Russia declared that the U.S. and Ukraine have covered up violations of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. This comes after Russia discovered bio-laboratories in Ukraine and after State Department official Victoria Nuland confirmed in her testimony on Tuesday that the U.S. has biolabs in Ukraine. The Biological Weapons Convention, or Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, is a disarmament treaty that effectively bans biological and toxin weapons by prohibiting their development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling, and use. The convention, banning the use of biological weapons, was ratified by 143 nations but lacked means of ensuring compliance and the US rejected biological weapons convention protocol, according to a report posted on the NIH website dated 2001. An international treaty banning bioweapons needs to be strengthened with a compliance verification mechanism, contrary to the US position on the issue, Moscow said on Wednesday. The call comes in the wake of the reported discovery of evidence that there were lethal pathogens at Pentagon-backed labs in Ukraine. The Russian military reported this week that Ukrainian authorities had ordered the destruction of highly pathogenic samples that were stored at US-backed biological labs throughout the country. The purported documents indicate that both Ukraine and the US breached the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which both nations signed and ratified, the Russian foreign ministry alleged on Wednesday. The order to destroy the samples was an attempt to cover up the violations of the treaty, it said. “We stand for the resumption of the work on a legally binding Protocol to the Convention for an effective verification mechanism, which the US has been stonewalling since 2001,” the ministry said.