The Russian Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that Washington must explain to the international community the purpose of U.S.-funded military biological laboratories in Ukraine.
“We remember for how many years and with what bloody results the U.S. searched for various types of chemical, biological, bacteriological weapons and so on all over the world, actually occupying lands and killing people,” the ministry’s spokesperson Maria Zakharova told a briefing.
She said that Kyiv has recently begun erasing traces of these biological programs. “We received documentation from Ukrainian employees at the biological laboratories on the urgent destruction of especially dangerous pathogens, plague, anthrax, cholera and other deadly diseases on February 24,” Zakharova said.
On the same day, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stressed that this issue is of great importance and the whole world would like to know the purpose of these labs.
Russian Defense Ministry spokesperson Igor Konashenkov announced on Sunday that evidence of a U.S.-financed military biological program developed in Ukraine has been revealed during Russia’s special operation in Ukraine.
U.S. calls Ukraine bio-lab info ‘false, absurd’
The Pentagon described the information presented by the Russian Defense Ministry regarding the presence of military bio-lab programs in Ukraine as “false and absurd.”
During a briefing in Washington on Wednesday, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby claimed that “this absurd Russian misinformation is patently false.”
U.S. overseas bio-labs concerns
The U.S. Department of Defense has operated 336 biological laboratories in 30 countries across the world. According to the public data released by the U.S., it has 26 biological laboratories in Ukraine so far, over which the Pentagon has absolute control.
Some of the places where the labs are based have seen large-scale outbreaks of measles and other dangerous infectious diseases, triggering international concerns about the safety of U.S. overseas laboratories.
Source: CGTN