Newly Declassified Documents From the ODNI Reveals U.S.-Funded Biolabs…

Newly declassified intelligence documents released this month by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard have confirmed that United States-funded laboratories in Ukraine worked with and stored dangerous pathogens, including anthrax and plague, along with Ebola, tuberculosis, and several other high-consequence diseases.

The release represents the most detailed official US government acknowledgment to date of a program that has been the subject of fierce dispute since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

According to the documents, the United States built and supported more than 40 laboratories across Ukraine. At least a dozen of those facilities were involved in research using human subjects, and several were engaged in what is known as gain of function research, a scientific practice in which pathogens are deliberately modified to increase their transmissibility or virulence in order to study how they might behave and spread among humans.

Gain-of-function research has been a controversial practice for years, drawing criticism even from scientists who otherwise support biodefense research, because of the inherent risk that a modified pathogen could escape containment.

The documents identify specific facilities and the funding amounts attached to them. The Central Reference Laboratory at the Ukrainian Research Anti-Plague Institute in Odesa reportedly received more than 3.4 million dollars in US funding. The Institute of Veterinary Medicine under Ukraine’s National Academy of Agrarian Sciences received more than 2.1 million dollars.

Additional funding reportedly went to facilities in Kherson and Zakarpattia, with the four most heavily funded sites alone costing American taxpayers in excess of 9 million dollars combined.

This network of laboratories did not spring up under the current administration or even under the Biden administration. Much of the underlying program traces back nearly two decades to the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, which began in the 1990s with the goal of securing and dismantling former Soviet weapons stockpiles after the collapse of the USSR.

Over time the program’s mission expanded to include public health and biosafety work, with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency investing roughly 200 million dollars in Ukraine since 2005 to upgrade aging Soviet-era public health and veterinary laboratories, many of which already held stockpiles of dangerous pathogens left over from Soviet biological research programs.

Then Senator Barack Obama played a documented role in this early history. A report from 2010, recirculated as part of the recent disclosures, details how Obama, then an Illinois senator, helped negotiate the construction of a biosafety level 3 laboratory in Odesa alongside Indiana Senator Dick Lugar in 2005, as part of broader cooperative efforts between American and Ukrainian researchers focused on studying and preventing the spread of avian flu.

Footage from that era reportedly shows then Director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency Andrew Weber showing anthrax samples inside a Ukrainian laboratory to Senator Obama during one of his earliest overseas diplomatic trips.

The issue exploded into a major geopolitical controversy in March 2022, just after Russia’s invasion began. Russian state media outlet RIA Novosti released what it claimed were captured Ukrainian documents showing the country had been working on biological weapons near the Russian border, and the Russian Defense Ministry accused Kyiv of ordering the emergency destruction of dangerous pathogens, including plague, anthrax, tularemia, and cholera, at US-funded sites in an effort to hide evidence before Russian forces could seize it.

At the time, the Biden administration flatly denied the existence of any US bioweapons program in Ukraine. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki dismissed the Russian claims as “previously invented” disinformation.

Then Representative Tulsi Gabbard, breaking with her own party, warned publicly that there were more than 25 US-funded biolabs in Ukraine that, if breached during the fighting, could release dangerous pathogens, and she called for a ceasefire around the facilities until the materials inside could be secured. Senator Mitt Romney attacked Gabbard directly, accusing her of “parroting false Russian propaganda” and warning that her “treasonous lies may well cost lives.”

That dispute simmered for years largely unresolved in the public record, with mainstream fact checking organizations generally siding with the Biden administration’s framing that the labs were legitimate public health and biodefense facilities rather than secret weapons sites, while critics, including Gabbard, maintained that the administration was being less than fully transparent about the scope, funding, and oversight of the network.

The Pentagon did eventually acknowledge in June 2022 that there were 46 US military-funded biolabs operating in Ukraine, a public admission that came only after months of official denial.

The newly released documents do not show evidence of a deliberate, named bioweapons program designed to create offensive weapons, and earlier claims circulated by Russian state media that anthrax and plague were explicitly listed as weapons targets in captured documents were not borne out upon further review of the material now available.

What the declassified material does confirm is that the laboratories, operating under the banner of biodefense, threat reduction, and public health research, handled, stored, and in some cases researched some of the most dangerous pathogens known to science, including anthrax and plague, often inside facilities with documented biosafety shortcomings.

