Is it true that the United States is funding the development of biological weapons in the post-Soviet space?

In the press you can often find information about laboratories not far from the Russian border, where various dangerous diseases are tested on people. Such institutions, as noted, operate with the money of American taxpayers. We checked how credible these rumors are.

How stated at one time Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Nikolai Patrushev, the Pentagon has more than 200 such laboratories around the world, including the CIS countries, Ukraine and Georgia. “Their activities have little in common with peaceful science. The greatest concern is caused by the facts of experiments on people being carried out in them,” he added in 2019 in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Lenta.ru then she clarified that there are dozens of similar institutions not far from the Russian border.

The Richard Lugar Center for Public Health, located on the outskirts of Tbilisi, is most often at the center of scandals. The Russian Foreign Ministry expressed concern in connection with his activities back in 2015, and in 2018, former Minister of State Security of Georgia Igor Giorgadze stated, that about 100,000 pages of documents fell into his hands, from which it may follow that experiments on people are being carried out in the laboratory. In particular, he cited the figure of 24 deaths on one day in 2015. His words were partially confirmed by ex-adviser to President Saakashvili Jeffrey Silverman in his interview mentioned new diseases and testing experimental vaccines on local citizens. The reaction of the Russian Ministry of Defense in the person of the head of the radiation, chemical and biological protection troops, Igor Kirillov, soon followed. “The almost immediate death of a large number of volunteers gives reason to believe that the Lugar Center, under the guise of treatment, assessed a highly toxic chemical drug or biological agent with high lethality,” he said, citing the results of checking information from Giorgadze. Since then, the laboratory has regularly appeared in the news thanks to various press conferences. paid Even Russian President Vladimir Putin pays attention to her.

In 2020, the Lugar laboratory was not spared the topic of coronavirus and bats. My article on this topic in April published Bulgarian journalist Dilyana Gaitandzhieva. This was not Gaitandzhieva’s first publication on the topic. At the beginning of 2018, its detailed investigation activities of laboratories in Ukraine and Georgia, in which she compares the dates of research into dangerous infections and outbreaks of diseases caused by them in these areas.

It should be noted that the topic of similar laboratories in Ukraine is fueled not only from the outside. Thus, shortly after Giorgadze’s statement, the famous Ukrainian lawyer Rinat Kuzmin criticized Minister of Health of Ukraine Ulyana Suprun, calling her “the curator of the American military-bacteriological project” and “a US citizen.” The above-mentioned project, according to Kuzmin, included “15 laboratories in which the US military produces deadly viruses.” This information seems to have been confirmed investigation website "Ukraina.ru".

On September 26, 2016, the Kazakh portal Yvision published an article entitled “The US has opened a new death laboratory”, dedicated to the Central Reference Laboratory (CRL) in Almaty. Soon the same portal reported about the likelihood of creating biological weapons in the institution. And in February 2020, sensational information appeared on the same website with reference to a source among the staff. It was stated that the samples of the COVID-19 virus obtained by Kazakhstani scientists “at the molecular level completely coincide with the strain, the study of which began in the laboratory about two years ago.” This led to the conclusion that the coronavirus was developed in a local laboratory with US money and later accidentally entered China. Thus, Kazakhstan was included in the virtual “black list” of countries with harmful American institutions.

As is often the case with conspiracy theories, it is impossible to fully confirm or refute what is declared classified information. That's why it's secret - to refute it, you need documents that are obviously not publicly available. But it is possible to analyze the main arguments of the accusers and assess the overall picture.

Let's start with the Lugar laboratory in Georgia. Its official name is the Richard J. Lugar Center for Public Health Research. Establishment located in a specially built complex near the road leading to Tbilisi International Airport.

Of course, the scandalous publications could not help but attract the interest of the press - soon journalists flocked to the laboratory. In 2018, even before Giorgadze’s statement, reporters from the international resource Coda paid a visit to the institution.

