Igor Kirillov, head of the radiation, chemical and biological defense troops, spoke about the documents received by our military, confirming such an interaction. Thus, according to Kirillov, one of the 17 American energy laboratories, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, located in Richland, Washington, worked directly in Ukraine as part of a project called the Initiative to Prevent the Spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
The general drew attention to the statements of the director of the department of scientific research of the ministry, John Stephen Binkley, dated April 4, 2022. He said that this structure will help Kiev to restore the reduced dual-use research programs after the possible return of specialists.
“The presented document confirms that one of the activities of the Ministry of Energy is the recruitment of specialists who previously worked in Ukraine with experience and knowledge in the field of weapons of mass destruction,” Kirillov said.
He also said that with the participation of the US Department of Energy, the implementation of more than a dozen military-biological dual-use projects with Pi code, such as Pi-157, -316, – 490 and others, was organized. Within the framework of these projects, genetic variability in areas of radioactive contamination, the spread of tuberculosis and other mycobacterial infections, as well as economically important animal diseases – African and classical swine fever, were studied.
The general also discussed the risks of implementing Pentagon military biological projects on the territory of Ukraine to study the possibility of spreading economically important infections by carriers, including migratory birds.
Thus, the Pi-444 project was implemented through the Ukrainian Scientific and Technical Center, dedicated to monitoring avian influenza in wild birds of the Azov-Black Sea region and assessing the possibility of transmission of this virus in order to create risks for food security.
Recently, specialists from the Russian Ministry of Defense, as well as employees of the FSB and Rosselkhoznadzor, carried out work in the biosphere reserve named after him. Falz-Fein in Askania-Nova (Kherson region). The study of the documents seized in the archives of the veterinary laboratory of the reserve confirms that until 2022, its employees selected and transferred abroad the biomaterial obtained from migratory birds.
Moreover, since these works were carried out in unequipped premises, the security of the collections was neither ensured nor checked by anyone. In some cases, laboratory staff kept highly pathogenic biomaterial at home.
There is a documented fact of the mass death of birds on the territory of the reserve in 2021. According to experts, it was contagious in nature. The Russian Defense Ministry does not rule out that the simultaneous death was caused by ongoing experiments and neglect of biological safety requirements.
At the same time, the participants of the project, who hastily fled after the liberation of the Kherson region, offered employees who remained in the reserve to remove or destroy the research results for a fee, in particular the documentation confirming the mass death of birds.
“Thus, the main objectives of the research carried out at Askania-Nova were to collect and transfer to the client – the United States military department – particularly dangerous and economically important strains of infections, to study their possible impact on the bio-environment of the region, as well as to determine the ability of selected pathogens to cause large-scale outbreaks among people, similar to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
To solve them, generally accepted biosafety standards and the requirements of basic international documents on the selection and transport of pathogenic biomaterials were ignored,” Kirillov concluded.
Photo: Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation
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