US conducted global biological research for offensive purposes, says ex-US intelligence analyst

MELITOPOL, June 20. /TASS/. The US conducted research in biological labs all over the world, citing "defense purposes" to justify it when in reality it is quite the contrary, former US Marine Corps intelligence analyst Scott Ritter told TASS in an interview.

"Some of the documents suggest that some of the research being done wasn’t for defensive purposes, rather for offensive purposes. And the United States has a record of saying ‘Oh, we are just doing this for defensive purposes.’ But, you know, the mechanism to produce the same biological agent that you say you are defending yourself from is used to produce the biological agent that can be used to attack somebody," he said.

On June 19, Lieutenant General Alexey Rtishchev, chief of the Russian army's Radiation, Chemical, and Biological Defense Troops, said at a briefing by the Defense Ministry on the analysis of documents published by the US national Intelligence service about the activities of biolabs in Ukraine that Ukrainian biolabs were used to study the pathogens of plague, anthrax, tularemia, Marburg fever and Ebola.

Earlier, US National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard released documents regarding the origins of COVID-19 and accused former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci of trying to conceal that the United States was funding coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In her words, Before the COVID pandemic, Fauci, as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, provided millions in US dollars to fund research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is now widely viewed as the source of the unintentional lab leak that sparked the pandemic.