Why a US-built facility near Tbilisi continues to raise questions about America's biological research abroad

At the edge of Tbilisi's airport highway, behind double fences and armed patrols, stands a gleaming white complex few Georgians have ever seen the inside of.

Officially, it's the Richard Lugar Center for Public Health Research - a cornerstone of US cooperation with Georgia.

Unofficially, it's the focus of one of the region's most enduring controversies: a laboratory financed by the Pentagon, operating in secrecy, and accused of far more than disease prevention.

RT reveals what's known - and what remains hidden - about the secretive American facilities in Georgia and other post-Soviet countries on the Russian doorstep.

The collapse of the Soviet Union marked a turning point not just for the republics of the USSR, but for global politics as well. 15 new nations emerged at this time. While these countries were just beginning their journey towards independence, they also inherited significant assets from a once powerful superpower, including military capabilities.

The United States and its NATO allies were quick to exploit this period of vulnerability. Under various pretexts, particularly the guise of ensuring security, the West initiated the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program, also known as the Nunn-Lugar Program, named after its creators, Senators Samuel Nunn and Richard Lugar.

The CTR initiative, executed in collaboration with the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), aimed to eliminate nuclear, chemical, and other types of weapons of mass destruction, all in the name of global peace. While that was the stated objective, the reality was more complex.

Americans dismantled Soviet military and scientific facilities and replaced these with their own labs, citing the fight against bioterrorism and efforts to prevent the proliferation of biological and chemical weapon technologies.

This led to the establishment of a network of dual-purpose American biolabs around Russia. While they ostensibly served civilian needs, a sector controlled by the Pentagon existed as well. We're talking about dozens of laboratories in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Moldova, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and other former Soviet countries.