Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified a trove of intelligence documents Friday revealing two dozen biological laboratories in Ukraine, including facilities storing pathogens from the old Soviet bioweapons program, in a move that directly contradicts years of official denials and accusations leveled at anyone who raised the subject.
The declassified materials, released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, show that a lab in Odessa, a city of more than one million people, has stored biological agents from the defunct Soviet biological weapons program. Viruses and bacteria in storage include anthrax, tularemia, tuberculosis, Swine Fever, MERS, SARS, Marburg, Ebola, Lassa, the Plague, and Rickettsia. The Odessa lab and four others in Ukraine are biosafety level three facilities, the second-highest level of containment.
Gabbard is leaving her post on June 19 to care for her husband following his cancer diagnosis, which she announced May 22. She has spent her final days in office pushing to declassify documents she says serve the public interest. The Daily Caller News Foundation reported the details of the newly released intelligence Friday afternoon.
The declassified slides paint a picture that Washington spent years trying to keep blurry. Forty labs in Ukraine received funding from the Pentagon's Biological Threat Reduction Program as of the 2010s. The United States built new labs in the country. Some of those labs conduct gain-of-function research. Many hold permits for handling "especially dangerous pathogens." One project involved highly pathogenic avian influenza, a virus with a 50 percent fatality rate.
The intelligence community's own assessment of the Institute of Experimental and Clinical Veterinary Medicine in Kharkiv, a city on the Russian border, is blunt. The declassified document states:
"The Institute of Experimental and Clinical Veterinary Medicine (IECVM) in Kharkiv probably houses at least some dangerous pathogens and almost certainly remains vulnerable to long-standing Russian information operations, seizure or damage."
That same Kharkiv lab reported biosafety problems in 2019 in rooms handling Brucella bacteria. Russian propaganda had accused the U.S. of generating bioweapons in the lab's basement. The intelligence community internally acknowledged that the Kharkiv lab does, in fact, have a basement.
The intelligence community also acknowledged that U.S. collaborations on infectious diseases in Ukraine posed a risk to America's reputation, a candid admission that never reached the public until now.
In March 2022, roughly one month after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Gabbard raised concerns about the security of U.S.-linked biolabs in Ukraine and called for a ceasefire. The response from Washington's establishment was swift and personal. Senator Mitt Romney posted on X on March 13, 2022:
"Tulsi Gabbard is parroting false Russian propaganda. Her treasonous lies may well cost lives."
That word, "treasonous", came from a sitting United States senator, directed at a former congresswoman and combat veteran, for raising questions that the intelligence community's own classified documents apparently supported. The declassified materials now show that the labs existed, that they were funded by the United States, that they stored dangerous pathogens, and that some conducted gain-of-function research. Whatever one thinks of Gabbard's broader foreign policy views, the factual core of her 2022 warning has been borne out by the government's own files.
The pattern of denial extended beyond Romney. Gabbard's statement Friday named names. She said politicians, "so-called health professionals like Dr. Fauci," and entities within the Biden administration's national security team "lied to the American people about the existence of U.S.-funded and supported biolabs, and threatened those who attempted to expose the truth."
Even State Department official Victoria Nuland, during that same period, had offered a partial acknowledgment that cut against the "Russian propaganda" dismissals. Nuland told lawmakers:
"Ukraine has biological research facilities which in fact we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of. So we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach."
That statement confirmed the existence of biological research facilities in Ukraine and acknowledged the danger of their contents falling into hostile hands, the very concern Gabbard had voiced. Yet the political class treated anyone who connected those dots as a Kremlin asset. The gap between what officials said publicly and what the intelligence community documented internally is now a matter of declassified record.
The Pentagon's Biological Threat Reduction Program was designed, in principle, to decommission the Soviet biological weapons program by securing pathogens and redirecting former bioweapons scientists toward civilian infectious-disease research. President Richard Nixon signed the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972, and the BTRP was part of the post-Cold War effort to keep Soviet-era weapons expertise from proliferating. American collaborators in the program included the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick and the USAID contractor Metabiota.
Metabiota carries its own baggage. The firm has faced scrutiny for repeated lapses in biosafety, its role in a USAID-backed scientific collaboration on novel coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and its connection to Hunter Biden's investment firm, Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners. The Trump administration shuttered USAID last year, cutting off one of the institutional pipelines that funded this kind of overseas biological research. The convergence of Metabiota, the Wuhan Institute, and Hunter Biden's financial interests in a single network of government-funded programs is the sort of detail that invites further scrutiny, and that establishment gatekeepers spent years dismissing as conspiracy.
The pattern of government agencies ignoring warnings while billions in federal funds disappear is not unique to biolabs. But the national-security implications here are in a category of their own.
Beyond declassifying the Ukraine biolab intelligence, Gabbard issued new guidance directing the intelligence community to increase collection on laboratories and facilities overseas. The ODNI stated Friday:
"The information surrounding the existence, history, locations and funding of these US funded biolabs has been intentionally covered up by powerful people falsely, claiming that they do not exist and accusing anyone who says otherwise to be foreign assets and traitors to America."
That is a remarkable statement from the nation's top intelligence office, not an editorial, not a social media post, but an official release accusing unnamed "powerful people" of an intentional cover-up. The ODNI added that it "will continue to work closely with partners across the government to identify where these labs are, what pathogens they contain to end dangerous Gain-of-Function research that threatens the health and wellbeing of the American people and people around the world."
Gabbard's last day is slated for June 19. Trump announced Thursday that he had picked New York attorney and former SEC chairman Jay Clayton to replace her. Whether Clayton will continue the declassification push or the new intelligence-collection directive remains to be seen. What Gabbard has already released, however, is now part of the public record, and it cannot be un-released.
The Trump administration's broader push for transparency and accountability across government agencies has produced friction with entrenched bureaucracies. The biolab declassification fits that pattern: information the public arguably had a right to know, held back for years, released only when a departing official decided the clock was running out.
The declassified documents raise as many questions as they answer. Which specific labs beyond Odessa and Kharkiv are among the two dozen identified? Which facilities conduct gain-of-function research, and on what pathogens? What is the current status of the stored Soviet-era biological agents in Odessa? What permits were issued, by whom, and under what oversight? And what "new intelligence" did American spy agencies unearth beyond what has been summarized so far?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are the natural next steps for congressional oversight, for the incoming DNI, and for any journalist serious about following the trail. The political establishment's preferred mode of response, attack the messenger, invoke Russia, change the subject, has been the default for four years. The declassified slides make that harder to sustain.
The broader lesson is institutional. When Gabbard raised the biolab question in 2022, the establishment did not engage on the merits. It reached for the most damaging label available, "treasonous", and deployed it against a sitting public official. That label was not an argument. It was a weapon designed to shut down inquiry. And the inquiry, it turns out, was warranted.
The intelligence community knew about these labs, knew about the pathogens, knew about the biosafety failures, and knew about the reputational risk. It kept that knowledge classified while public figures who asked obvious questions were smeared. The climate of hostility toward anyone who challenges official narratives has real consequences, not just for the people targeted, but for the public's ability to understand what its own government is doing with its money and in its name.
Anthrax, Ebola, Marburg, and the Plague stored in a city of a million people, in a country at war, funded by American taxpayers, and the people who asked about it were called traitors. The documents are out now. The question is whether anyone who did the name-calling has the decency to reconsider.