Little-noticed video footage reviewed by RFE/RL's Russian Service sheds light on a secretive military research center that is notorious for its role in the Soviet Union's biological weapons program and has undergone a major expansion since Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Russian state media footage of a January 2024 inspection by then-Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu offers a rare glimpse inside the restricted facility outside Moscow, showing equipment and infrastructure that experts say are typical of biological laboratories designed for work with the world's most dangerous known pathogens.
In an April report on compliance with arms control commitments, the State Department said the United States "assesses that Russia maintains an offensive [biological weapons] program" in violation of the UN Biological Weapons Convention. The report specifically cited the facility, the 48th Central Scientific Research Institute, as an example of Russia "extensively modernizing Soviet-era biological warfare infrastructure that could support its present-day offensive program."
Russia denies the allegation. In an April interview with the Russian Defense Ministry's main newspaper, the head of the site called the facility part of Russia's "biological defense system," and the ministry has portrayed it as aimed at developing defenses against pathogens for the Russian military and population.
The institute, near the picturesque city of Sergiyev Posad, was the focus of a recent report by the Washington Post that found that several new buildings had been erected on the secretive site over the past two years as part of a massive renovation and construction project.
Analyzing satellite imagery of the site, known as Sergiyev Posad-6, experts told the Washington Post that at least four of the buildings bear hallmarks of biological laboratories with the maximum level of security required to work with deadly pathogens such as the smallpox and Ebola viruses.
RFE/RL's Russian Service found and examined video footage of Shoigu, now the secretary of President Vladimir Putin's Security Council, touring the facility. The footage was released in January by the Defense Ministry and published by state-run and Kremlin-friendly media outlets, which made no mention of the site's biological-weapons legacy.
A video of the tour released by the Defense Ministry and published by the state news agency TASS removed the sound during a part of the report in which Shoigu and his entourage are being shown certain areas inside the complex, though the silent section reveals equipment resembling that of a high-security biolab.
This includes a large, cylindrical metal cistern, flanked by stairs, that resembles wastewater treatment equipment typically found in laboratories with high biosafety levels.
A European expert on high-security biolaboratories who spoke to RFE/RL's Russian Service on condition of anonymity said the tank could indeed be part of a water-treatment system. The tank appears to have a relatively small volume, but judging by the location of the stairs, larger tanks from the same system could be out of the frame, the expert said. It is unclear which building of the 48th Central Research Institute Shoigu was in at the time of filming.
The video also shows an airlock, a crucial barrier between a sealed room and an exterior area. Russian virologist Sergei Netyosov told the Russian newspaper Izvestia in an interview that Russia has adopted the international standards of building highly protected biolabs.
"A laboratory for the most dangerous pathogens is a building within a building. The inner building has its own windows, but they are usually bulletproof and double or triple [glazed]. This inner building is the dirty zone where they work with pathogens. The clean zone is the outer part. Now everyone in the world builds like this," Netyosov said.
'Black Boxes'
Established under the Soviet government in 1954, the Sergiyev Posad facility is one of three centers that make up the 48th Central Research Institute, which is run by the Russian Defense Ministry. The United States imposed sanctions on all three in May 2021.
The Soviet centers researched deadly pathogens like the plague bacteria and anthrax, as well as viruses like smallpox. This work included studying the possibility of making these pathogens more infectious and resistant to medical intervention. Similar work was under way in other countries as well, including the United States, Britain, and France.
In 1975, the Soviet government ratified the UN Biological Weapons Convention, even as it refused to recognize that it had, in effect, been working on the development of biological weapons. Despite becoming a party to the convention, the Soviet Union expanded its secret biological weapons program, which ultimately employed tens of thousands of people throughout the country -- and also led to an anthrax outbreak that killed dozens of people in Sverdlovsk, now known as Yekaterinburg, but which Soviet officials blamed on tainted meat.
Details about the program emerged thanks to Soviet scientists who defected or left for the West, including Vladimir Pasechnik, a director of one of the institutes under the Soviet Union's nominally civilian agency, called Biopreparat, that spearheaded the country's development of offensive biological weapons.
