An informed source in Moscow confirmed the presence of military biological laboratories in Ukraine, which, it said, cause concern on the Russian side. This is reported by RIA Novosti.
Earlier, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said that the United States had deployed 16 military biological laboratories in Ukraine for “opaque and dangerous” research, and called on the United States to clarify. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry replied that reports of the existence of such laboratories are untrue.
“Such laboratories do exist, and we also have concerns. And not only in Ukraine, but also in Georgia”, – the agency’s interlocutor said.
In May last year, the publication “Ukrainian News”, citing the country’s Ministry of Health, reported that the United States had built eight laboratories in Ukraine that store especially dangerous infections, allegedly to prevent the creation of biological weapons. It was reported that the Pentagon Threat Reduction Agency provided technical assistance to laboratories built or upgraded with its participation in Ukraine. It was noted that the work was carried out from 2005 to 2014, during this time, eight objects were built and improved in Lviv, Transcarpathian, Ternopil, Vinnitsa, Kherson, Dnepropetrovsk and Kharkiv regions.
In 2019, the Secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev said that the United States had commissioned more than 200 biological laboratories around the world, including in the countries adjacent to Russia – Georgia, Ukraine and others.
The Russian side has repeatedly expressed concern about the Pentagon’s activities “to locate its biomedical laboratories in the immediate vicinity of the Russian borders”. In 2015, the Foreign Ministry mentioned in this regard the so-called “Lugar Public Health Research Center” in the suburbs of Tbilisi, under the roof of which a medical research unit of the US Army was firmly “registered”. Moscow believes that the American and Georgian authorities are trying to hide the true content and direction of the activities of the US Army military unit studying especially dangerous infectious diseases. The Georgian side considers the fears in vain and states that the laboratory is engaged exclusively in scientific research.