Hey, you're listening to Episode 34 of Unlimited Hangout. I'm your host, Whitney Webb.

For weeks now, Ukraine has dominated the headlines in both mainstream and independent media.

Following on the heels of COVID-19, the Ukraine conflict, oddly enough, has a surprising parallel with the pandemic,

the specter of lab leaks, gain of function research, and potentially bioterror.

In late February, soon after the conflict between Ukraine and Russia erupted, a theory emerged that many of the Russian

missile strikes throughout the Ukraine had coincided with the locations of U.S.-funded

biolabs in the country. While I personally did not look into or confirm whether that

alleged coincidence was true,

the Bulgarian journalist Dyliana Gaetanyewa took to Twitter to claim that the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine

was subsequently deleting documentation about Pentagon-funded biolabs present in the country.

Initially derided as a nutty conspiracy dreamt up by the Kremlin and the organs of Russian propaganda,

the godmother of the 2014 U.S. Baku in Ukraine and current Undersecretary of State for Political

Affairs, Victoria Newland, testified before the U.S. Senate on March 8th and confirmed that

the U.S. has, quote, biological research facilities throughout Ukraine.

Many of those who had previously dismissed their existence as having been just a kooky conspiracy theory, then shifted gears, arguing now that these biological research facilities

were benign and unconnected to any potential bioweapons research.

However, old media reports in U.S. government documents on earthed by one of my

guests today shows that at least one of the Pentagon-funded biolab in Ukraine, located in the coastal

city of Odessa, was a biosafety-level-3 lab researching, quote, dangerous pathogens used by bioterrorists,

in quote, and that more generally, the U.S. government feels that monitoring

the so-called biological research facilities in Ukraine and other countries is essentially

pointless because bioweapons research is easily, quote, disguised within legitimate activities.

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