Vladimir Putin (Russian President) ordered an unprovoked, illegal invasion of Ukraine to be carried out on February 24
On Wednesday, the White House expressed new concerns that Russia might use biological weapons to escalate its aggression against Ukraine.
Jen Psaki, Press Secretary condemned Kremlin allegations that the United States is building a bioweapons laboratory in Ukraine. She also pointed out that Russian President Vladimir Putin had a history using horrific tactics to eliminate his enemies.
Meanwhile, the attention of the world has been drawn to Siberia’s Soviet-era research centre that may be where Putin keeps a frightening ‘bioweapons’ arsenal. Although the State Department stated last year that Russia has a program for bioweapons, the Kremlin strongly denied this claim.
‘It’s Russia that has a long and well-documented track record of using chemical weapons, including in attempted assassinations and poisoning of Putin’s political enemies like Alexey Navalny,’ Psaki wrote on Twitter Wednesday. ‘It’s Russia that continues to support the Assad regime in Syria, which has repeatedly used chemical weapons. It’s Russia that has long maintained a biological weapons program in violation of international law.’
Putin had previously protected his ally Bashar Al Assad from UN investigations into chemical weapons use on civilians as part of Syria’s civil war.
Human Rights Watch has found at most 85 chemical weapons attacks in Syria that took place between 2013-2018, the vast majority of them blaming the Russian-backed Syrian government.
Moscow and Damascus both denied that the government used bioweapons, even though Assad acknowledged stockpiling them during a Fox interview in 2013.
According to reports, an apparent attack with sarin gas in Douma on 2018 claimed to have left between 40 and 50 dead.
Putin provided cover to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the past when he was accused by his people of using chemical arms
Jen Psaki, White House Press Secretary, stated that Russia may use chemical and biological weapons against Ukraine after Russia accused America of creating a bioweapons laboratory in Ukraine.
Russian officials said that after an inspection of the location, they discovered that it was an attack by Western governments.
According to the US State Department, Russia was accused of conspiring with Syria “to clean up the sites of suspected terrorist attacks and eliminate incriminating evidence that chemical weapons were used.”
Putin was also accused of using chemical weapons in targeted attacks, including those against Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition activist and Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence agent.
Navalny was a prominent critic of the autocrat in recent years. He fell ill while on an August 2020 domestic flight from Moscow. After the emergency landing, he was transferred to Moscow and treated there. His wife requested that he be flown back to Berlin two days later.
According to tests done by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), he had been exposed to the Soviet-era Novichok nerve gas in Germany, France, and Sweden.
Navalny was detained after he returned from Russia in January 2021. He has been held since then, despite numerous international appeals for his release.
The Kremlin repeatedly denies any role in the poisoning of Navalny. Putin laughed at the accusations that he was guilty when asked about it during an event in December 2020.
However, Putin wasn’t the only one to be tied to Novichok after Navalny was poisoned.
Putin critic Alexei Navalny, seen via a video connection from a prison in December 2021 during a court session. Multiple countries allege that he was poisoned using the Soviet-era Novichok nervous agent.
Ex-Russian intelligence agent Sergei Skripal (right), and his daughter Yulia Skripal, (left), were poisoned two years ago by something British officials claim is Novichok
Sergei Skripal (former Russian intelligence officer) and Yulia Skripal (his daughter), were both found unconscious at a Salisbury park bench, England on March 4.
BBC was told by a witness that Yulia, who was sitting on a park bench, looked like she was foaming at her mouth. Her eyes were wide open and completely clear.
Skripal had been previously found guilty of high treason by a Russian court for allegedly disclosing the identities of European-based Russian agents to Britain’s MI6 intelligence service.
The poisonous substance was identified by British authorities as Novichok, and Russia has been accused of attempted murder. According to The New York Times, they claim Russian agents fled Russia to apply the nerve agent on Skripal’s doorknob and then flew back to England. According to the New York Times, Russian agents flew to England and applied nerve agent to Skripal’s door handle. The Kremlin denies any involvement.
Theresa May, former UK prime minister, stated at that time: ‘Either it was a direct attack by Russia against our country or the Russian government lost control over its potentially devastating nerve agent and let it get into other hands.
Salisbury’s resident, who had applied perfume to her body in June 2011, died after his boyfriend took home the bottle of perfume he dumped in the garbage. She fell ill, but her boyfriend was able to survive. The Skripals’ poison is believed to have killed them.
Putin might have chemical weapons in his entire arsenal. Like a bad guy’s lair right out of a James Bond film.
However, this Soviet-era Siberia building may still be where Vladimir Putin’s bioweapons arsenal is kept.
Novosibirsk Oblast State Centre for Research on Virology and Biotechnology has devastating disease outbreaks such as smallpox and anthrax. It also has more modern killer pathogens like Ebola.
It was opened in the Cold War era as a research center for bioterrorism. Today, the site is one of Russia’s most secure. Barbed wire and armed soldiers are permanently posted at the gates.
It covers a total of 70,000 square feet and is the largest research or administrative building in Russia, called ‘Vector.
This is one of the most important. just 59 maximum-security biolabs in the world, a status it shares with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — the site at the centre of the origins of the Covid pandemic.
Vector (pictured) released a statement claiming that a gas cylinder exploded in the fifth floor of Vector State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology.
Vector can handle some of the deadliest diseases in the world. Vector’s workers are equipped with full-body hazmat suits and wear military green.
Hidden in the foothills, the secretive Level Four facility can be found on the border with Kazakhstan. This is one of the coldest areas on Earth, and temperatures can drop to as low of -35C in winter.
Russia claimed the laboratory, which was one of twelve involved in USSR’s production of bioweapons in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The lab is now focused on the development of vaccines against lethal viruses. The lab launched last year research on prehistoric viruses discovered in the remains of paleolithic horses, which were recovered from Siberia’s melting permafrost.
