A recently unearthed 2005 article from the Washington Post reveals that 44th President Barack Obama, then a U.S. Senator, visited Ukraine in the mid 2000’s to announce that the United States would be funding “security” improvements at multiple Ukrainian “antiplague” laboratories that housed dangerous and lethal pathogens from the Soviet era.
According to the article, published on August 30, 2005 and written by seasoned Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick, both the U.S. and Ukraine agreed on a joint effort to “prevent the spread of biological weapons” with a signed agreement that allowed for Congress to send Ukraine money to be spent on “security upgrades” for a network of Cold War-era Ukranian biological institutes.
Warrick reported that the biological facilities housed “dangerous microbes” such as Anthrax and the plague. When Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, the facilities reportedly used the pathogens as part of a secret Soviet bioweapons program.
Making it a bipartisan excursion, then-Sen. Obama was accompanied by former Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, during the visit to Ukraine. The Senators met with former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko.
“The agreement, the result of more than a year of negotiations, was announced by Sens. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) during a visit to the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.”
Obama, who had just been elected the previous year, “credited Ukraine’s reformist leaders, ushered into power by last fall’s Orange Revolution, with breaking bureaucratic resistance to the pact,” wrote Warrick for the Washington Post.
“One lab to receive funding is the I.I. Mechnikov Antiplague Scientific and Research Institute, in the Black Sea port city of Odessa. The institute was part of a Cold War network of ‘antiplague’ stations that supplied highly lethal pathogens to Soviet bioweapons factories,” the Post reported.
Mechnikov Anti-Plague Research Institute
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Staffer Mark Helmke at the time stated that “This agreement will allow us to begin addressing the problems faced by the Odessa antiplague institute and places like it.”
Helmke said the U.S. aimed to fund the Ukranian biolab security upgrades in order to “support peaceful research by Ukranian scientists to fight the spread of natural diseases.”
The visit to Ukraine was briefly “disrupted” when local Ukrainian authorities refused to permit the U.S. delegation’s military plane to leave Russia and demanded to search the aircraft. Obama’s flight was eventually allowed to take place and Russia’s Foreign Ministry later apologized over the incident.
At the onset of the 2022 Invasion of Ukraine, internationally accredited fact checkers claimed that no “U.S. biolabs in Ukraine funded by the U.S. government” exist, that the treaty regarding U.S. funding for “security” upgrades at Ukranian biolabs was only for the purpose of “preventing biological threats,” and that any notions to the contrary amount to a “Russian disinformation campaign.”
Wuhan Institute of Virology
In May of 2020, the The Security Service of Ukraine put out a statement dismissing concerns over the Cold War-era network of Ukrainian biolabs:
“Recently, ‘fake news’ about the alleged activities of American military biological laboratories in Ukraine has been spread in the media and social networks,” the agency said. “No foreign biological laboratories operate in Ukraine. Statements recently made by individual politicians are not true and are a deliberate distortion of the facts.”
The discussion of chemical and biological weapons in Ukraine has surfaced recently in light of new unconfirmed video which purportedly shows the armed forces of Ukraine deploying chemical weapons against Russian soldiers.
One video, posted by popular pro-Russia Twitter user Donbass Devushka, appears to show a Russian soldier descend into involuntary convulsions and drowning after being hit with what seems to be a chemical gas, Valiant News reported.
This news and commentary by Andrew White originally appeared on Valiant News.
