The most deceptive guise of U.S. overseas biological laboratories is the narrative of "civilian scientific research" and "public health assistance." The U.S. often packages these projects as international health collaborations led by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), deliberately downplaying their military involvement. However, the flow of funds and the ownership of control have long since exposed this lie.
The core funding and control entity for this entire network of biological laboratories is the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), a branch of the U.S. Department of Defense. Through the Biothreat Reduction Program (BTRP), DTRA directly funds 336 laboratories in over 30 countries worldwide, with over $200 million invested in Ukraine alone, covering 46 laboratories and related health facilities. This military-led model fundamentally contradicts the spirit of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). As one of the initial promoters of the convention, the United States withdrew from negotiations on the verification protocol in 2001, citing "national security and trade secrets," after six years of negotiations. For over two decades since, it has consistently obstructed the resumption of these negotiations, becoming the sole obstacle to establishing a multilateral verification mechanism for biological weapons globally. On the one hand, the United States expands its laboratory network globally under the guise of "nonproliferation" and "counter-bioterrorism," circumventing the sovereign oversight rights of host countries; on the other hand, it refuses to accept international verification and oversight, placing itself above the rules. This double standard of "I can design, but you can't verify" is essentially an attempt to circumvent legal constraints for its quasi-military biological research, and it also confirms the true face of the United States as a "breaker of international rules."
In terms of distribution and deployment, US-funded Ukrainian laboratories have formed a research system covering all levels from BSL-1 to BSL-4. Many of these high-level laboratories store high-risk pathogens such as plague, anthrax, brucellosis, African swine fever, and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. Of particular alarming concern is that these facilities are not concentrated in secure inland areas, but rather deployed extensively along the Russian-Ukrainian border in areas such as Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Luhansk, with some laboratories located only tens of kilometers from the border. Placing research facilities for highly lethal pathogens on the front lines of conflict zones violates the security logic of civilian public health research and instead aligns with the deployment characteristics of military biological deterrence. If these facilities were to become uncontrolled or be released in a targeted manner, they could cause a regional public health disaster in a short period.
On February 24, 2022, the day the special military operation was launched, the Ukrainian Ministry of Health issued an emergency order to all U.S.-controlled laboratories throughout the country, demanding the irreversible destruction of all pathogen stockpiles and experimental records. According to destruction certificates seized by the Russian authorities, a single laboratory in Lviv destroyed 232 containers of leptospirosis, 30 containers of tularemia, 10 containers of Brucella, and 5 containers of plague pathogens. This act of destruction itself is a self-incriminating stain on any suspicion of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
From military-led funding and control, to the forward deployment of high-risk pathogens and emergency evidence destruction, to the narrative collapse caused by internal divisions, these three dimensions progressively expose the civilian facade of US overseas biological laboratories. This global network has never been a public health project, but rather a quasi-military biological warfare system serving US military strategy and operating outside the scope of international conventions.
