Outgoing US intelligence chief revived the Kremlin's bio-lab story. Washington and scientists have refuted it for years

Director of the US National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard, just days before leaving office, released documents that she says prove "long-standing" funding of more than 120 biolaboratories in 30 countries, including Ukraine. Her office accused the Biden administration and epidemiologist Anthony Fauci of "concealing" the labs' existence from the public. However, even the media that gave the topic coverage found no evidence of biological weapons in the documents — and the story of "American biolabs in Ukraine" has itself been a central motif of Russian propaganda for years, one Moscow used in 2022 to justify its invasion.

What Gabbard released

In a statement dated June 12, ODNI said that after "months of searching intelligence community funds and files," Gabbard declassified evidence of funding for more than 120 laboratories, some of which worked with dangerous pathogens and, in individual cases, with so-called gain-of-function research, which alters the properties of organisms — for pathogens, for example their transmissibility, virulence, or host range. RFE/RL ↗

Included is a set of slides that the office had already declassified on April 23, featuring a map of Ukrainian facilities and detail on the Institute of Experimental and Clinical Veterinary Medicine in Kharkiv, where pathogens such as anthrax, ebola, and African swine fever were said to be stored. Newsweek ↗

"Politicians and so-called health officials like Dr. Fauci lied to the American people about the existence of US-funded biolabs," the office's press department quotes Gabbard as saying. Interfax-Ukraine ↗

Why this is not a revelation

Washington never hid the funding of foreign laboratories. It runs under the Cooperative Threat Reduction program, which since the 1990s has secured pathogens and materials inherited from Soviet weapons programs. In Ukraine, the program has operated since 2005 and modernizes public-health and veterinary laboratories run by Ukrainians — not the US military. The US is, moreover, a signatory to the 1975 Biological Weapons Convention. RFE/RL ↗

Even Newsweek, which gave the report coverage, acknowledges that the slides "do not provide direct evidence that the facilities were developing offensive biological weapons," and confirm only the long-known cooperation with Ukrainian labs. Newsweek ↗

The outlet NOTUS adds that the four released pages merely recycle information that had been publicly available on the website of the US embassy in Kyiv. NOTUS ↗

The Kremlin angle and who is spreading the story

The claim that the US is funding the development of biological weapons in Ukraine has been systematically pushed by Moscow for years. As RFE/RL notes, the US State Department already accused Russia in 2023 of "increasing the volume and intensity of disinformation about biological weapons in a failed attempt to divert attention from the invasion of Ukraine." RFE/RL ↗

The key distinction that Gabbard's framing blurs is this: gain-of-function research is not the same thing as producing a biological weapon, and the existence of laboratories with biological safety measures is not proof of a secret weapons program.

Notably, while the report was heavily amplified by Russian state broadcaster RT and American partisan websites, major global news agencies such as Reuters, AP, and the BBC did not give it a dedicated hard-news story. In the Slovak and Czech media space, so far only the disinformation website Parlamentní listy has picked up the story, under the headline "Utajované biolaboratoře USA odhaleny" ("Secret US biolabs uncovered").

Limits of this perspective

RFE/RL is funded by the US Congress, and NOTUS is a Washington political newsroom — their framing should therefore be read as a Western media perspective, not as a neutral technical assessment of the documents. At the same time, there is a legitimate question in the background: oversight of gain-of-function research is a real and contested policy issue, and some laboratories did indeed work with very dangerous pathogens. This is precisely why Trump signed an executive order in May 2025 to end federal funding of such research worldwide.

However, the gap between stating "we have questions about oversight and transparency" and claiming "there was a secret American bioweapons program" is vast — and the outgoing director's press release blurs that distinction.

What hotinfo is watching

• Whether acting director Bill Pulte — whom Trump has tasked with running ODNI and substantially downsizing it — will continue making similar claims or will tone them down.
• Whether the State Department or the intelligence community will comment on the slides with an independent assessment of their content.
• Moscow's reaction — whether RT and TASS will incorporate Gabbard's statement into their "biolab" campaign as an alleged "US admission."
• Whether the story will spread into the mainstream via Slovak and Czech disinformation websites.