The Russian Defense Ministry on Saturday disclosed that many of the high-ranking participants undertaking military biological studies in Ukraine are associated with U.S. intelligence services or American pharmaceutical companies.

The ministry has a document with names of all the key U.S. officials supervising Ukraine's military biological programs, Igor Kirillov, chief of the Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defense Forces of the Russian Armed Forces, said during a briefing.

The participants include Kenneth Myers, former director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency with the U.S. Department of Defense; Tara O'Toole, executive vice president of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm controlled by the Central Intelligence Agency; Thomas Frieden, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and others, according to Kirillov.

The executors of the military biological programs are the Ukrainian Mechnikov Anti-Plague Research Institute, the Institute of Veterinary Medicine and the Lviv Research Institute of Epidemiology and Hygiene, he said.

The defense official said in June that the Pentagon admitted the United States had supported 46 biological research facilities in Ukraine.

"As an example of such studies is the work carried out in the United States for intensifying the effect of pathogenic microorganisms, including the creation of an artificial agent of the coronavirus infection at Boston University. As we already pointed out, the obtained modified virus had 80 percent lethality and caused atypical neurological symptoms and severe damage to the lungs," Russia's news agency TASS quoted Kirillov as saying.

 (With input from Xinhua)