On September 15, the occupiers announced the opening of a so-called “laboratory and scientific complex” in Simferopol in the “Anti-plague station of the Republic of Crimea” under their control. The event was held with the participation of the Crimean gauleiter Sergei Aksyonov, as well as, “via video link”, the Kremlin dictator personally.
It was stated that “the total area of the facility is 9.9 thousand square meters, the staff is 94 people”, and that “the commissioning of the center will increase the volume of research by 5.2 times – from 12.5 thousand to 65 thousand per year”, and that allegedly “in the event of an emergency of an epidemiological nature, the volume of research can be increased threefold”.
Let us recall that we have previously described the aggressor’s criminal experiments with bacteriological weapons at the “Crimean anti-plague station” converted by the occupiers since 2015, and we also reported on these provocations to the OSCE, UN structures and relevant conventional bodies.
The occupiers formally “subordinated” the illegally captured Ukrainian station to “Rospotrebnadzor” as a “federal state institution”, but at the same time, its “director” for the last decade has been Sergei Tikhonov, from a family of Russian military microbiologists who were responsible for the development of bacteriological weapons, the father of the current director, Nikolai Tikhonov, at one time headed the corresponding Volgograd institute “Microbe”.
Earlier, in 2015-2017, the occupiers had already “updated” the “anti-plague station”, and after analyzing the relevant purchases and features of the “repair”, our Association’s experts came to the conclusion that they do not correspond to the stated goal of “fighting Crimean pathogens” and most likely concern criminal experiments with bacterial infections such as tularemia.
It is obvious that the current, already the second “improvement” of the facility, with the creation of a “unique air purification system, thermal disinfection of wastewater and backup life support systems”, “a full-fledged research institute”, allows the aggressor to expand its criminal experiments on the development of bacteriological weapons at the station, which began in 2015.
It was then that the “station” received a “license” from the occupiers for non-medical “activities in the field of using pathogens of infectious diseases of humans and animals”, including “genetically modified organisms”, and now the occupiers have announced that it will operate not only on the occupied peninsula, “but also in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhya regions”.
Earlier, the “station” received from the aggressor at its disposal complexes of “bacteriological research of a mobile complex based on an automobile chassis”, and since 2017 a “laboratory of especially dangerous infections” has been created there. At the same time, from the public actions of these “epidemiologists” since 2022, the occupiers’ propaganda mentions only “monitoring the quality of Dnieper water flowing through the North Crimean Canal”, which has obviously not been available in Crimea for almost two years, as well as some “research of Dnieper water”, apparently “on site”.
At the same time, all the propaganda statements of the occupiers about the “US biolaboratory” voiced a couple of years ago and repeated now by Aksyonov were actually refuted by the “epidemiologists” themselves.
In 2024, the “head of the epidemiology department of the anti-plague station” Lilia Zinich stated that before the occupation, “Crimea did not work directly with the US”, receiving only grants from the European Union, but the station did not send any materials to the EU until 2014.
And the standards of its biosafety before 2014 did not correspond to some “insidious research”, but to the direct task of the station – a banal study of Crimean ticks, rodents and the like for ordinary, and not “newly invented” infections, which is indicated in the “license” of the occupiers of 2015.
But now, in the new buildings, “with special protection” and with at least three times more personnel, the aggressor will clearly not be dealing with the Crimean outbreaks of borreliosis, but with something completely different.
The “Dnieper” exercises of the occupiers pose a particular danger in this context, especially considering the aforementioned “mobile complexes based on a car chassis” which, naturally, can not only take samples, but also do the opposite, with the aim of spreading especially dangerous infections in the lower reaches of the Dnieper.
Among the recently identified purchases of the “station”, one can note its painful attention to hantaviruses, a rare disease carried by rodents, which has never posed a natural threat to the south of Ukraine.
Among other things, it should be noted that such criminal experiments and provocations make the “mobile complexes” of Russian bacteriologists in uniform a legitimate military target.
Let us add that in 2017, the “station” personnel even complained to the occupiers about the “new realities” in a collective appeal, but then, as expected, the “on-site unscheduled inspection” stated that “no violations were found”.
Let us note that the occupiers spent more than 2.3 billion rubles on the “new building” through the company “Specialized developer “Gor-Stroy” of Aslanbek Abdusalamov from Grozny, which had previously appeared in scandals with development in the Siberian city of Muravlenko; the building project was done by the Moscow structure “Construction company “Garant”.
