MOSCOW, May 16. /TASS/. The US laboratories created in Ukraine near Russia’s borders can be regarded as NATO facilities, the co-chair of the special parliamentary commission for investigating US biological laboratories in Ukraine, State Duma deputy speaker Irina Yarovaya said following the commission’s meeting on Monday.
"The US biological laboratories created along Russia’s border can be regarded as NATO facilities. The military purposes and functions of these facilities stems from the agreements on their creation, because the Pentagon always acts as a party to such deals," Yarovaya said.
"The information concerning these laboratories that we have obtained prompts an unequivocal conclusion that the United States was implementing a dangerous military program on the territory of Ukraine, which poses threats in the first place to the people of Ukraine themselves," she added.
Yarovaya said that the international community showed great concern over these issues.
"The first discussion that took place on the platform of the UN Security Council, confirmed the world’s wish to hear answers to the well-founded, well-reasoned and very acute questions that Russia has formulated," Yarovaya said.
She stressed that the evidence the parliamentary commission had gathered confirmed that the military biological laboratories in Ukraine, created under a Pentagon program, "posed a threat to the world and for that reason required an adequate and multi-level evaluation and answers on different international platforms."
"For this reason, we entirely support the Russian Foreign Ministry’s proposal for initiating an investigation on the platform of the UN Security Council. Moreover, the documents and dossiers being formed by the parliamentary commission will be of tremendous importance. They are of tremendous importance already now in proving the violations being committed by Ukraine and the United States from the standpoint of enforcing the Biological Weapons Convention," Yarovaya added.
Parliamentary inquiry
Earlier, the State Duma and the Federation Council adopted a resolution to conduct a parliamentary investigation into the biological laboratories in Ukraine, as well as to create a joint panel of inquiry to conduct such a probe. The procedure for such a parliamentary investigation began on the basis of instructions issued by the State Duma’s speaker Vyacheslav Volodin. The commission consists of 14 Duma members and as many Federation Council members. The State Duma’s deputy speaker, Irina Yarovaya, and the Federation Council’s deputy speaker, Konstantin Kosachev, are its co-chairs.
As Yarovaya said earlier, the commission's task was to produce a dossier that would be sent to Russia’s president and government and to international organizations. The dossier will present the necessary evidence, "highlight all cause-and-effect relationships, identify all threats and challenges, as well as name all involved organizations, international law entities and officials concerned."
About biolaboratories
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov earlier said the special military operation in Ukraine produced evidence the Kiev regime was urgently eliminating traces of a US Department of Defense-funded military biological program in Ukraine. He said that according to staffers of Ukrainian biolaboratories a number of extremely dangerous pathogens, such as those causing plague, anthrax, tularemia, cholera and other lethal diseases were urgently destroyed on February 24.
US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, while testifying before the US Senate’s foreign relations committee on March 9, 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".