Ukraine has biolabs. Ukraine is not making bioweapons.

What's the deal with all those loud allegations about biological laboratories in Ukraine? Do they exist? Are they making bioweapons? Are they dangerous? The answers are yes, no, and yes. The best short piece about them that I've read was in the Wall Street Journal yesterday:

The allegations have shocked those who are most familiar with the Pentagon’s post-Cold War initiative, called the Cooperative Threat Reduction program. That is because not only has Russia been aware of the Pentagon’s work securing chemical, biological and nuclear facilities across the former Soviet Union, but it had also been its beneficiary for many years.

....The program, which dates back to 1991 and continues today, stretches across the former Soviet Union. Since the program started, the Pentagon has spent approximately $12 billion on securing material used in weapons of mass destruction in post-Soviet republics, according to a DTRA spokeswoman.

....The president of Ukraine [in 2001], Leonid Kuchma, concerned about the threat of terrorism in his own country, asked the U.S. for help. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade earlier, Ukraine had been starved of the funds needed to secure its biological facilities. Mr. Weber put together a team that visited Ukraine’s biological and chemical facilities, which ranged from large laboratories to small veterinary research centers. “We found that a number of them had dangerous pathogen collections left over from Soviet days,” he said. “They were in pretty bad shape.”

As we used to say back in the Golden Age of Blogging, read the whole thing if this is a topic you happen to care about.