The first thing the journalists reported in their report, - the laboratory, as well as its associated network of small monitoring centers across the country, were indeed funded by the US Department of Defense. There is no secret to this. At the time of the investigation, the Pentagon was still contributing to the laboratory's expenses, although most of the employees were Georgian citizens. In addition, the center was already under the full control of the Georgian authorities.

But other information about the laboratory somewhat contradicts the conspiracy theory. The fact is that the Lugar Lab network originated within the framework of the American initiativesaimed at neutralizing potential threats in the field of biological and chemical weapons. One of the reasons for the creation of such a “shield” was letters with anthrax spores, the distribution of which followed after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Another reason was the desire to neutralize the potential threat from the Soviet legacy in the field of biological and chemical weapons research. The fact is that monitoring of infectious diseases in Georgia has been carried out since 1937, and samples of especially dangerous pathogens (EDP) were previously stored in an old building in the center of Tbilisi. Given the low level of security of the Soviet laboratory, there was a significant risk to the population, but now these and other samples, through the joint efforts of the American and Georgian sides, have been placed in a safe place. Journalists were even taken into a repository of the most dangerous of the strains, now known as the pathogen museum. Paradoxically, this largely Soviet arsenal was often cited in Russian media as the basis for American biological weapons.

The director of the laboratory, Paata Imnadze, expectedly rejected all accusations regarding the development of biological weapons: “I visited every room of this laboratory and I do not believe that any secret research is being carried out there.” In addition, he said, creating a viable biological weapon requires a very complex process, for which it is not enough just to have a stock of pathogens. It is interesting that Russian journalists have been intensively invited to the laboratory for several years, but at the time of reporting no one had visited there. And although how stated the same Imnadze in 2020, since then more Russians have visited the laboratory than Georgians, but the information attack from the media continued. This can be seen from the opening frames of the video. It got to the point that, as of 2019, 20% of Georgians believed that the laboratory was helping to spread epidemics.

Regarding the dozens of deaths mentioned by Igor Giorgadze, soon the head of the Georgian National Center for Disease Control Amiran Gamkrelidze spoke with statement, where he confirmed this fact, but noted that the cause of death was complications of hepatitis C. According to him, in Georgia, 50,000 people were treated for this disease, and 98% of them were cured thanks to the super-successful medicine Sovaldi, approved in many countries, including Russia. And of the remaining 2%, many simply turned to doctors very late. And they did not deal with any biological weapons. In addition, the employee of the Ministry of Health, Giorgi Khatelishvili, mentioned in Giorgadze’s documents, in his interview The BBC noted that these were not statistics of deaths per day, but per month.

Less than two months have passed since The Insider caught Channel One for another manipulation on the topic of the Lugar Center. In the summer of 2018, several Russian tourists in Georgia were struck by an intestinal infection - an unpleasant, but not the most rare event during travel. The head of Rospotrebnadzor then stated that the genetic bank does not know of such a variety - it is possible that it is artificial. This shade of doubt was enough for the journalists of “First” to tie poisoning with the work of the Lugar Center. It is noteworthy that all this took place against the backdrop of the scandal with the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal and could, as many analysts note, serve as a kind of lightning rod to distract attention.

Attempts to link the laboratory’s activities with the coronavirus provoked a response statement President of Georgia Salome Zurabishvili. Oddly enough, the accusations against the laboratory coincided with the period when the Lugar Center was the main testing site for Georgian citizens for COVID-19, that is, potentially saving their lives. Moreover, at the peak of the scandal, Georgia was among the most successful countries in combating the pandemic.

The European Union database dedicated to disinformation will help us give us a general assessment of the reliability of falsehoods about the Lugar laboratory. Search it shows: in 61 (!) news feeds containing misinformation, the long-suffering Tbilisi laboratory is mentioned.

