Russia has been urged to disclose details of its biological weapons programme following the death of a laboratory technician from an unknown illness. Marshall Billingslea, former US Special Presidential Envoy for Arms Control, said Moscow must "come clean" about its activities at the Irkutsk Research Anti-Plague Institute.
Technician's death raises questions
Daria Shipilova, 28, died on October 2 at the Irkutsk Research Anti-Plague Institute. According to health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor, she died from "pneumonia of unknown aetiology". Unconfirmed reports suggest she fell ill after accidentally breaking a test tube containing a deadly pathogen.
Billingslea, who worked in the 1990s as a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer, interviewed Ken Alibek, former second-in-command of Biopreparat, the Soviet Union's biological warfare programme. Alibek exposed a "mammoth" infrastructure, naming the Irkutsk institute as a site that performed classified biological warfare work.
Soviet-era engineering concerns
In the 1980s, Soviet scientists allegedly engineered plague bacteria (Yersinia pestis) to make it resistant to modern antibiotics. "They took the plague bacteria and they merged it with a non-dangerous bacteria," Billingslea told Fox News Digital. "The goal was to render the plague bacteria far more resistant to antibiotics."
Billingslea warned an engineered leak could be far worse than standard plague. He confirmed US officials rely on "multiple other sources of information" proving Russia inherited the network, Fox News reported. "I think one of the most important things that Ken shed light on was the sheer scale of the Soviet program, which then Russia inherited," Billingslea said. "Just mammoth."
Calls for transparency
"It's not acceptable in this day and age for the Russians to have a biological warfare program. They need to cut it out, and they need to tell us," Billingslea said. "They need to come clean about what they're doing at this lab."
A State Department report assessed Soviet bioweapons were "absorbed, not dismantled" by Russia and have "continued and evolved". A State Department official confirmed: "Russia maintains an offensive biological weapons program and is in violation of its obligations under the BWC."
US President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the WHO are pressing Moscow for transparent diagnostic data, while surrounding nations tighten border controls. "At the December meeting, Russia is going to get grilled," Billingslea said. "And they should."
State of emergency declared
On October 9, Russia declared a "state of emergency" in Siberia amid fears over a surging foot-and-mouth outbreak. The move follows a medical alert earlier this week over two suspected cases of the deadly Black Death plague in the Irkutsk region, though Vladimir Putin's health officials now insist no infectious diseases have been detected.
