MOSCOW, March 10. /TASS/. Chief of Russia’s Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Troops Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov announced the names of Ukrainians involved in US military biological programs at a briefing on Friday.

He pointed out that the Russian Defence Ministry had earlier announced the names of some participants in US military biological programs, including officials from the US Department of Defense, US biotech companies and Pentagon contractors. "Today, we would like to add representatives of Ukrainian state institutions and private companies involved in US military and biological programs to this list," Kirillov said.

According to him, one of them was Sergey Morgun, Head of the Sanitary and Epidemiological Department of the Ukrainian armed forces and one of the organizers of interaction between the Ukrainian Defense Ministry and the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). He was one of the leaders of the U-P-8 project supervising hantavirus research.

Kirillov went on to mention Vladimir Kurpita, Head of the Public Health Center, who had managed interaction between Ukrainian specialists and DTRA, organized the collection of biological samples from Ukrainian citizens and their transfer abroad. The Russian general also noted that Irina Demchishina, Head of Reference Laboratories at the Ukrainian Health Ministry’s Public Health Center, had acted as an intermediary in interaction with Pentagon contractors Black & Veatch and Metabiota and supervised the implementation of DTRA projects of UP and TAP series.

"In total, the Russian Ministry of Defense has information on more than a hundred participants in dual-use biological programs. The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation is currently checking more than ten United States citizens, as well as a number of officials of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, for their involvement in the aforementioned programs," the chief of Russia’s Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Troops stressed.