The United Nations on Friday said it had no evidence Ukraine had a biological weapons program while Washington and its allies accused Russia of spreading the unproven claim as a possible prelude to launching its own biological or chemical attacks.
Russia called the meeting of the 15-member U.N. Security Council to reassert through its envoy Vassily Nebenzia, without providing evidence, that Ukraine ran biological weapons laboratories with U.S. Defense Department support.
Member countries called the claim “a lie” and “utter nonsense” and used the session to accuse Russia of deliberately targeting and killing hundreds of civilians in Ukraine, assertions that Russia denies in a 15-day offensive it calls “a special military operation.” Izumi Nakamitsu, the U.N. High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, told the council the United Nations is “not aware” of any biological weapons program in Ukraine, which joined an international ban on such arms, as have Russia and the United States along with 180 other countries.
Last Sunday the Russian ministry of foreign affairs posted a tweet accusing the US and Ukrainian governments of running a secret “military-biological program” inside the stricken country. Moscow claimed that its invading forces had discovered evidence of an “emergency clean-up” to hide the program.
Moscow went on to claim that it had found documents related to the secret US operation in laboratories in the Ukrainian cities of Kharkiv and Poltava. The allegations were quickly amplified by China, which supported the claims during Friday’s UN security council debate.
The theory also took on a life of its own on social media under the hashtag #usbiolabs, and found a welcome home among rightwing outlets in the US including the War Room podcast of Donald Trump’s former White House adviser Steve Bannon and the Fox News primetime show hosted by Tucker Carlson.
