VORONEZH, November 16. /TASS/. The US has set up a network of laboratories across Russia where, among other things, it conducts experiments with Slavic biomaterials, and it is precisely this activity by Washington that is the main threat to Central Russia's biosecurity, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev said.
"The United States continues to actively pursue military-biological programs aimed at creating artificial pathogens and microorganisms resistant to antibiotics, standard vaccines and other traditional medicine," he said at a meeting on security in the Central Federal District, explaining that "in Ukraine and other states bordering Russia, Washington has established a network of biological laboratories where military-biological research and experiments are conducted using biomaterials, including those taken from Slavic peoples."
"The actions of the Americans to deploy biolabs in the immediate vicinity of Russia's borders and to expand the scope of military biological research undoubtedly create serious biological threats and require the development of effective measures to eliminate them," he pointed out.
At the same time, Patrushev said that "under far-fetched pretexts, the Anglo-Saxons are obstructing the creation of verification mechanisms within the framework of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which are intended to bring the biological activities of the member parties to the convention under international control."
The Russian security official also emphasized that the Central Federal District is a densely populated and urban macro-region. "Possible deterioration of the sanitary-epidemiological, veterinary-sanitary and environmental situation may harm the life and health of the population living in the district, which makes up more than a quarter of the country's population, as well as negatively affect the economy," Patrushev warned.
According to him, "at present, the main threats to biological security in the region are those related to the fallout from US military and biological activities in Ukraine and the critical state of its healthcare system."