Government has been implementing the German Biosecurity Programme (GBP) which includes partnership projects with government agencies and research organisations in focus countries, which Ukraine became part of in 2014, the year of Maidan. German specialists from the Institute of Microbiology of the German Armed Forces (Munich), Friedrich Loeffler Institute (Greifswald-Riems Island), Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine (Hamburg) and the Robert Koch Institute (Berlin), which specialise in research of deadly biological agents, are engaged in practical activities.
According to the German Federal Foreign Office, the third phase of
the GBP will be implemented in 2020-2022. We can infer from the publicly
available materials that the GBP’s stated technical goals include,
among others, the gathering of epidemic intelligence in third countries,
including with the use of big data technology, and developing the
infrastructure of partner countries for handling dangerous biological
agents.
The Institute of Experimental and Clinical Veterinary Medicine in
Kharkov has been the Institute of Microbiology of the German Armed
Forces’ main Ukrainian counterparty since 2016, which we know from its
own data. The two institutes cooperate under the Ukrainian-German
project titled “Initiative on Biological Safety and Biological Defence
in the Management of the Zoonotic Risks at the Outer Borders of the
European Union.” The fact that its official goal is to “improve the
biological defence and security situation” in Ukraine, “particularly in
the east of the country” gives rise to the rhetorical question of which
border the German military biologists consider an outer border for the
purposes of their professional interests. Is it the Russian-Ukrainian
border?" IW