Pasechnik defected to Britain in 1989, passing on detailed information about Biopreparat's operations to the West. In 1992, within months of the Soviet collapse, Russian President Boris Yeltsin acknowledged the program publicly for the first time.
Yeltsin signed a decree in April of that year requiring adherence to the Biological Weapons Convention and a complete halt to all work on the program. Later in 1992, his foreign minister, Grigory Berdennikov, acknowledged that "offensive biological programs" continued in Russia until March 1992.
Mutual inspections were conducted in the 1990s under a trilateral agreement with Britain and the United States. But Russia has never authorized inspections of the Sergiyev Posad center or the two others that are part of the 48th Central Scientific Research Institute, located in Yekaterinburg and Kirov.
"They remained black boxes to the outside world," Andrew Weber, a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense for radiation, chemical, and biological defense programs, told RFE/RL's Russian Service.
Weber said that while "it's difficult to distinguish defensive work from illegal offensive work," the United States does have "extraordinary intelligence collection against the 48th Central Research Institute, because it's a priority for the West to know what illegal activities are happening in these facilities."
Western governments believe Russia has already violated the Chemical Weapons Convention, to which it is a party, with the Novichok poisonings of former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal in England in 2018 and the late Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny in Siberia in September 2020. Substantial evidence has linked Russian security services to both attacks.
Weber called the May 2021 sanctions announced by the U.S. State Department against the 48th Central Research Institute "the tip of the iceberg" of "massive quantities of high-quality intelligence" backing up Washington's assessment that "Russia continues to engage at these facilities in illegal biological weapons activities -- offensive activities that are prohibited."
In its April report on compliance, the State Department said the United States "assesses that the Soviet program was absorbed, not dismantled, by the Russian Federation, and that the program has continued and evolved."
Lab Equipment For A 'Business Center'
While the Sergiyev Posad facility is shrouded in secrecy, it has left a faint public footprint in open-source records reviewed by RFE/RL's Russian Service.
Photographs and renderings of buildings erected at the site during the expansion over the past two years were posted on the website of Okna-Star, a subcontractor involved in facade construction at the facility. The company's website referred to the project as a "business center."
"The project was completed on time, and the customer was completely satisfied," Okna-Star boasted.
Russian government procurement records also show a spike in the 48th Central Research Institute's spending on laboratory equipment beginning in late 2021, several months before construction began on the facility's expansion and renovation.
In the last three months of 2021 alone, the institute spent more on equipment than in the previous five years combined. The Russian government classified military procurement data beginning in 2022.
RFE/RL's Russian Service also found several open-source patents and scientific papers from the Sergiyev Posad and Kirov branches of the 48th Central Scientific Research Institute, those related to the preparation and spread of aerosolized forms of pathogens.
Dmitry Pruss, a U.S.-based molecular biologist who examined these papers and patents at RFE/RL's request, said that "in the civilian world, there is no need to turn pathogens into ultra-fine and aerosolized forms."
A Russian virologist who wished to remain anonymous told RFE/RL's Russian Service that he "cannot think of a 'civilian' use [for pathogens in aerosol and powder form], only for destroying the enemy's manpower with a cloud of pathogens."
"However…the effectiveness of such an aerosol in the actual reality of modern warfare is highly questionable. Well, except for exterminating the population of cities," the virologist said.
'Almost Certainly' Building Biological Weapons
Milton Leitenberg, a researcher at the Center for International Security Studies at the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy, said Western specialists' failure to visit the Sergiyev Posad facility under the trilateral agreement in the 1990s was an "extremely unfortunate mistake."
"We had the opportunity to choose three military institutes or four Biopreparat laboratories. And we chose Biopreparat because Pasechnik told us everything in great detail and we, roughly speaking, knew exactly where to look," Leitenberg, a historian of the Soviet biological-weapons programs, told RFE/RL.
Leitenberg believes Russia is "almost certainly" continuing to build biological weapons.
"For 25 years now, I've been part of an informal expert group on biological weapons. There are experts from 11 countries, some of whom have worked for their governments in the past, some of whom are still in government work now," Leitenberg said.
"These are not random people; they have been in this field of work for many years," he added. "Of these 50 people, all of them would answer this question in the affirmative. Only two or three would put a small question mark next to the 'yes.'"
