Russia may have weaponised the Black Death plague spread by Siberian squirrels and a host of other deadly diseases, arms experts have warned. According to the US State Department, Russia has retained a 'highly capable state biological weapons programme'.
Putin's scientists are able to 'produce and deploy agents to support a range of military objectives', it said. Among the diseases the Russian president's researchers have tampered with are typhus, Q fever, smallpox, anthrax, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, brucellosis, and Marburg, according to the US Arms Control Association.
US and WHO call for transparency over scientist's death
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the World Health Organisation have called on Russia to be 'transparent' about the death of 28-year-old scientist Daria Shipilova after she dropped and smashed a test tube containing plague bacteria in a research lab. She is said to have been working with Yersinia pestis – the bacterium behind plague and the medieval Black Death.
Daria developed symptoms on an expedition in Siberia to study plague-infested squirrels. Up to 200 people have been quarantined, and social media reports suggesting a second victim had died were hastily removed. Russia's lack of candour about the incident has sparked fears among politicians and scientists that the accident may have happened during biowarfare research.
Secrecy around Soviet-era facilities
According to a 2024 State Department report, Russia has secretly retained 'biological facilities' developed by the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. The country 'continues its ongoing secrecy efforts including legislation criminalising any disclosure of information about the former Soviet program'.
'Key military biological facilities associated with the Soviet offensive programme remain inaccessible and not transparent.' While the plague is now treatable with antibiotics and does not spread as fast as diseases like Covid or measles, western scientists fear the bacteria could have been tampered with to kill.
Ashish Jha, a US-based biosecurity expert who led America's Covid response, said the lab where Daria worked was 'officially a civilian institute'. 'But Russia is well known to have an active military biological weapons programme,' he added. 'Our intelligence agencies have publicly stated that their programme has been expanding substantially in recent years.'
History of chemical attacks
Russia's Cold War bioweapons programme was only exposed when some of its scientists defected to the West in the late 1980s. Vladimir Pasechnik, a scientist who came to the UK in 1989, described working on an aerosolised strain of plague and putting it on a cruise missile at a laboratory near Leningrad - now St Petersburg. As the Soviet Union collapsed in the early '90s, then-Russian president Boris Yeltsin pledged it would dismantle its programme.
But that appears to have been an empty promise. Putin is a signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention, but to what extent he abides by it is unclear. US officials believe Russia retains an 'extensive offensive' germ warfare capability. It has a track record of deploying deadly chemical agents against its enemies.
In 2006 Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy who defected to the UK, was poisoned with radioactive polonium 210 after meeting two Russians at the Ritz hotel. He died an agonising death three weeks later. Then in 2018 two Russian spies travelled to Salisbury, Wilts, and tried to assassinate ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia with the nerve agent Novichok. The Skripals survived, but Dawn Sturgess later died after her partner found a discarded perfume bottle used to carry the deadly agent and gave it to her as a gift. The European Union accused the Russian government of using the same chemical to poison dissident Alexei Navalny in Siberia in 2020.
Psychological threat of germ warfare
Hamish de Bretton Gordon, former commanding officer of the UK's Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment, said the threat of germ warfare extends beyond the agent itself. 'They have such a propensity to create fear and panic. The psychological aspect is almost more powerful than the physical one,' he said.
'It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that they have an active biological weapons program. Because regulation is so poor, particularly in Russia, some of the scientists and some of these laboratories can possibly be used for really malign and malicious and dangerous activities. We now know there is a potential for some sort of plague-type pathogen to be travelling around.'
