White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Wednesday said that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s troops may be preparing to use chemical and biological weapons in Ukraine.
Psaki said in a statement that Russia’s “false claims” that the US conducted WMD research in Ukraine could be a deliberate smokescreen to deploy the dreaded weapons.
Russia has a track record of accusing the West of the very violations that Russia itself is perpetrating. In December, Russia falsely accused the US of deploying contractors with chemical weapons in Ukraine, ”Psaki said.
“This is all an obvious ploy by Russia to try to justify its further premeditated, unprovoked, and unjustified attack on Ukraine.”
Psaki added: “Now that Russia has made these false claims, and China has seemingly endorsed this propaganda, we should all be on the lookout for Russia to possibly use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine, or to create a false flag operation using them. It’s a clear pattern. ”
Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed Wednesday that invading Russian troops found documents that show Ukraine’s health ministry recently ordered the destruction of samples of plague, cholera and anthrax.
The Russian foreign ministry tweeted“We confirm that the special military operation in Ukraine revealed facts of the emergency eradication by the Kiev regime of traces of the military biological program implemented by Kiev with funding from the US @DeptofDefense.”
A spokesman for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said, “Ukraine strictly denies any such allegation.”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Tuesday that “the US, as the party that knows the labs the best, should disclose specific information as soon as possible, including what viruses are stored and what research has been conducted.”
Zhao is notorious for falsely suggesting that the US military released COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. The US intelligence community believes the virus may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but the Chinese government has refused to allow an independent scientific investigation.
Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland on Tuesday told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the US is helping Ukraine close down potentially dangerous “biological research facilities,” which she did not describe in detail.
“Ukraine has biological research facilities which in fact we are quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to gain control of, so we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach, ”Nuland said.
Russian agents infamously use poisons and radioactive material for assassination attempts against dissidents and political rivals. And the Moscow-backed Syrian government used chlorine, mustard and sarin gas repeatedly against rebel-held areas in a long-running civil war.
Russia’s two-week invasion of Ukraine on Wednesday featured the bombardment of a maternity ward of a hospital in the eastern city of Mariupol. Russia allegedly has used thermobaric weapons that burn the lungs of victims, as well as cluster bombs in residential areas of the country’s second-largest city Kharkiv.
Europe’s largest nuclear power facility in Zaporizhzhia, southern Ukraine, caught fire Friday and subsequently was seized by Russian troops. A Ukrainian company said Wednesday that Russian troops disconnected the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site from the local electrical grid.
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