US fears new labs built at Russia’s Soviet-era bioweapons facility

President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that direct involvement of a third country “is the first step towards world war”.

There is no evidence that biological weapons have ever been used in Ukraine, which is prohibited by international treaties.

However, the development of the facility, as well as the secrecy surrounding it, has raised fears that it could be a possibility in the future.

Russian officials have publicly confirmed in recent weeks that the Sergiev Posad-6 labs will be used to study deadly microbes, which they have said is necessary to defend the country against bioterrorism and future pandemics.

US intelligence agencies and biological weapons experts are closely monitoring the development, The Post reported.

Russian forces are already using chemical weapons on the front line in Ukraine. In May, the US State Department said it had evidence of the use of chloropicrin, a powerful irritant more toxic than chlorine that damages the lungs, as well as riot control agents.

Use of both substances violates the Chemical Weapons Conventiona multilateral treaty banning chemical weapons to which Russia is a signatory.

The Kremlin denies the allegations

The Kremlin has been accused in the past of using banned nerve agents and radioactive materials in high-profile assassinations of opposition figures and defectors both at home and abroad.

Alexei Navalny, a key figure in the Russian opposition, he was poisoned with Novichok planted in panties in Tomsk, Russia in 2020. Exiled intelligence officer Sergei Skripal was poisoned with the same substance in 2018 in Salisbury.

Baseless claims that a US biological weapons program was being developed in Ukraine were one of the pretexts for its large-scale invasion, but the Kremlin denies that biological weapons exist on its own soil.

A Soviet biological weapons network

The Sergiev Posad-6 compound was known as Zagorsk-6 during the Soviet era and is believed to have been the focus of military research into pathogenic viruses, particularly the smallpox virus that causes smallpox.

A vast Soviet network of biological weapons facilities working to combat diseases such as anthrax, smallpox and bubonic plague was revealed by Soviet defectors in the 1980s.

In 1979, a wave of anthrax spores was accidentally released from a secret facility near Yekaterinburg, killing 66 people in the deadliest anthrax outbreak ever.

Russian officials also deny that the Soviet Union had an offensive biological weapons program.