into offensive work, according to Mr. Weber.
Those pathogens, like anthrax, could pose a threat if released, whether accidentally or on purpose.
The focus of U.S. work in Ukraine was to consolidate that biological material, much of it related to agriculture, into secure facilities, which the U.S. would pay to build or upgrade.
Paul McNelly, who from 1995 to 2003 directed the Defense Department’s chemical and biological elimination programs in Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, said he was stunned with what he saw inside the former Soviet facilities.
“You would walk into these places and the refrigerators that stored these dangerous pathogens, they had no locks on them at all,” Mr. McNelly said. “There would be vials that were labeled tularemia, plague, different things like that. And these people, most of them, weren’t masked. Their gowns were antiquated.” He added: “It was horrible.”
As part of the program, the Pentagon spent $1 billion to build the Russians a facility in Shchuchye, Siberia, to demilitarize some two million chemical weapons. By the time it was done in 2009, ties with Moscow were growing tense. The price of oil was going up, giving Russia more revenue to wean itself off foreign assistance. At the same time, Mr. Putin was consolidating power.
As a result, the
Russian government became a less-willing partner to the Pentagon’s drive to secure the deadly materials, according to James Tegnelia, who served as the head of DTRA from 2005 to 2009.
“They wanted our money, but they didn’t want to admit that we built the facility,” Mr. Tegnelia said. “You could see that they were getting ready to pull back.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry had in the past praised the program. But by 2012, Moscow declined to renew cooperation, saying it could pay for the work on its own.
In 2014, the year Moscow illegally annexed Crimea and began backing separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region, the program in Russia drew to a close.
A spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., didn’t respond to a request for comment on the Pentagon program.
Yet even with that chapter of its cooperation over, the Russian claims about the Pentagon conducting secret weapons work in Ukraine came as a surprise not only to those who have worked on the program but also to other Western officials. The Kremlin has in the past used such charges as cover for its own actions, they say.
“We are concerned that Moscow could stage a false-flag operation, possibly including chemical weapons,” North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said last week.
U.S. officials have declined to discuss what specific intelligence, if any, they have to indicate Russia might be preparing to deploy chemical or other unconventional weapons to Ukraine. But they say Russia has a history of using chemical weapons, including against Mr. Putin’s domestic political opponents, and it has encouraged their use in Syria by President Bashar al-Assad’s government.
The Russian government shot back against the U.S. allegations, denying plans to use chemical weapons. In a post last week on its official Telegram channel, the Russian Defense Ministry said the units fighting in Ukraine “do not have chemical munitions.”
Mr. Tegnelia, the former DTRA director, views Russia’s allegations as a path to an even more dangerous escalation. “If you see them using chemical weapons in Ukraine, watch out,” he said, “because they’re only one step away from nuclear weapons.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentago...ar-11647768601
