U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified a package of documents on biological laboratories that had been funded for decades by American taxpayers. According to her, the documents concern more than 120 facilities in over 30 countries, with more than a third of them located in Ukraine.
“Many of these U.S. government-funded biolabs were conducting research on dangerous and highly infectious pathogens, in some cases including gain-of-function research on pathogens, with virtually no control or oversight,” the agency said in a statement.
Gabbard accused the previous administration of concealing information. According to her, politicians and “so-called health professionals,” including Dr. Anthony Fauci, as well as structures within the Biden administration’s national-security team, “lied to the American people about the existence” of these laboratories and threatened those who tried to reveal the truth. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, she added, will continue to determine where such facilities are located, what pathogens they contain, and seek to end dangerous gain-of-function research.
The documents mention centers in Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Lviv, Vinnytsia and Chernihiv, as well as the Central Reference Laboratory of the Mechnikov Ukrainian Anti-Plague Institute in Odesa, laboratories in Kherson and Zakarpattia, and the Institute of Veterinary Medicine of Ukraine’s National Academy of Agrarian Sciences. Among the pathogens these institutions are alleged to have worked with are the causative agents of anthrax, tularemia, swine flu, Marburg fever, Ebola and plague.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence noted that U.S. intelligence had previously warned of risks to facilities in Ukraine because of possible damage, seizure or destruction amid the war. The initiative was supported by Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth. Gabbard herself is leaving the post of director of national intelligence on June 30, 2026.
The issue of U.S.-funded laboratories in Ukraine became the subject of an information campaign as early as 2022, when Moscow claimed that Washington was running military-biological programs on Ukrainian territory. The United States and Ukraine rejected those accusations. The facilities in question are Ukrainian state institutions that received support under the U.S. Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, also known as Nunn–Lugar, which has operated since the 1990s and is aimed at securing pathogen stocks inherited from the Soviet Union. A 2022 Pentagon fact sheet said Ukraine had no biological-weapons program and that both countries complied with the Biological Weapons Convention. International fact-checkers at the time assessed the “bioweapons” claim as false.