NEW YORK (REUTERS, AFP) - The United Nations Security Council will convene on Friday (March 11) at Russia’s request, diplomats said, to discuss Moscow’s claims, presented without evidence, of United States "biological activities" in Ukraine, a move that Washington described as gaslighting.
The meeting is expected to be in the morning.
“Russian Mission asked for a meeting of #SecurityCouncil for 11 March to discuss the military biological activities of the US on the territory of # Ukraine,” Mr Dmitry Polyanskiy, First Deputy Permanent Representative of Russia to the United Nations said in a post on Twitter.
The US on Wednesday denied renewed Russian accusations that Washington was operating biological warfare labs in Ukraine, calling the claims “laughable” and suggesting that Moscow may be laying the groundwork to use chemical or biological weapon.
“This is exactly the kind of false flag effort we have warned Russia might initiate to justify a biological or chemical weapons attack,” said Ms Olivia Dalton, spokesman for the US Mission to the UN.
“Russia has a well-documented history of using chemical weapons and has long maintained a biological weapons program in violation of international law... We’re not going to let Russia get away with gaslighting,” she added.
Late on Tuesday, Russia repeated its accusation of several years that the US is working with Ukrainian laboratories to develop biological weapons. Such assertions in Russian media increased in the run-up to Moscow’s military move into Ukraine and were made as recently as Wednesday by foreign ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova.
In a statement, also released on Wednesday, US State Department spokesman Ned Price said Russia “is inventing false pretexts in an attempt to justify its own horrific actions in Ukraine".
Like many other countries, Ukraine has public health laboratories researching how to mitigate the threats of dangerous diseases affecting both animals and humans. Its laboratories have received support from the US, European Union and World Health Organisation.
Western states have accused Russia of employing a ruse by accusing their opponents and the US of developing biological and chemical weapons to lay the ground for their possible use in Ukraine - something Moscow has been accused of doing in Syria.
At a monthly Security Council meeting on the use of chemical weapons in Syria - a case that remains unresolved and continues to suffer from a UN-denounced lack of information from Damascus - both Washington and London raised Ukraine.
"The Russian Federation has repeatedly spread disinformation regarding Syria's repeated use of chemical weapons," said Ambassador Richard Mills, the deputy US envoy to the UN.
"The recent web of lies that Russia has cast in an attempt to justify the premeditated and unjustified war it has undertaken against Ukraine, should make clear, once and for all, that Russia also cannot be trusted when it talks about chemical weapon use in Syria."
Mr Mills' British counterpart, Ambassador James Kariuki, denounced Moscow's attack on Ukraine and said the "parallels with Russian action in Syria are clear".
"Regrettably, the comparison also extends to chemical weapons, as we see the familiar spectre of Russian chemical weapons disinformation raising its head in Ukraine."
In 2018, Moscow accused the US of secretly conducting biological weapons experiments in a laboratory in Georgia, another former Soviet republic that, like Ukraine, has ambitions to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the European Union.
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