One veterinary laboratory in Kharkiv was specifically flagged in prior government assessments for housing dangerous pathogens while exhibiting biosafety deficiencies, including problems with the handling of Brucella, a bacteria that causes brucellosis. Independent researchers tracking high containment laboratories globally have separately estimated that there are more than 3,600 such facilities worldwide, the large majority of which do not publicly disclose their precise locations or the specific pathogens they study, and that more than 300 confirmed laboratory leak incidents have occurred globally since 2001.

Gabbard’s broader disclosure extended well beyond Ukraine. She announced that her office was releasing evidence connected to more than 120 biolabs across over 30 countries that have received US government funding for work involving especially dangerous pathogens, describing the effort as part of a long overdue push for transparency around a global biosafety and biodefense funding network that has operated for years with limited public scrutiny or oversight from Congress.

The disclosure also touched on the politically sensitive subject of the origins of COVID-19. Critics of the federal government’s pandemic response have long pointed to United States backed research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, where gain of function style research on coronaviruses was conducted with partial American funding routed through intermediary organizations, as a parallel example of US supported research abroad involving dangerous pathogens with limited public transparency about the scope of the work or its oversight. Commentators following the new Ukraine disclosures argued that it is implausible the United States intended to fund actual biowarfare research, but said funding gain of function work at a facility where Chinese military linked biodefense research was also taking place was, in their words, reckless regardless of the underlying intent.

The political reaction to the new disclosures has split along familiar lines, though with an unusual twist given Gabbard’s own history on the issue. Supporters of the disclosure argue it vindicates concerns Gabbard raised years ago, concerns that were dismissed at the time as conspiracy theory or Russian propaganda by officials in both the Biden administration and members of her own party. They argue the episode is a case study in how legitimate questions about government transparency, especially involving dangerous pathogens and taxpayer funding, were suppressed under the broader label of disinformation rather than being honestly examined and explained to the public.

Defenders of the original program, including former Biden administration officials who have not commented extensively since the release, would likely argue that distinguishing between defensive biosafety and security work and offensive bioweapons development is a meaningful distinction, not a technicality, and that securing former Soviet pathogen stockpiles inside aging, poorly maintained facilities served a legitimate public health and nonproliferation purpose rather than representing a hidden weapons program. That argument has historically been the core of the US government’s defense of the broader Cooperative Threat Reduction program since its inception in the 1990s.

What is not in dispute, based on the documents now made public, is that anthrax and plague were in fact present, studied, and in some cases stored at US funded Ukrainian facilities, a fact that earlier official statements from the Biden administration either did not acknowledge directly or characterized in far more general and reassuring terms than the newly released material supports. The gap between those earlier public assurances and the now declassified record is likely to remain a significant point of political contention for the foreseeable future.

For Gabbard personally, the disclosure represents a striking turn in a controversy that once threatened to define her as a fringe figure within her own party. Having been publicly accused of spreading propaganda for raising early concerns, she now finds herself in a position to release official intelligence community documents that at minimum confirm the underlying factual premise she was attacked over, even if the broader characterization of a deliberate offensive bioweapons program remains unproven by the material released so far.

Congressional oversight of biodefense funding, gain of function research, and the network of high containment laboratories funded by the United States both domestically and abroad is likely to receive renewed attention in the wake of this disclosure. Lawmakers on relevant committees have not yet announced formal hearings specifically tied to the new Ukraine documents, though previous gain of function controversies tied to the origins of COVID-19 have already prompted years of ongoing congressional scrutiny of similar funding arrangements.

The State Department and Pentagon have not issued detailed new statements responding to the specifics of Gabbard’s release beyond acknowledging, as they have in the past, that the United States has long supported biosafety and threat reduction work in Ukraine through publicly available programs, some details of which remain posted on the US Embassy in Ukraine’s own website describing the broader biological threat reduction partnership between the two countries.

As with many stories involving classified or formerly classified material, the full picture is likely to continue developing as more documents are reviewed, additional countries’ programs come under scrutiny, and lawmakers weigh whether new oversight mechanisms are needed for a global network of laboratories that, by Gabbard’s own account, has operated for years with far less public transparency than the scale of taxpayer funding and the danger of the pathogens involved would seem to warrant.