But a US State Department report last year claimed Russia ‘maintains an offensive biological weapons program’ despite the country insisting it had ceased such research.
This comes just a few days after US Ambassador to the United Nations suggested that Putin might use bioweapons in order to overthrow Ukraine’s Government. He warned, “Nothing is off the Table” for Putin.
This lab houses the deadly virus strains in more than 59 maximum containment laboratories at level 4.
Officially the laboratory focuses its efforts on vaccines for deadly viruses such as anthrax and smallpox. Pictured: Lab workers wearing hazmat suits
After accidentally being infected with Ebola or Marburg, at least two lab workers were both killed. Pictured: Lab workers wearing hazmat suits
Vector is pictured here in 2016 with doctors handling the Ebolavirus in Medical Unit number 163. This unit, along with other Atlanta Centers for Disease Control and Protection houses the deadly smallpox.
Russia accused the US, as well as Russia’s allies in the conflict of interest, of creating bioweapons within Ukrainian laboratory facilities. But global experts deny these accusations.
Non-proliferation experts and former US officials also believe the labs work to prevent and detect the spread of bioweapons. They also help in the containment and prevention of disease outbreaks.
In 2019, the lab was headline news after a gas explosion caused second- and third-degree burns to one worker.
Bosses had to admit that they were unaware of the fact that there was a fire and the possibility of exposure to the pathogens contained within.
Antonina Presnyakova, a lab worker died 15 years ago after accidentally infusing herself with an Ebola-infected needle.
And its former boss Professor Ilya Drozdov went missing in 2017 after being accused of stealing two million roubles — then worth around £27,000 — from the facility.
Interpol put Professor Drozdov on the wanted list. However, he is still missing five years after he was placed there. Authorities are concerned that a fugitive from abroad may have escaped.
The facility — also called the Vector Institute — is believed to be one of the locations where Russia may have continued the bioweaponary scheme, which was named Biopreparat in the Cold War era.
According to a US State Department report, Russia allegedly maintains an offensive biological weapon program that violates Articles I and 2 of the Biological Weapons Convention.
It stated that Russia had been violating the BWC for years.
This international convention prohibits countries from stockpiling or developing biological weapons. It was signed by the USSR and forced it to disband Bioprepart.
Biopreparat agency — which spearheaded the country’s biological warfare programme — was founded in 1974, the same year as the lab. This agency was made up of five institutes that were military-focused and employed upwards of 40,000 people.
Vector, which employs about a third the 4,500 people it used back in Soviet times, is one of 59 security labs at level four spread across 23 countries.
China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology is the largest international facility. It is believed that this was where the coronavirus epidemic began.
There are seven in the UK, the best known of which is the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, run by the Ministry of Defence at its base in Porton Down, Wiltshire — where two labs research the threat from biological weapons.
A second high-security lab is run by the National Institute of Medical Research in Camden. This laboratory studies flu viruses that can lead to pandemics.
Experts are increasingly worried about managing dangerous organisms found in such labs. Others warn that there are not enough safety measures to protect the world from a pandemic triggered by undiscovered viruses.
Scientists at the lab had previously weaponised Marburg virus — which kills 88 per cent of people that it infects
The State Centre for Research on Virology and Biotechnology in Novosibirsk Oblast (pictured) houses Russia’s bioweapon arsenal of smallpox, anthrax and Ebola
Vector is one the two only labs that have the deadly smallpoxvirus.
Filippa Lentzos, a senior lecturer in science and international security at King’s College London, said 75 per cent of high-security labs around the world are sited in urban areas — increasing the likelihood of rapid transmission in the event of a virus escaping.
Vector also houses the fatal smallpoxvirus. The other lab is the Centers for Disease Control and Protection in Atlanta, USA. These facilities are allowed to house the virus in accordance with an international agreement.
Both are inspected by the World Health Organization for safety every 2 years. The last Vector Institute check-up was in 2019, just before the outbreak of the pandemic.
In 1977 smallpox occurred naturally. By 1980, the World Health Organization had declared it eradicated.
It is believed that smallpox has killed as many as 300million people during the 20th century.
Scientists at the lab had also previously weaponised Marburg virus — which kills 88 per cent of people that it infects.
According to reports, a researcher who died from the virus in 1988 was buried in a grave with zinc liner at the laboratory complex’s cemetery.
It was 16 years ago that he died.
In 2017, Professor Drozdov disappeared without a trace after a complicated legal wrangle.
He was head of the facility for five years and knew some of Moscow’s biggest biological secrets.
Drozdov was ordered to be held ‘in abstention’ by a court over an alleged fraud. This mysterious case, linked to Vector, came only four years later than he had left the research centre.
He left the institute in 2010 and returned to Saratov in southern Russia, where he was the head of Russian Scientific Research Anti-Plague Institute “Microbe”, which provides protection from dangerous diseases like anthrax, bubonic plague and cholera.
Vector colleagues claimed that he was a director and paid high salaries for executives while lab workers were given low wages.
In 2019, the lab came back to the forefront when an explosion of a gas tube threatened to release some of its virus-damaging viruses.
Russia says there is no ongoing threat following the explosion of a gas tube on the fifth-floor.
Authorities scrambled 13 fire engines and 38 firefighters to tackle the blaze — which the lab claims covered 30 square metres.
Koltsovo mayor said that there was no release of biologically harmful materials in the explosion.
Since the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States has invested an estimated £7.5million at Vector to encourage the site to abandon bioweapon research in favour of vaccine development.
According to the lab, it is now focusing on vaccine research only and has stopped being involved in biological warfare.
Vector was involved in the search for cures and treatments for killers like anthrax and hepatitis B.