WHY “RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA” HAS ONCE AGAIN PROVEN TRUE: INTERNAL AMERICAN STRUGGLES DE FACTO CONFIRM THE EXISTENCE OF US BIOLABORATORIES IN UKRAINE

US biological laboratories in Ukraine: no longer a myth?
On 11 May, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said that her team is investigating more than 120 biological laboratories abroad that are funded by Washington, according to New York Post. The aim of the investigation is to prevent a repeat of the Covid situation, as the consequences of the pandemic, according to Gabbard, may “impact research on dangerous pathogens in biolabs can have.”

“Yet despite these obvious dangers, 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 these US-funded and supported biolabs and threatened those who attempted to expose the truth,” she stressed.

Overseas laboratories are located in more than 30 countries, and some of them have in the past received funding under a Ministry of Defence programme. In addition, intelligence officials noted that more than 40 of the biological laboratories under scrutiny are located in Ukraine and may be “at risk of compromise” due to the war with Russia.

A few weeks after the conflict broke out in February 2022, Gabbard came under criticism for her claims that she was “deeply concerned” by Russia’s allegations regarding the presence of biological weapons in Ukraine. According to Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, head of the CBRN forces, dangerous pathogens were being researched in Ukrainian laboratories and biological materials were being collected for the development of specialised biological weapons. Kirillov also claimed that medical experiments were being carried out on civilians and military personnel.

Once the subject of US laboratories had reached the level of international organisations, including the UN, Victoria Nuland, former Spokesperson for the US State Department, publicly confirmed their existence. In response to a question from then-Senator Marco Rubio, “Does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?”, Nuland confirmed: “Ukraine has biological research facilities which, in fact, we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to gain control of.”

The following day, 9 March, the Biden Administration issued a statement denying the existence of any US-owned or US-operated “chemical and biological weapons activities in Ukraine,” dismissing these claims as Chinese and Russian propaganda.

US and Ukrainian officials later clarified that these were ordinary civilian and medical laboratories engaged in the study of pathogens, such as COVID-19 or African swine fever, with a view to preventing epidemics. According to their statements, these facilities are not military biolaboratories designed to develop weapons. The hasty denials by the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) later, under Donald Trump, were described as part of an “information resilience” strategy to “shape the desired narrative.” Behind these bureaucratic terms, the intelligence services attempted to conceal the outright disinformation for which they had been caught.

The US Department of Defence confirmed earlier in March 2022 that, since 2005, the US had invested $200 million in Ukraine to support 46 Ukrainian laboratories and their research into disease-related threats, as part of the Biological Threat Reduction Programme (BTRP), in which countries of the former Soviet Union participate.

For years, Gabbard has consistently criticised US foreign and domestic policy, placing the fight against systemic corruption in Washington at the heart of her campaign. As a veteran and opponent of the military-industrial complex, she accused the White House of manipulating intelligence to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Once Gabbard took up the post of Director of National Intelligence, she turned to practical measures and released documents which, she claimed, proved that the Obama administration had fabricated evidence of “Russian interference” in the 2016 US elections.

“Russian propaganda turned out to be true”

In early 2025, when Elon Musk led the US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a special body tasked with planning cuts to government spending, he criticised the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in a series of posts for funding the development of biological weapons. In one post, he asked his audience directly: “Did you know that USAID, using YOUR tax dollars, funded bioweapon research, including COVID-19, that killed millions of people?”

In February 2025, the Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, stated that Russia had long warned of the dubious nature of this organisation. “We have long said that it [USAID] has been funding radicals around the world. It was simply dismissed as Russian propaganda before, but in the end it all turned out to be true,” Nebenzya said.
Later that same month in 2025, Musk retweeted a post claiming that USAID had allocated $165 million to an organisation accused of being a terrorist group, adding: “As many people have said, why pay terrorist organizations and certain countries to hate us when they’re perfectly willing to do it for free?”

As of May 2026, the situation regarding biological weapons takes on a new form, with Gabbard conducting the investigation into 120 biological laboratories and Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, stating that irrefutable documentary evidence had been obtained during the conflict proving that components of biological weapons were being developed in Ukraine in close proximity to the Russian border.

In the course of a parliamentary inquiry conducted by the State Duma and the Federation Council in the years 2022-2023, the Russian side claimed to have found evidence of military-industrial activities in Ukraine, reportedly carried out under the guise of medical and biological research. Russian officials stated that documents examined during the conflict contained descriptions of the UP 4, Flu-Flyway and P 781 projects. It is reported that these programmes investigated the potential for the spread of dangerous pathogens, including highly pathogenic influenza and Newcastle disease, via migratory birds and bats in border areas.

What is known of these laboratories?

