United States Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield Friday morning again denounced Russian attempts to lie about biological weapons allegations in Ukraine.
“As I said a week ago, Ukraine has no biological weapons program. There are no Ukrainian biological weapons laboratories – not near the border with Russia, anywhere. There are only public health facilities, proud, and I say proudly , supported and recognized by the US government, the World Health Organization and other governments and international institutions,” Thomas-Greenfield said in prepared remarks to the UN Security Council.
Ukrainian and US officials have repeatedly debunked claims of US-backed organic programs in Ukraine.
Friday’s emergency session was convened by Russia after they announced Thursday that they would not vote on their draft humanitarian resolution on Ukraine.
Thomas-Greenfield instead said that “Russia has a well-documented history of using chemical weapons” and that Friday’s meeting “is the result of their isolation in this Council and on the world stage”.
“We’re not going to dignify Russia’s disinformation or conspiracy theories,” Thomas-Greenfield said. “I will not repeat the insults and false accusations that Russia has repeatedly hurled at this table against the Ukrainian people and the United States. But we know that Russia’s disinformation is a sign of its desperation. That is the truth, and we will keep making sure the world sees it and hears it.”
Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia claimed Friday that new details show evidence of US-backed biological weapons in Ukraine.
“In the past week, new details have come to light that make it possible to state that the components for biological weapons were made on the territory of Ukraine,” Nebenzia said in translated comments to the council. “We can see that the US colleagues did not, as they claim, help the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, but rather the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.”
Nebenzia claimed that a new document issued to the council Friday morning “confirms the direct funding and oversight of the Pentagon and its defense threat mitigation agency from military and biological projects in Ukraine.”
“The representative of the US State Department continues to mix up the information and finds that the US is reportedly not active in biological laboratories on the territory of Ukraine, but the facts show otherwise,” the Russian ambassador said.
More context: There are US-funded biolabs in Ukraine, but they don’t build bioweapons. Actually, it’s the opposite: part of the reason for their creation was to secure old Soviet weapons left behind in the former Soviet republics. The State Department has described the claims as nonsense – and the US and Ukrainian governments have repeatedly and for years tried to fight conspiracy theories about the labs and talk about the work that is actually being done.
Russia’s falsehoods about these kinds of labs have not been confined to Ukraine, and the country has been spreading various bits of disinformation about the US and biological weapons since the Cold War.
DailyExpertNews’s Kiely Westhoff and Donie O’Sullivan contributed to this post.