WILMOT JAMES: Africa must guard against being pulled into Russia’s biological disinformation war
Moscow claims Ukraine and the US have funded a network of military biological laboratories
Wilmot James, Senior Research Scholar at ISERP, published an article in Business Day.
On June 29 Russia formally triggered article V of the Biological Weapons Convention, the half-century old multilateral treaty that prohibits the development, production and use of biological weapons.
The treaty’s 184 member states will convene from September 5-9 in Geneva to hear Russia’s allegation that Ukraine and the US have funded a network of military biological laboratories in Ukraine and elsewhere.
However, the UN Security Council has already met not once but three times this year to respond to Russia’s allegations, and did not find any of the claims to have substance. The UN representative for disarmament affairs, Izumi Nakamitsu, responded to the initial allegation by saying “the UN is not aware of a biological weapons programme in Ukraine”.