MOSCOW, April 3. /TASS/. The Russian State Duma’s (lower parliament house) international committee is ready to officially invite US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland to visit Moscow as part of her European trip, Leonid Slutsky, the committee’s chairman, said on Sunday.
"On Monday, April 4, the parliamentary commission on probing into circumstances linked with the establishment of US biolaboratories in Ukraine will hold a regular meeting at the Federation Council (upper parliament house - TASS)," he wrote on his Telegram channel. "The State Duma’s international committee is ready to send an official invitation to Nuland to visit Moscow as part of her European tour."
According to the lawmaker, the commission plans to discuss possible influence of the activities of biolaboratories in Ukraine on the epidemiological situation in Russia.
Nuland plans to visit France, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, and Germany on April 2-9 to discuss the situation around Ukraine and anti-Russian sanctions.
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said earlier that the special military operation in Ukraine produced evidence Kiev’s ruling regime was urgently eliminating traces of a US Department of Defense-funded military biological program in Ukraine. He said Ukrainian biolabs’ staffers testified that on February 24 pathogens of extremely dangerous diseases, such as plague, anthrax, tularemia, cholera and others were urgently disposed of.
While testifying before the US Senate’s foreign relations committee on March 9, Nuland acknowledged that in Ukraine there were some facilities conducting clandestine biological research and Washington was keen to prevent Russian forces from gaining control of these facilities. She said the US Department of State was "quite concerned that Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to gain control of [those labs], so we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces." The Russian Defense Ministry said that in fact it was a confirmation of the Pentagon’s involvement in military- biological programs in Ukraine.