Washington persistently disregards Moscow’s requests to provide information about its military biological activity beyond the US, Director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department for Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Vladimir Yermakov told TASS on Saturday.
According to the diplomat, the extended build-up of military-biological activities by the United States and allies causes Moscow to raise specific questions in the context of their implementation of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction (BTWC).
“Taking into consideration the cross-border nature of biological threats, this poses considerable risks to security of both our state and neighboring regions. Nevertheless, Americans stubbornly ignore our requests to provide information on this activity,” Yermakov noted.
The diplomat pointed out that the Pentagon “has cranked out” construction and upgrading of microbiological facilities in a lot of former Soviet republics under the pretext of assistance in the sanitary and epidemiological field.
“In view of the absence of a verification mechanism within the BTWC framework, which development has been blocked since 2001 by nobody else by the United States, it seems impossible to control the order and degree of involvement of those facilities in the classified research programs of the US Department of Defense,” he went on to say.
The situation is aggravated by the fact that Washington does not carry out its military biological activities in the post-Soviet space directly, but through affiliated companies, Yermakov said.
“The laboratories, including those in Ukraine, are formally national facilities, not owned by the United States,” he explained. “Another question is by whom, how, for what purposes, based on what programs and how transparently research studies are carried out there.”.
