Washington spends 250 mln USD on biowarfare activities in Ukraine: Russian Defense Ministry

MOSCOW, July 8 (Xinhua) -- The United States has spent more than 250 million U.S. dollars on military biological activities in Ukraine since 2005, the Russian Defense Ministry said Thursday.

The ministry has been studying the work of U.S.-funded biological weapons programs in Ukraine and other regions, and has recently obtained a report on the activities of the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) from 2005 to 2016, Igor Kirillov, chief of the Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defense Forces of the Russian Armed Forces, said during a briefing.

The report positively assessed the activities of the DTRA, namely the fact that the organization was able to transfer a national collection of microorganisms from Ukraine to the United States, conduct biological assessments, and implement projects aimed at studying particularly dangerous and economically significant infections that could worsen the epidemiological situation, Kirillov said.

The report also contained ambiguous data on the sponsors and executors of the Biological Threat Reduction Program in Ukraine. The activities of the sponsors of the program, such as the Soros Foundation, were not related to biosecurity issues.

"This confirms that the activities of the Pentagon in Ukraine are just a front for illegal military and biological research," Kirillov said.

Ukraine and other post-Soviet states have become "a testing ground" for biological weapons for the United States and its NATO allies, according to Kirillov.