Democrats in the US have partnered with Big Pharma companies and friendly foundations led by George Soros and Bill Gates to set up biological research in Ukraine, using the project to generate additional funding for elections, the Russian military claimed on Wednesday in its latest briefing.
“It needs to be said that the ideologues of US military biological research in Ukraine are leaders of the Democratic Party,” said Lieutenant-General Igor Kirillov, the head of the Russian Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Force.
The US government set up a way to fund the military bio-research directly from the federal budget, but also used government guarantees to raise funds from “non-governmental organizations controlled by the leadership of the Democratic Party,” Kirillov added.
As an example of such organizations, he showed a slide with the names of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the [Bill and Hillary] Clinton Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society and investment funds, the Rockefeller Foundation, EcoHealth Alliance, and Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca Partners.
Kirillov also named Pfizer, Moderna, Merck and Gilead as “large pharmaceutical companies” involved in this scheme, using it to test medications while bypassing international safety standards. This reduces the cost of their research and development, Kirillov argued, and the increase in pharma profits “allows the leaders of the Democratic Party to receive additional financial contributions for election campaigns and hide their distribution.”
Using Ukraine as a testbed effectively outside international control and leveraging the technological capacities of transnational pharma companies, the Pentagon has “significantly expanded its research potential not only in the field of creating biological weapons, but also obtaining information about antibiotic resistance and the presence of antibodies to certain diseases in populations of specific regions,” Kirillov noted.
Head of Russia’s Investigative Committee Alexander Bastrykin told RT last week that his service has “clearly identified” Americans involved in military biological research in Ukraine, including employees of the US Department of Defense and several companies with ties to the Pentagon.
The US had spent more than $224 million on biological programs in Ukraine between 2005 and early 2022, Bastrykin said.
The Russian military has presented evidence of US government involvement in Ukrainian biolabs before. At the end of March, Kirillov showed slides that pointed to current US President Joe Biden’s son Hunter being involved in procuring funding for some of the projects. Kirillov also presented documentation that showed Kiev was interested in equipping drones for distribution of weaponized pathogens.
US officials have confirmed the existence of “biological research facilities” in Ukraine, but said Washington only provided what they called “assistance” for efforts that did not involve development of bioweapons.
Russia attacked the neighboring state in late February, following Ukraine’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements, first signed in 2014, and Moscow’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The German and French brokered protocols were designed to give the breakaway regions special status within the Ukrainian state.
The Kremlin has since demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two republics by force.