Tens of hundreds of cattle have been culled in Russia, with fears that the animals were infected by a leak from a bioweapons research plant.
Hundreds of animals have been killed amid furious protests from farmers in Siberia, with authorities giving differing accounts as to the explanation why.
Some have cited an outbreak of ‘pasteurellosis’, which might normally be treated with antibiotics.
Disease control specialists have told farmers there was also an outbreak of ‘incurable rabies’, without citing evidence.
Farmers haven’t been shown the order from the Kremlin’s agriculture ministry, and at the moment are claiming the organisation is attempting to conceal the true cause.
There have been no outward signs of illness, and farmers insist their animals are healthy.
Despite this, the cattle have been burned in pyres, with some claims that the Putin regime is looking for to cover an outbreak of foot and mouth disease.
One woman fainted and fell on the snow when she was told her livestock were being killed.
Others have been detained for demanding an evidence for the enforced cull.
Veteran political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin warned there could also be a sinister explanation, pointing to Vector State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology, at Koltsovo, within the Novosibirsk region, certainly one of only two places on this planet legally holding stocks of deadly smallpox.
Its vaults include Ebola, Marburg, and other lethal viruses. Within the Cold War, Vector produced smallpox on an industrial scale, while also weaponising Marburg.
Oreshkin claimed that under Putin’s rule, ‘biotoxins or similar biologically aggressive compounds are being produced on the centre’.
He added: ‘We will’t say with complete certainty that some virus has leaked from this laboratory. But indirect evidence allows us to significantly consider this matter.
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‘If so, then the authorities’ hysterical response is totally comprehensible. We’re being told a couple of terrible disease called ‘pasteurellosis’. Sorry, but it surely’s a bacteria that’s treated with antibiotics.”
Oreshkin also said if the claim of the infection was true, there wouldn’t be a reason for mass hysteria and slaughter of livestock.
‘There’s something unhealthy about this story, and the proven fact that nobody goes to elucidate anything to the general public,’ he added.
And the cull or emergency measures are widening to other regions – now covering at the least 4 time zones in Russia, with neighbouring Kazakhstan taking emergency measures to forestall a ramification.
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