The United Nations denies Russia's claims about Ukraine's biological weapons program. Western countries have even accused Russia of spreading 'wild' conspiracy theories in UN forums as a pretext for launching their own biological or chemical attack in its invasion of Ukraine.
"Russia has a track record of falsely accusing other countries of abuses that Russia itself has committed," said US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield.
"We have serious concerns that Russia may be planning to use chemical or biological agents against the Ukrainian people," he added.
Suspicions such as those raised by Thomas-Greenfield are not without cause. Russia is known to have inherited its biological weapons program from the Soviet Union so there is always suspicion about this.
Citing Wikipedia, the Soviet Union secretly operated the largest, longest, and most advanced biological weapons program in the world, violating its obligations as a member of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in 1972. The program began in the 1920s and lasted until at least September 1992. It is likely that this program will be continued by Russia after that.
During World War II, Soviet Head of Government Joseph Stalin was forced to stop his biological warfare (BW) operations so as not to hinder the advance of German troops. He is alleged to have used tularemia against German troops in 1942 near Stalingrad.
By 1960, many BW research facilities existed throughout the Soviet Union. Although the Soviet Union also signed the 1972 BWC, they later stepped up their biowarfare program. Throughout its history, the Soviet program is known to have armed and stockpiled the following twelve biological agents:
Bacillus anthracis (anthrax)
Yersinia pestis (plague)
Francisella tularensis (tularemia)
Burkholderia mallei (glands)
Brucella sp. (brucellosis)
Coxiella burnetii (Q fever)
Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus (VEE)
Botulinum poison
Staphylococcal enterotoxin B
Smallpox
marburg virus
orthoxic viruses.
In 1992, President of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin admitted that the Soviet Union had operated an offensive biological weapons program in violation of the BWC. He described a biological weapons accident in Sverdlovsk in 1979 that killed at least 64 people.
Soviet defectors, including Colonel Kanatjan Alibekov, first deputy head of Biopreparat from 1988 to 1992, asserted that the program was massive and still exists.
He then tried to close the program but was unsuccessful by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation which continued to operate his biological research institute.
In September 1992, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom signed a trilateral statement in which Russia pledged to end Russia's biological weapons program and transform its facilities for good scientific and medical purposes, as well as to allow its Western counterparts access to these facilities.
But Moscow didn't deliver on that promise, so the institute for military biology remains a secret today, just as it was in Soviet times.
Furthermore, Yeltsin's 1992 confession was reversed by Vladimir Putin after he became acting president in 1999. Russia's official position since then has been: The Soviet Union never had an offensive biological weapons program and carried out only defensive research as permitted by the BWC.
