(Tony Sifert, Headline USA) During testimony (transcript) this week before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Victoria Nuland, under secretary of state for political affairs, confirmed that there are bioweapon facilities in the Ukraine, and that the United States is concerned that such facilities may fall into Russian hands, reported journalist Glenn Greenwald.
Nuland, husband to neoconservative scholar Robert Kagan and former foreign policy advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, was responding to Sen. Marco Rubio‘s, R-Fla., question about whether the Ukraine has “chemical or biological weapons.”
“Ukraine has biological research facilities which we are now quite concerned Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of,” Nuland told Rubio.
Nuland also confided that the State Department is “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.”
Worried that Nuland’s admission could provide evidence of U.S. complicity in bioweapon attacks in the Ukraine, Rubio quickly asked Nuland to blame the Russians for any potential attacks.
“If there is a biological or chemical weapon incident or attack inside Ukraine, is there any doubt in your mind that 100% it would be the Russians behind it?” Rubio asked.
“There is no doubt in my mind, Senator,” the grateful Nuland responded. “And it is classic Russian technique to blame on the other guy what they’re planning to do themselves.”
Really good cleanup by Rubio: interrupting Nuland’s bizarre confession, which he did not expect, and immediately directing her to say that if there’s a biological attack, it must be Russia.
Why is she so concerned Russia would seize such a benign “biological research facility”?
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 8, 2022
In a statement issued Tuesday, a Russian spokeswoman claimed that the Russian military had discovered in the Ukraine “traces of [a] military biological program, carried out by Kiev with funding from the US Department of Defense.”
“Documents were obtained from employees of Ukrainian biological laboratories about emergency disposal of particularly dangerous pathogens of plague, anthrax, tularemia, cholera and other deadly diseases, carried out on February 24,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
Fact-checkers in the corporate media in the United States were quick to dismiss such claims — which first surfaced in mid-February — as “Russian propaganda,” with Snopes saying the “rumors” were part of “a long-running disinformation campaign by the Kremlin and its supporters.”
Victoria Nuland has been deeply involved with events in the Ukraine since at least 2014, according to Greenwald, when the United States was allegedly involved in regime change in Russia’s neighbor.
As Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Nuland was seen handing out cookies to demonstrators during the Obama-backed coup in Ukraine in 2013. https://t.co/QXx7jP80Yl
— Pedro L. Gonzalez (@emeriticus) March 9, 2022
“It was Nuland herself, while working for Hillary Clinton and John Kerry‘s State Department under President Obama, who was heavily involved in what some call the 2014 revolution and others call the ‘coup’ that resulted in a change of government in Ukraine from a Moscow-friendly regime to one far more favorable to the EU and the West,” Greenwald wrote.
