MOSCOW, March 10. /TASS/. Russia’s Armed Forces have discovered proof that the Pentagon was financing research on developing a mechanism of the covert spread of deadly pathogens in documents at biological laboratories in Ukraine, Russian Defense Ministry Spokesman Igor Konashenkov said on Thursday.
"Additionally, a special interest was caused by detailed information on the US implementing a project on Ukrainian soil on studying the transfer of pathogens by wild birds migrating between Ukraine and Russia, other countries. According to the documents, in Ukraine, in 2022, the American side planned to conduct works on bird, bat and reptile pathogens subsequently proceeding to researching the possibility of them transmitting African swine fever and anthrax," the military official said.
"As the documents show, at the biological labs created and financed in Ukraine, experiments were held with the samples of bat coronavirus. The goal of this and other biological studies in Ukraine financed by Pentagon was the creation of a mechanism of the covert spread of deadly pathogens," the spokesman emphasized.
He added that in the near future, another set of documents received from Ukrainian employees would be published and the results of their expert evaluation would be presented.
Earlier, Igor Kirillov, who heads the Russian army’s radiation, chemical and biological protection force, reported that a network of over 30 biological labs was formed on Ukrainian soil on the orders of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) of the US Department of Defense. According to him, on February 24, they were all instructed by the Ukrainian Health Ministry to completely destroy biological agents located in the laboratories. He noted that the procedure of destroying the collections implies their irreversible elimination since, apparently, everything necessary to continue the implementation of the military biological program had already been removed from Ukrainian territory.