In a heated U.N. Security Council meeting Friday, Russia accused the United States of supervising and funding Ukrainian biological weapon operations, a statement that was angrily denied by the Ukrainian and American ambassadors.
Some observers fear the accusations are a bid by Russia to justify rolling out its own biological warfare against the Ukrainians. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last month that Russia would “fabricate allegations about chemical or biological weapons to justify its own violent attacks against the Ukrainian people.”
Russia presented no evidence for its claims, and United Nations officials say there is nothing to support allegations of the existence of biological weapon operations in Ukraine. China, however, has amplified the unsupported claims.
But Russia’s U.N. representative, Vasily Nebenzya, insisted Friday that at least 30 Ukrainian labs were discovered near the Russian border that are working on weaponizing diseases, including anthrax, cholera and “the plague.” The research, which he claimed threatens Europe, involves research using diseases carried by birds, lice and fleas, The Washington Post reported.
The U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Linda Thomas-Greenfield, vehemently denied all such claims. She accused Russia of calling for the Security Council meeting “for the sole purpose of lying and spreading disinformation.”
Russia is “attempting to use the Security Council to legitimize disinformation and deceive people to justify President [Vladimir] Putin’s war ... against Ukraine and the Ukrainian people,” she said.
“Ukraine does not have a biological weapons program, and there are no Ukrainian biological weapons laboratories supported by the United States — not near Russia’s borders, not anywhere,” Thomas-Greenfield added.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a Facebook post that it’s Russia, not Ukraine, which is capable of planning such an atrocity. “No chemical or any other weapons of mass destruction were developed on my land,” he said. “The whole world knows that.”
Russia accuses “that we are allegedly developing biological weapons, allegedly we are preparing a chemical attack. This makes me really worried,” he added, noting that he has two children.
Ukraine does have a network of biological labs supported by the U.S. But they’re part of a biological threat reduction program intended to mitigate deadly outbreaks, whether natural or manufactured. Early efforts date to the 1990s to dismantle the former Soviet Union’s program for weapons of mass destruction, The Associated Press reported.