PYONGYANG (Dispatches) – North Korea said on Sunday the United States is manufacturing biological weapons in Ukraine, echoing a Russian claim.
Pyongyang in February said U.S. policy was the “root cause of the Ukraine crisis”, and this month recognized the independence of Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republics (LPR), Ukraine’s two eastern breakaway regions, which caused the two countries to cut diplomatic ties.
Washington “set up many biological labs in tens of countries and regions, including Ukraine, in disregard of the international treaties”, the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Sunday, citing what it said had been detected by Russia.
“According to the discovered documents, photos and evidence, the U.S. has set up 46 secret biological labs in Ukraine over the past twenty years, for research into an epidemic disease capable of striking individual countries and the agricultural field in the whole region with an investment of more than two hundred million dollars,” KCNA added.
In March, not long after Russia’s military operation on Ukraine began, Moscow repeated its assertions that the United States is working with Ukrainian laboratories to develop biological weapons.
KCNA also said that it has been known that the distribution chart on biological labs, established by the U.S. in different parts of the world, are coincided with the chart on areas of diseases and viruses broke out in the world in recent years.
“It is by no means fortuitous that assertions are made that the U.S. is behind the malignant epidemic crisis confusing the international community,” it added. “The US is a vicious sponsor of biological terrorism throwing mankind into destruction.”
The U.S. has a long, infamous history of using and developing Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) including biological and chemical weapons in other countries, such as what it did to North Korean and Vietnamese soldiers and civilians during the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
Washington has denied that it owns or operates any such biolabs in the country, while Kiev insisted that the facilities were only engaged in civilian research.