Putin said the CIS is threatened by “radicalism and extremism”, in addition to organised crime, terrorism and drug trafficking, and there are risks to “economic, information, technological and biological security”.
“Biological security”? Really?
Putin, you just got caught running a chemical weapons program with that Novichok fiasco after Russia had committed via treaty not to run offensive chemical weapons programs.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was running an offensive biological weapons program after having committed not to via treaty.
Despite being a party and depositary to the BWC, the Soviet Union has operated the world’s largest, longest, and most sophisticated biological weapons program, which goes back to the 1920s under the Red Army.[91][92] Around the time when the BWC negotiations were finalized, and the treaty was signed in the early 1970s, the Soviet Union significantly expanded its covert biological weapons program under the oversight of the “civilian” institution Biopreparat within the Soviet Ministry of Health.[93] The Soviet program employed up to 65,000 people in several hundred facilities[91] and successfully weaponized several pathogens, such as those responsible for smallpox, tularemia, bubonic plague, influenza, anthrax, glanders, and Marburg fever.[13]
The Soviet Union first drew much suspicion of violating its obligations under the BWC after an unusual anthrax outbreak in 1979 in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk (formerly, and now again, Yekaterinburg) resulted in the deaths of approximately 65 to 100 people.[94][95] The Soviet authorities blamed the outbreak on the consumption of contaminated meat and for years denied any connection between the incident and biological weapons research.[95][96] However, investigations concluded that the outbreak was caused by an accident at a nearby military microbiology facility, resulting in the escape of an aerosol of anthrax pathogen.[95][96][97] Supporting this finding, Russian President Boris Yeltsin later admitted that “our military developments were the cause”.[98][99]
Similarly, as of 2021, the U.S. Department of State “assesses that the Russian Federation (Russia) maintains an offensive [biological weapons] program and is in violation of its obligation under Articles I and II of the BWC. The issue of compliance by Russia with the BWC has been of concern for many years”.[101]
I’d put Russia as a top-five-in-the-world most-likely candidate for having a clandestine offensive biological weapons program right now.