Now about the Kazakhstan laboratory. The Central Reference Laboratory opened on September 9, 2016 in Almaty and, like similar facilities, soon became the target of numerous revealing articles. As a result, in June 2018, the chief state sanitary doctor of Kazakhstan, Zhandarbek Bekshin, gave an official answer on a number of issues that concern society. In particular, he said that the Central Research Laboratory is a structural subdivision of the Kazakh Scientific Center for Quarantine and Zoonotic Infections named after. M. Aikimbaeva of the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Kazakhstan, and its employees are only citizens of the country. He noted that the TsRL cannot be used for the development of bacteriological weapons, since the project is being implemented within the framework of agreements between the US Department of Defense and the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources of the Republic of Kazakhstan regarding the elimination of weapons of mass destruction infrastructure dated October 3, 1995 in order to implement a biological threat reduction program. Bekshin noted that viruses, bacteria, toxins and other dangerous strains were not and are not produced in the laboratory.

He also dedicated his material fact-checker portal factcheck.kz. His conclusions generally coincide with Bekshin’s words and are partly based on them - with the addition that the construction of the TsRL building was indeed financed by the US Department of Defense. The publication, however, was subject to criticism from the head of the Eurasian Analytical Club Nikita Mendkovich. However, this criticism lacks facts that clearly prove the opposite, and conclusions are made based on generalizations from other particular cases, such as the scandal with dubious documents from Giorgadze. And in 2020, after the scandal with bats and coronavirus, factcheck.kz released another parsing, which showed that coronaviruses are real studied in Kazakhstan on bats, have nothing to do with the strain that caused the pandemic. Not to mention the fact that the artificial origin of COVID-19 itself is still considered by leading world experts and specialized organizations to be a marginal and extremely unlikely theory, bordering on conspiracy theories. However, despite periodic open days with permitted video recording, answers to all questions and assurances about the technical impossibility of developing viruses, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Kazakhstan has to speak from time to time with refutations.

As for the 15 laboratories in Ukraine, in 2020 a detailed parsing the portal MediaSapiens carried out stories of scandals with them. In short, the rhetoric of all such news is very reminiscent of the Kazakh and Georgian cases. As in other countries, these laboratories had a financial connection with the United States, which very quickly became legendary. Among the outright fakes, the analysis mentions “the Pentagon itself’s recognition of the fact that viruses were created in Ukraine,” “the lack of control of the Ukrainian government over military laboratories,” and “access to laboratories only by American scientists.” All this contradicts the documents and reports made by journalists. It is also impossible not to note the use by Dilyana Gaitandzhieva in her “sensational” investigation of archival filming 1995, made on the beaches of Odessa and dedicated to the then cholera outbreak. This happened 15 years before the appearance of “American military laboratories” in the country and cannot have anything to do with them. At the same time, the list of laboratories is in open form posted on the website of the US Embassy in Ukraine - along with documents and amounts spent on the reconstruction of a particular facility. And even the fact that the United States Agency for International Development and the American Embassy are among the organizations supporting the work of the MediaSapiens portal does not change the fact: all the information provided by the portal is in the public domain, has been repeatedly cited as an argument by other resources not related to the US government, but has never been convincingly refuted by supporters of action-packed theories.

As you can see, all three cases are quite similar to each other, and not only in terms of the charges. Everywhere, in response to publications and statements in the media, we have a denial from the host country, a denial from the United States, as well as a lot of inconsistencies between the facts presented in sensational materials and the real verifiable state of affairs. This allows us to talk about the development of biological weapons in the post-Soviet space, coupled with experiments on people, as an unproven conspiracy theory. Of course, periodically concerns Even Western scientists speak out on US biological weapons issues. And it is impossible to 100% refute the absence of secret developments from the position of fact checkers working with open data, but we have no reason to confirm this to any extent.

Most likely not true

Confidence rating

Read on topic:

1. EUvsDiSiNFO Database
2. Fake Channel One: The US produces biological weapons in Georgia and poisons tourists with them
3. Zh. Bekshin's answer to the editor-in-chief of MediaNet
4. “American laboratories in Ukraine”: Medvedchuk and “1 + 1” revived the Russian fake