Russia to Investigate US Bio Weapons Labs in Neighboring Countries

Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia Sergey Ryabkov noted that the department does not exclude the anthropogenic factor in the spread of some viruses that hit the planet’s population.

MOSCOW,  / Tass /. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation is developing protocols that will make it possible to open the activities of the laboratories of the countries-neighbors involved in the study of biological threats. This was announced on Wednesday by Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia Sergey Ryabkov on the program “ Evening with Vladimir Solovyov ” on the Russia-1 TV channel.

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“We are developing an agreement, protocols with neighbors that allow us to obtain transparency, look inside these laboratories, which are funded, including from the Pentagon,” he said, urging people not to forget about the threat of biological weapons and to look for ways to counter it at the national level.

“If there are problems of an inexplicable nature, like, for example, an outbreak of hemorrhagic fever in children from Russia who rested in Georgia last summer, you need to look deeper. Manipulations with the genome of the causative agent of this infection cause at least questions,” the diplomat added.

At the same time Ryabkov noted that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation does not exclude the anthropogenic factor in the spread of certain viruses that hit the planet’s population. “We saw it on outbreaks of such diseases as Zika, Ebola in Africa, in their rapid spread throughout the world. We saw it, including in close proximity to our borders, in the laboratory named after Lugar in the village of Alekseyevka, near Tbilisi” , – he said.

The deputy minister believes that Russia should resist the threat of using biological tools with diplomatic tools before talking about the use of force. “We must exhaust all other resources before turning to this extreme means,” Ryabkov added, recalling that according to the Russian military doctrine, “the use of nuclear weapons is possible in the event of aggression against Russia using nuclear or other types of weapons of mass destruction.” “Biological weapons are among those,” he concluded.

Lugar Research Center in Georgia

The Richard Lugar Public Health Research Center was opened near the Tbilisi International Airport in the village of Alekseyevka in 2011 under the US government program. The center is engaged in research of biological threats. Former Minister of State Security of Georgia, Igor Giorgadze, at the end of 2018, said that he had documents confirming that dangerous research had been conducted at the research center, and also called on US President Donald Trump to investigate the laboratory’s activities. In Georgia, these accusations were called absurd, and in Moscow they said that they would ask the US for documents on the activities of the laboratory.