MOSCOW — For four years, the American government told the world that Maria Zakharova was lying. The Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman had claimed that US-funded biological laboratories in Ukraine were conducting work with dangerous pathogens. Washington called those claims “outright lies” and “Russian disinformation.” On Friday, Washington’s own intelligence community published the evidence.
Outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released newly declassified documents showing that the United States government had funded more than 120 biological laboratories in over 30 countries, including more than 40 in Ukraine alone. The facilities housed pathogens including anthrax, Ebola, tularemia, plague, Marburg, Lassa, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, New Castle Disease, Swine Fever, Rickettsia, and tuberculosis. At least 12 of the Ukrainian labs were conducting human research.
“This is what we and the Russian Defense Ministry have repeatedly said, drawing attention of the international community to the dangerous and uncontrolled military-biological activities of the US outside its national territory, including in Ukraine,” Zakharova wrote on Telegram on Friday. The statement was short. The gap between it and the previous four years of Western dismissal was not.
The contrast with 2022 is precise. When Russian forces entered Ukraine in February of that year, Russia’s Defense Ministry released documents claiming that the Ukrainian Ministry of Health had issued emergency orders to destroy pathogen samples — plague, anthrax, tularemia, cholera — to conceal the scope of a US-sponsored biological program. Washington’s response was swift and categorical. A senior US defense official called the claims “absurd” and “untrue.” Then-US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield stated flatly that “there are no Ukrainian biological weapons laboratories supported by the United States.”
Then-Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland created a more complicated record. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in March 2022, Nuland acknowledged that “Ukraine has biological research facilities” — but immediately insisted that the United States did not own or operate any chemical or biological laboratories there, and that Washington was working to prevent the research materials from falling into Russian hands. That testimony, long cited by Moscow as a partial admission, now sits alongside the Gabbard documents in a more legible context.
Gabbard was direct about how the previous administration handled the disclosure question. “Despite the obvious potential for catastrophic global impact research on dangerous pathogens in biolabs can have, politicians, so-called health professionals like Dr. Fauci, and entities within the Biden administration’s national security team lied to the American people about the existence of US-funded and supported biolabs, and threatened those who attempted to expose the truth,” she said in the official ODNI press release accompanying the declassification.
The Intelligence Community, according to the ODNI statement, had previously warned internally that at least one US-funded biolab in Ukraine likely housed dangerous pathogens and remained vulnerable to the risk of Russian attack, seizure, or damage. That warning, it appears, was not shared with the public.
The release coincides with Gabbard’s departure from her position as DNI. She framed it explicitly as a transparency action in support of an executive order signed by President Trump to end federal funding for gain-of-function research outside the United States. The ODNI said it would continue working with partners across the government to identify the full scope of overseas lab activity, the pathogens each facility contains, and the nature of ongoing research — including clinical trials that Gabbard said raise “significant ethical, financial, and security concerns.”
Eastern Herald reported in January that Russia had renewed its push at the United Nations for an independent probe into the Pentagon’s biological program in Ukraine, a campaign that Western member states had blocked at every procedural turn. The biological weapons question had been a recurring point of friction between Moscow and Washington throughout the conflict, with the US consistently declining to engage on Russia’s terms.
What the documents do not resolve — and what neither the ODNI statement nor Friday’s Zakharova response addresses — is the precise nature of the research. The declassified records confirm the existence and US funding of the facilities, the class of pathogens involved, and the internal security assessments. They do not adjudicate the central Russian allegation: that the research constituted a biological weapons program under another name. That question, which Zakharova raised in 2022 by invoking the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, remains formally unanswered.
Zakharova did not press that distinction on Friday. She did not need to. The disclosure itself — the confirmation that the laboratories existed, that they housed the specific pathogens Moscow had named, and that previous American officials had publicly denied their existence — carried enough weight on its own.
