Shadowy Ukrainian bio-labs that few in US want to talk about

Recent talk by Russia of United States-funded biological laboratories in Ukraine has raised questions about why they are there and what their purpose is.

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday that in addition to more than 30 such laboratories in Ukraine, the US has created "hundreds of such laboratories" in other countries.

The Biological Threat Reduction Program, or BTRP, is part of the US Department of Defense's Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, according to a fact sheet the department published on March 11.

Since 2005, when the BTRP has partnered with the government of Ukraine, the US has invested about $200 million in Ukraine, supporting 46 Ukrainian laboratories, health facilities and diagnostic sites.

According to publicly available information, 336 laboratories in about 30 countries receive funding from the BTRP. The research work conducted by these laboratories is highly classified.

Although US officials have dismissed the questions about them as disinformation and "conspiracy theories", there have been calls for Washington to comply with the Biological Weapons Convention and make clarifications on related issues.

Alastair Hay, professor emeritus of Environmental Toxicology at the University of Leeds in England, said: "The United States has been supporting various laboratories in Ukraine through a post-Cold War program. As I understand it, these labs are generally involved in disease surveillance.

"It is unclear why the United States needs to support this work and why, for example, it is not happening under WHO guidance."

The US says it has funded such laboratories in other countries to "contain biological threats". And yet these laboratories turn out to have been designed to store and deal with dangerous pathogens and toxins.

A report by the US National Academy of Sciences in 2012 said some Ukrainian laboratories have been upgraded to the level needed to handle some of the more dangerous pathogens such as anthrax.

Some reports said the US-funded biological laboratories in Ukraine were set up to create a mechanism for the covert spread of lethal pathogens, which has raised unease about potential pathogen leakage.

Why did the US choose to fund such laboratories in Ukraine, which is not a rich country and does not excel in biomedical research?

While explaining the history of the US biological laboratories program in Ukraine to The American Conservative, Jonathan Askonas, an assistant professor of politics at the Catholic University of America, said the Defense Threat Reduction Agency increased its activities in peripheral countries of the former Soviet Union. Ukraine was particularly attractive because it has many skilled STEM workers and had a US-friendly government.

On Thursday the World Health Organization advised Ukraine to destroy high-threat pathogens stored in the country's laboratories to prevent "any potential spills".

US mainstream news outlets have largely remained silent on the issue of the US biological laboratories program in Ukraine.

"What is in those Ukrainian biological labs that make them so worrisome and dangerous?" journalist Glenn Greenwald said in an article published on March 9, a day after the US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, testifying before a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, acknowledged that "Ukraine has biological research facilities".

Xinhua