Russia Is Lying About Evidence of Bioweapons Labs in Ukraine, Russian Biologists Say
Russian scientists who have looked at the documents Russia calls proof of “bioweapons labs” in Ukraine say there is no evidence for such claims.
At considerable risk to their own safety, 10 Russian biologists, including researchers who remain in Russia, have publicly accused the Russian government of lying about having proof that biological weapons were being developed in Ukrainian labs funded by the United States.
According to the biologists, documents presented to the public last week by Russia’s defense ministry as supposed evidence of covert “bioweapons labs” under Pentagon control in Ukraine actually describe relatively harmless collections of pathogens used for public health research. The comprehensive review of the documents by experts who understand both the science and the Cyrillic alphabet took on new importance on Wednesday, as President Vladimir Putin cited the imaginary threat of weapons of mass destruction near Russia’s borders as a justification for the invasion of Ukraine.
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Before the
recent crackdown on independent media outlets in Russia, these outlandish claims from Russian defense officials — which were amplified on the global stage by Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and its U.N. ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya — might have been undercut by interviews with Russian biologists who called the underlying evidence for the allegations transparently false. But because dissenting views have been repressed, and independent broadcasters shut down, Russian scientists have been forced to post their findings on social networks that are mainly blocked in Russia.
The first Russian biologist to make his analysis of the evidence widely known was
Eugene Lewitin, who holds advanced degrees in biology from Moscow State University and GosNIIgenetika, a biotechnology research institute. The documents from Ukraine, Lewitin wrote in
an open letter posted on Facebook and Change.org, do “not imply any development of biological weapons or even the use of particularly dangerous pathogens in the laboratories. The list of destroyed strains published by RIA Novosti and other Russian media outlets contains not a single particularly dangerous strain. The list contains only strains common to microbiological and even more so to epidemiological laboratories.”
More than 800 signatories endorsed Lewitin’s letter when it was transformed into a petition from Russian biologists urging Russian journalists to stop repeating the government’s “false, absolutely groundless and hatred-inciting statements about allegedly found evidence of the development of biological weapons in Ukrainian laboratories.”
The first set of Ukrainian documents to be made public by the Russian military
published by were the Russian government news agency RIA Novosti on March 6. Those documents were orders from Ukraine’s health minister, issued on the second day of the Russian invasion, directing labs in two cities, Kharkiv and Poltava, to destroy collections of bacterial pathogens used for research.
Given the subsequent Russian shelling of Kharkiv, the Ukrainian effort to ensure that an attack on the lab there could not cause the accidental release of bacteria seems prudent. But Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, the Russian defense ministry spokesperson,
told the state news agency that the attempt to secure the labs was itself evidence that Ukrainian and American scientists had been secretly plotting to weaponize dangerous pathogens. The destruction of the pathogens listed on orders sent to the labs, Konashenkov said, was a desperate effort “to conceal any traces of the military-biological program financed by the U.S. Department of Defense in Ukraine.”
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Some of the documents cast by [the head of the Russian military’s radiation, chemical, and biological protection force Lt. Gen. Igor] Kirillov as evidence of biological weapons research actually concerned the Ukrainian health ministry’s cooperation with German experts from
BNITM, the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, to improve surveillance and diagnosis of diseases like dengue fever and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever.
In a statement sent to The Intercept, the institute rejected the Russian claims.
“The BNITM has never and will never work directly or indirectly on bio weapons,” the statement said. For the past six years, the BNITM has instead been working with public health officials in Ukraine to investigate “seroprevalence, the existence of antibodies, on various infectious diseases occurring in this region. The aim of the project is and was to enable the country to do diagnoses on antibodies itself.” The institute added that its project is part of the German government’s effort to improve global biosecurity through the “minimization of biological risks emanating from highly hazardous pathogens in 25 countries.”
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[Russian defense ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor] Konashenkov additionally stated as a matter of fact something for which none of the documents presented at the briefing backs up: that American-financed studies of bird, bat, and reptile pathogens planned for later this year would include experiments on the ability of the animals to be used to covertly transmit weaponized African swine fever and anthrax. [
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When Russian news outlets repeated these claims, Lewitin, the veteran Russian biologist, wrote that they had been duped into printing what he called “deliberately false information,” fed to them by the military, about what was in the documents. Even reporters for state-run outlets, Lewitin said, have a duty to study what the state calls proof and consult experts to make sure official claims about science are accurate.
By way of example, Lewitin, who has a Ph.D. in genetics, pointed to “the absolutely wild idea of the existence of special ‘DNA of the Slavs,’” which could be used to target ethnic Russians with a biological weapon. That, he said, “is nonsense” that echoes “German Nazi propaganda.”
Lewitin offered a more detailed debunking of the evidence in
an interview with Marina Aronova, a correspondent for Siberia.Realities, a regional news outlet of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which is funded by the U.S. government. Lewitin explained that all of the bacterial strains mentioned in the documents were the kind of samples found in any public health lab or epidemiological institute. The paperwork even indicated that some of the strains had been purchased from Russian labs.
