Security Council to meet on Russian charge of US biological weapons, as US vehemently denies allegations
WASHINGTON DC (Kurdistan 24) - Late on Thursday, Russia called for a UN Security Council meeting on Friday morning to discuss what it claims are “the military biological activities of the US on the territory of Ukraine.”
“This is exactly the kind of false flag effort we have warned Russia might initiate to justify a biological or chemical weapons attack," the Spokesperson for the US Mission in New York, Olivia Dalton, responded. “We’re not going to let Russia gaslight the world or use the UN Security Council as a venue for promoting their disinformation.”
On Wednesday, US officials vehemently denied Russian charges that it was supporting research on, and the production of, biological and chemical weapons in Ukraine.
Nonetheless, Russian officials repeated those charges on Thursday. Among them was Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who was in Turkey for a meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba.
Their discussion was unproductive, and in a press conference following the meeting, Lavrov claimed that the Pentagon was funding biological laboratories in Ukraine “for experimenting on pathogens,” which was “totally outrageous,”
“The Americans were keeping this work deeply secret,” he continued. “There is definitely no getting away from it.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry also repeated on Thursday charges it has been making since Sunday. The US, it said, “has been supporting research that could allow the spread of diseases through wild birds migrating between Russia and Ukraine,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
US Rebuttal
For its part, the US, for the second day running, sought to refute those claims. Two senior Defense Department officials spoke with reporters on Thursday and began by explaining the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which “prohibits the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling, and use of biological and toxin weapons.”
“It was the first multilateral disarmament treaty banning an entire category of weapons of mass destruction,” one official explained.
The US signed the BWC in 1972 and ratified it in 1975, and Russia did the same in the same years.
However, with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union—of which Ukraine was a part—Moscow was discovered to be in flagrant violation of the Biological Weapons Convention.
“Illegal biological weapons programs [were] left in the Soviet successor states,” including Ukraine, the US official said.
And the US believes that Russia still maintains “an offensive BW [Biological Weapons] program,” he stated.
Since 2005, the Defense Department has worked with Ukraine under its Cooperative Threat Reduction Program to neutralize any lingering threat from the illegal Soviet laboratories.
But “there are no DOD [Department of Defense] bioweapon labs in Ukraine or anywhere else in the world,” he affirmed.
There is significant concern in the US and Ukraine, as well as among other countries supporting Ukraine, that the Russian charges are meant to serve as a pretext for Russian action.
Russian forces would carry out some attack—biological, chemical, or nuclear/radiological—in such a way as to make it appear Ukraine was responsible. That would then become justification for some extremely brutal Russian assault in Ukraine.
In addition to Russia’s public complaints, the two Defense Department officials repeatedly stated that there were other “indications” that Moscow was planning such an action, but they declined to offer any further details.