MOSCOW, July 18. /TASS/. The blood tests of captured Ukrainian service members prove that they had been experimented on in Ukraine, Deputy Speaker of Russia’s Federation Council (the upper house of parliament) Konstantin Kosachev said on Monday.

"The concentration of substances indicating a number of diseases, including those that are uncommon for Ukrainians, are many times higher than their normal, explainable levels. This means that Ukrainian troops were experimented on with extremely dangerous infectious diseases, which could be used for offensive aims under certain circumstances," the senator pointed out following a meeting of a parliamentary commission investigating the activities of US biolabs in Ukraine.

The deputy speaker of the upper house noted that until 2013, Russian scientists working in the field of civilian biological research had actively participated in numerous multilateral programs funded by the US and other Western countries, "along with Russia’s more traditional partners from CIS countries." "Surprisingly, the Americans and their Western partners stopped inviting Russian experts to take part in multilateral programs after 2013. Today, we carefully assessed the situation and realized that in the 1990s and 2000s, the Americans continued, by hook or by crook, to pump out the relevant technologies and biopharmaceuticals that our labs had accumulated since the Soviet era, as well as our researchers, paying very little money to engage them in cooperation on programs that the Americans viewed as practical, and in some cases, military ones," Kosachev emphasized.

According to him, Russian researchers were later banned from those programs, while "these activities continued in full force" with scientists from Ukraine and other countries.