The Russian military, Lewitin told Aronova, had simply lied about what the Ukrainian documents meant. “Let me explain with a simple example,” he said. “Imagine you come to a certain office and see an inscription on one of the rooms: ‘Instruction for the cleaner. Two times a day to wet clean the room.’ From this you conclude that in this room Ukrainian nationalists dismember people alive twice a day and sacrifice them to Cthulhu, and then cover up the traces. The statement of the official representative of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, Igor Konashenkov, in combination with the documents attached to this statement, produces just such an impression.”
“That’s how propaganda works,” he added. “The Ministry of Defense made a false, unfounded statement — and now, if I talk to people, 90 percent of them will say: ‘Bioweapons were made in Ukraine.’ No one has read the attached documents. And those who have read it will say: ‘Well, yes, maybe there are no dangerous pathogens in these documents. But they don’t tell us about it for nothing. Maybe there are dangerous strains in other documents that cannot be published openly.’”
When I asked Lewitin in an online chat this week what he made of the other documents, on research projects involving American experts from the CDC and USDA, he replied: “I would say that this is a hash of scattered information with no relevance to the subject [of] bioweapons. These are invitations to workshops and accompanying material, lists of instructions on biosafety, lists of completely innocent strains [of pathogens], many of them received from Russian collections.”
As for “the stuff on avian and bat migration investigations,” routine research on strains of flu and other viruses in the wild population that could jump to humans, Lewitin told me he couldn’t comprehend it any other way than as “a complete delirium.”
A parallel effort to evaluate the first set of documents presented as proof of biological weapons research at the labs in Kharkiv and Poltava was conducted by a group of nine Russian-speaking biologists based in Russia, Belarus, Sweden, and France that
was published on Twitter in Russian by Olga V. Pettersson, an “ex-pat Soviet” expert in genome sequencing. (Most of that long thread was
translated into English by Ilya Lozovsky, an editor at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.)
Pettersson and her colleagues converted the screenshots of the original documents ordering the destruction of pathogens at the labs published in the Russia media into a
Google Docs spreadsheet that is easier to read and pointed out that, despite claims from the Russian military, there are “no deadly pathogens on this list – no plague, anthrax, cholera.”
In their detailed debunking of the Russian claims, the researchers explained that any effort to create biological weapons would require “a much larger base of strains than those listed.” The documents indicate that “the Kharkiv lab destroyed only 40 test tubes and the Poltava lab destroyed 24.” The group also agreed with Lewitin’s conclusion that creating “a ‘military’ bacterium specific only for a certain nationality and especially for Russians is absolutely evolutionarily impossible.”
In conclusion, the researchers said, the statements published in the Russian state media, and attributed to senior Russian officials, “are unsubstantiated anti-scientific bullshit.”
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Asked why she thought the Russian officials expected to get away with so inaccurately describing the contents of the documents they made public, Pettersson suggested that they might have guessed many Russians would not look too closely at
the lists of bacterial strains used in the Ukrainian labs because they were all written in Latin.
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The Russian strategy, of loudly making claims about biological weapons research and pointing to documents that do not, in any way, confirm that to be true has been employed multiple times in recent years.
In 2018, when Russia faced international condemnation for trying to kill the former spy Sergei Skripal
with a nerve agent, Russian state television suddenly revived conspiratorial claims that a U.S.-funded lab in Georgia was testing biological weapons on the Georgian people. In that case too, documents supposedly proving the allegations were published in the state media — records from the lab which showed that dozens of Georgians had died in 2015 while taking the American-made drug Sovaldi. Those records were obtained and made public by a former head of Georgian intelligence living in exile in Russia, Igor Giorgadze.
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Another Russian expat amazed by the Russian claims is Michael Favorov, who immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union three decades ago, after a long career in public health and epidemiology, and then oversaw CDC programs in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
In a phone call this week, Favorov told me that he suspects some of the Russian military’s wild ideas about what is happening in U.S.-funded labs in former Soviet countries is likely projection.
Favorov recalled that there was pressure on Soviet scientists to look for potential military applications for their research. He didn’t take part, but some of his contemporaries did. The accidental release of anthrax in 1979 from a Soviet military research facility in Yekaterinburg, which was known as Sverdlovsk in Soviet times,
killed at least 66 people. Soviet officials, including Boris Yeltsin, lied about what caused the outbreak until 1992.
And Soviet-era biological weapons are still used to poison Russian dissidents and defectors. The anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny survived
an attempted assassination with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok in Russia in 2020. Two years earlier, the same nerve agent had been used in a
botched attempt to murder Skripal in England. Western officials and open-source researchers offered convincing evidence that both attempted murders were carried out by Russian intelligence agents.
Favorov told me that older, Soviet-trained military biologists probably assume that the U.S. is still doing that sort of work.
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https://theintercept.com/2022/03/17/rus ... formation/ 
