The United States has funded biological research facilities in Ukraine since 2005, and the Pentagon has never hidden it. That fact sits at the center of a controversy ignited by outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who released what she called “never before seen intelligence” on the program June 12 — a disclosure that independent analysts say repackages long-public records while amplifying a Russian disinformation narrative that dates to the first weeks of the 2022 invasion.
What the documents do not show, and what the release’s own sourcing undermines, is that any of this was deliberately concealed from the American public, or that the labs served any purpose beyond what the Pentagon has said publicly for more than two decades.
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The facilities belong to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Biological Threat Reduction Program, a post-Soviet threat reduction initiative, known as the Nunn-Lugar program, established in 1991 and active in Ukraine since 2005. Its mandate covers disease surveillance, pathogen detection and biosafety upgrades at former Soviet research facilities. DoD has invested roughly $200 million in Ukraine under the program, funding 46 laboratories, health facilities and diagnostic sites. The Ukrainian government owns and operates all of them. The US provides funding and expertise but no operational control.
None of that was hidden. DoD published a detailed fact sheet on the program in March 2022, after Russian officials cited the labs in the early weeks of their full-scale invasion to claim Ukraine was hosting a US-funded bioweapons program — a claim international fact-checkers and independent researchers assessed as disinformation at the time.
Gabbard described the June 12 disclosure as “never before seen intelligence” and said it exposed what “entities within the Biden administration’s national security team” had deliberately withheld from the public. ODNI characterized the underlying material differently. In a follow-up thread on X June 14, the office described the data in Slide 4 of the presentation as compiled from open-source information corroborated with US government sources including US Embassy in Ukraine data — a characterization that sits awkwardly alongside the claim of newly surfaced intelligence.
That slide reproduces a project status table from a Black & Veatch Special Projects Corp. document labeled “BTRP TO 04 Ukraine Phase IIb — Country Science Plan, CDRL A017, Rev. 06, June 2019.” Black & Veatch received a Biological Threat Reduction Integrating Contract from DTRA in 2008 to serve as lead contractor for the Ukraine program. The 2019 planning document has been publicly accessible through the Internet Archive.
There was also the issue of a map that ODNI said its office created. It contains multiple glaring, easily verifiable errors, including identifying a village of the same name in the Mykolaiv region as Kyiv rather than the capital itself, labelling Zakarpattia — a region, not a city — as a biolab site, and recording one location as “Cherniv” instead of Chernivtsi. The errors are consistent with output from AI image generation tools rather than cartographic production by intelligence community resources.
Christopher Miller, the Financial Times‘ Ukraine correspondent, said Gabbard had disingenuously twisted facts and delivered a gift to the Kremlin in her final weeks in office. Christo Grozev, lead investigator at The Insider, argued the release functioned as a Kremlin information operation regardless of intent — lending official US imprimatur to a narrative Russian officials introduced in March 2022 and that has circulated in pro-Russia media ever since. Russian state media covered the release approvingly.
Gabbard announced her resignation May 22, citing her husband Abraham Williams’ diagnosis with an extremely rare form of bone cancer. She leaves her post on June 30.
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