Gary Samore: Nobody is Checking for Violations of the Biological Weapons Convention: "[T]he types of facilities that research and produce biological agents, such as vaccines, antibiotics, vitamins, biological pesticides and certain foods, can also produce biological weapons. Some pathogens with legitimate medical and industrial uses can also be used for bioweapons. [...] The world already has a legal foundation to prevent gene splicing for warfare: the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. Unfortunately, nations have been unable to agree on how to strengthen the treaty. Some countries have also pursued bioweapons research and stockpiling in violation of it. [...] The Pentagon expressed fears that inspections of biodefense installations would compromise national security or lead to false accusations of treaty violations. The Commerce Department opposed intrusive international inspections on behalf of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Such inspections might compromise trade secrets, officials contended, or interfere with medical research or industrial production." (UK Column News - Video)

The conflict has already seen massive growth in defense spending. The EU announced it would buy and deliver 450 million Euros of arms to the Ukraine, while the US has pledged US$ 350 million in military aid in addition to the over 90 tons of military supplies and US$650 million in the past year alone. Put together, this has seen the US and NATO sending 17,000 anti-tank weapons and 2,000 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, for instance. An international coalition of nations is also willingly arming the Ukrainian resistance, including the UK, Australia, Turkey and Canada. This is a major boon for the world’s largest defense contractors. To give just a couple of examples, Raytheon makes the Stinger missiles, and jointly with Lockheed Martin makes the Javelin anti-tank missiles being supplied by the likes of the US and Estonia.

DDoS attacks have recently become the most powerful cyber weapon of governments to censor investigative journalists and take their websites offline.

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server or network by overwhelming the target with a flood of Internet traffic. Arms Watch, my investigative journalism platform, which documents war crimes, has constantly been the target of such cyber attacks. I have been using DDoS protection ever since my website was created. However, the last malicious attack has been so massive that it has taken my website down, with more than 53 million requests flooding my Internet traffic from different locations around the world, 17.7 million of which originating from the US.

Earlier this week, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that the US-funded biolabs in Ukraine engaged in the development of components for biological weapons. The biolabs were spotted by Russian troops amid Moscow's ongoing special military operation in Ukraine. The US considered opening a biolab in Simferopol before the Crimean Peninsula's reunification with Russia, Georgy Muradov, the permanent representative of the Republic of Crimea under the Russian president, has told Sputnik.

"Biological weapons have been developed for years in the Pentagon's secret laboratories located on Ukrainian territory. This is no news for Crimean residents, given that the US [previously] planned to create the same lab on the peninsula. Only the reunification of Crimea with Russia in March 2014 stopped the implementation of the plans to create pathogens on Crimean territory."

Arms Watch: Documents expose US biological experiments on allied soldiers in Ukraine and Georgia

The National Pulse: Deleted Web Pages Show Obama Led an Effort To Build a Ukraine-Based BioLab Handling ‘Especially Dangerous Pathogens’

Briefing by the Russian Foreign Ministry: Biological laboratories in Ukraine: "We remember how they have been searching for chemical, biological or bacteriological weapons across the globe for years, with exceptional bloody efficacy, invading countries and killing people. Well, you have been searching in all the wrong places. We have found them for you. Your projects, your biological samples, including those for military purposes in the first place, are in Ukraine. What were you doing there? It's a different continent. No common borders. No US bases. What were your specialists doing then under the guise of scientific developments, giving regular instructions to the Ukrainian side? The world has the right to know what they were going to make there, what their purpose was. The game is over."