Steven Starr to the IPC

Beware Biological Warfare Research Disguised as ‘Health Defense’

Jan. 31—Nuclear weapons expert Steven Starr, former Clinical Laboratory Science Program Director at the University of Missouri, addressed the International Peace Coalition on the dangers of bioweapons research, in particular in Ukraine, on Dec. 20, 2024. The following is an edited transcript of his presentation, which is video-archived, with many illustrations.

I am going to talk about the assassination that took place this last week of the Russian lieutenant general who was in charge of Russia’s nuclear, biological, and chemical defense forces. I stress the biological part, because he really did a lot of work in that area.

The headline, “Igor Kirillov—The Russian Top General Killed by Ukraine,” appeared Dec. 18 on DW, a German news program, and the article talks about him earning a reputation for spreading misinformation. But the misinformation is coming from the West. And that’s a problem we have all along, of trying to explain all these dangers to the public; and the media do not help.

The U.S. had quite a few biolabs in Ukraine, and they were financed by the U.S. Department of Defense. You can see maps that show you some of the locations. There were Bio Level Security 3 labs, which handle highly contagious organisms. Level 4 is the very-most. There are only a handful of those in the world, but I think, in the United States, we might have 200 or 300 Bio Security Level 3 labs. So they have, maybe as many as 46 in Ukraine. It seems like kind of a lot.

Victoria Nuland admitted that we have these labs. When it became public, and they were trying to get some of the pathogens out of those labs and back to the United States, she was confronted with the fact, and she admitted it in front of a news conference.

There is a document that comes from the U.S. Department of Defense, titled, “Fact Sheet on WMD Threat Reduction Efforts with Ukraine, Russia and Other Former Soviet Union Countries,” dated June 9, 2022. They mention that there are 46 peaceful Ukrainian laboratories. Well, this is because they were always putting these labs forward as doing health research for Ukraine. The U.S. Embassy, even today, they still have a webpage that describes the activities of these bio labs. They came under the idea of “Biological Threat Reduction,” which goes back to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, they had some bio labs in Ukraine, and the U.S. actually took over those labs. And there was a question about, “well, what do we do? Do we let these scientists go, and then maybe they make their way to other hostile nations?” So a lot of them were kept employed in the labs.

Inside the Ukraine Labs

And a lot of the pathogens—you know, the pathogens are supposed to be destroyed, and the U.S. is a signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention. But they weren’t destroyed. And on the page here, there are listed the different laboratories, and in the body of the text they talk about the “Active Research Projects.”

And I call your attention to the first two there: “Risk Assessment of Selected Avian EDPs [emerging and dangerous pathogens] Potentially Carried by Migratory Birds over Ukraine.” Well, this could include avian flu, and the migratory birds in Ukraine usually migrate into Russia. So the Russians would consider this a threat.

And some of the diseases they were studying there, for example, the next one talks about the “Prevalence of Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever virus....” Well, how prevalent is that in Ukraine? Is that something you would expect a health lab in Ukraine to look at? So, no.

They were purchasing long-range drones from Türkiye for aerial spraying. They had a range of about 300 km. Why would they need that?

Something I found is that within 2017, the U.S. Air Force was contracting out, trying to obtain specimens of synovial fluid and RNA samples from Caucasian Russians. They specified that they didn’t want any Ukrainian RNA or tissue samples, only Russians. Well, why would the Air Force be looking for that? I think the Russians would be concerned about that.

The U.S. has bio labs in a lot of places, not just in Ukraine. So this is something—you know, you can say you’re studying a vaccine; in order to create the vaccine you have to have the pathogen to do it. And so, it’s a way to continue research into biological warfare, under the guise of health.

I just wanted to point that out, because the assassination of that general this week, that was a big reason why he was assassinated.