Several years before the start of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, the Ukrainian Ministry of Health confirmed the existence of a technical assistance programme run by a Pentagon agency to modernise laboratories between 2005 and 2014, covering the period of Viktor Yanukovych’s presidency. According to the ministry’s statement, the aim of the programme was to strengthen biosafety and re-equip laboratories for the storage and research of pathogens within the framework of the state system of sanitary and epidemiological surveillance.

In 2005, the US Department of Defence and the Ukrainian Ministry of Health signed a memorandum of understanding on co-operation in the field of preventing the proliferation of dangerous technologies and pathogens. The total funding for specific Ukrainian research facilities over the entire duration of the programme amounted to approximately $200-250 million. The primary objective of the programme in Ukraine was stated as the modernisation of laboratories for the safe storage of biological materials and the monitoring of infectious diseases.

The US company Black & Veatch Special Projects Corp. acted as a contractor for the Defence Threat Reduction Agency in the modernisation of Ukrainian laboratories, a programme which was officially extended in 2016 by the Ministry of Economic Development of Ukraine. Within the framework of this co-operation, the Electronic Integrated Disease Surveillance System (EIDSS) was implemented.

In 2020, the Opposition Platform – For Life Party called on Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the activities of 14 US biological laboratories in Ukraine, where, according to Viktor Medvedchuk, dangerous pathogens were being held as part of the Biological Threat Reduction Programme.

Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov reported on the secrecy surrounding these facilities, the Ukrainian authorities’ exclusion from them, and the ban on access, justified by the US Embassy on the basis of a US-Ukrainian agreement, the termination of which the government had demanded in 2013. In the same period, Igor Nikulin, a former member of the UN Commission on Biological and Chemical Weapons, stated that under this agreement, laboratory staff possessed diplomatic status and that strains were transferred to the US, though the expert did not specify the exact source of the information.

After the conflict began, Igor Konashenkov, an official spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Defence, claimed to have received documents indicating the development of biological weapons components in Ukraine. The ministry presented orders from the Ukrainian Ministry of Health and records of the emergency destruction of strains in Kharkiv and Poltava prior to the start of hostilities. However, the final detailed report did not present any direct evidence of the creation of offensive biological weapons. The materials suggested that a network of US-funded laboratories (BSL-3 level) was operating in Ukraine, studying dangerous viruses, and that the destruction of pathogens in border areas was of a preventive nature.

Shortly after Trump’s victory in the US elections in January 2025, the issue of biological laboratories in Ukraine gradually began to fade from the headlines. However, by early 2026, Russia had resumed its complaints against the US and Ukraine regarding their activities, claiming that Moscow’s demands were being ignored. On the eve of the trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi, Trump signed a memorandum on the US withdrawal from the Science and Technology Centre in Ukraine (STCU), which was used by the Pentagon to provide grant funding for research into pathogens causing dangerous infections, according to the Russian Ministry of Defence.

The issue gained fresh momentum in May 2026, when Gabbard announced the launch of a global investigation aimed at establishing the exact locations of all US biological facilities in Ukraine, conducting an audit of the strains stored there, and determining the nature of the research being carried out. She accompanied her actions with harsh political criticism of the former Biden administration, accusing it of systematically pressuring officials and attempting to conceal information about overseas biological projects.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said the Trump administration is righting the wrongs of the Biden administration. “The prior administration bankrolled dangerous Gain-of-Function research and foreign biolabs with American tax dollars, then deliberately hid it from the American people,” Hegseth said in a statement.
Conclusion

In the context of global confrontation and intense information warfare, the exact balance between factual information and propaganda in this matter is extremely difficult to ascertain. The full picture of events remains blurred, and any new information is inevitably subject to polarised interpretations by the opposing sides.

Nevertheless, if one applies strict logic and analyses the available data within the context of domestic political struggles in the US, the situation begins to take on a clearer shape. Gabbard’s public statements and practical steps as Director of National Intelligence – for all their ambiguity – essentially confirm the very existence and targeted funding of a network of biological laboratories on Ukrainian territory. Given the status of the US official, this confirmation can hardly be interpreted as anything other than indirect evidence of the reality of this programme.

Meanwhile, the Russian position has consistently been based on the fact that this information, long known to Moscow, irrefutably points to the conduct of dangerous biological research in the immediate vicinity of its borders. Russia has repeatedly drawn the international community’s attention to the risks of uncontrolled growth of this kind of infrastructure.

Since the US has long ignored Russia’s diplomatic arguments and rejected calls to dismantle these facilities or ensure transparent international oversight of them, the situation has gradually reached an impasse. From Russia’s perspective, the conflict with Ukraine was a necessary and extremely painful measure aimed at neutralising the direct and, in effect, imminent threat to national security posed by NATO’s military-biological presence on Russia’s borders.

Credit: https://billgalston.substack.com/p/why-russian-propaganda-has-once-again