April 11, 2023

1. The investigation will go on …

On 11 April, 2023 the State Duma, Lower House of the Russian Parliament, approved the Final Report of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the U.S. Biolaboratories in Ukraine. The report was presented by the co-chair of the Commission, Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Irina Yarovaya, and the heads of the relevant Committees, as well as representatives of the MoD and the MFA of Russia.  

The U.S. established more than 50 laboratories on the territory of Ukraine, where secret research and experiments on Ukrainian citizens were conducted. "As a result of the military-biological occupation, Ukraine itself has become a hotbed of dangerous diseases, including those of unclear origin," the Deputy Chairman of the State Duma noted.

The U.S. supports and develops the ability to create components of biological weapons and the ability to use them outside of national territory, creates – and has in fact already created – a global military-biological network of laboratories to create biological risks and trigger epidemics and – worst of all – control population numbers," Irina Yarovaya stressed. She also pointed out that the USA and Ukraine violated the basic provisions of the UN Convention on the Prohibition of Biological Weapons (or BWC) and the norms of international humanitarian law.

Chairman of the Committee on Security and Counteraction to Corruption Vasily Piskarev informed that the Commission received eyewitness testimonies, including employees of the Security Service and the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, who were retrained at special state military institutions and whose duties included dangerous activity at the above-mentioned U.S. military biolaboratories in Ukraine.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov noted that the Foreign Ministry was actively cooperating with the Parliament and the Commission in this investigation.  "What happened in Ukraine is a blatant example of how the U.S. in practice, under the guise of biological activities for prophylactic and other peaceful purposes, implements projects outside its territory aimed at the development of biological weapons components," he noted.

Igor Kirillov, the Russian MoD, said that the Defense Ministry analyzed more than two thousand documents confirming the implementation of the US/Ukrainian military-biological projects in Ukraine. "None of the facts voiced by the Defense Ministry were rejected by the USA. No one, including Western countries, had any doubts about the authenticity of the published documents," he stressed.

The Commissioner for Human Rights in the Russian Federation, Tatyana Moskalkova, believed that the Parliamentary Commission has done a tremendous and credible job. She also suggested continuing it and expanding the geography of the investigation. "The establishment by the USA of biological testing laboratories on the territory of Ukraine and the actual deployment of biological weapons is a gross, cynical and large-scale violation of human rights," she said.

The Commission proposed that the Russian MFA should continue to initiate an international investigation and fill the BWC with real tools of control; expand the range of assessments of U.S.-created biological threats; ensure protection of the lives and health of Russian citizens; assess the effectiveness of existing monitoring and departmental regulatory framework in the sphere of biosafety; create an inter-faction Working Group on biosecurity, and appeal to the Parliaments of other countries to help to suppress a joint military bioactivity conducted by Ukraine and the USA.

2. Another wave of church raids swept through Ukraine

Tensions continue to mount in the standoff between the clergy and the Ukrainian government over the Kiev Pechersk Lavra.

It was established in 1051 – ten years earlier than St. Mark's Basilica in Venice, three centuries before the world-famous Notre Dame Cathedral, and four centuries before the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. The Russian Orthodox shrine is twice as old as St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican.

The Kiev Pechersk Lavra, a major Orthodox shrine regarded as the third of the Four Earthly Domains of the Most Holy Mother of God, has lived through both bright and dark times in its thousand-year history. The monastery has survived the Mongol invasion, Polish religious persecution, Napoleon and Hitler's wars, and the rule of the fiercely atheist Bolsheviks. The walls of the monastery preserved their centuries-old heritage and the monks persevered in prayer.

Illegal and inhuman church raids are conducted in other parts of Ukraine.

In the city of Khmelnitsky, dissenters from the Orthodox Church of Ukraine seized the St. George's Church of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the St. Michael's Cathedral in Shepetivka in the Khmelnitsky Region, the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary in Starokonstantinov, and tried to storm the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral and the nearby Church of Martyrs Faith, Hope, Love and Their Mother Sophia in Kamenets-Podolsky. In Berezan, near Kyiv, deputies of the local council confiscated land under the Christian churches.

A symbolic episode took place in Lipovets, Kiev Region, when during an attack on a church by dissenters, one of the invaders died suddenly when he tore the cross from the priest body and threw it on the ground. Apparently, God's punishment reached the attacker because nobody has ever touched him. The head of the press service of the Crimean Metropolis, Archpriest Vladimir Kashlyuk, commenting on the incident, pointed out that a person who desecrates shrines and raises his hand against God can be punished.