The Kremlin’s problem with plague is nothing new

In 1979, weaponised anthrax escaped from a bioweapons facility in Sverdlovsk, Russia, killing at least 66 people as it spread southward through the city of 1.2 million inhabitants. The cloud infected livestock in nearby farms, which then had to be slaughtered. The Soviet authorities blamed the outbreak on their citizens eating contaminated meat from sick cows that was sold illegally. They denied the presence of any biological agent; its use would be a violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). But in 1992 President Boris Yeltsin admitted the military’s responsibility for killing Russian citizens with illegal pathogens.

On 2 October 2026, Darya Shipilova, a 28-year-old researcher at the Siberian-based Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute, died after being exposed to a lethal pathogen, or, as the authorities called it, ‘pneumonia of some unknown aetiology’. According to some sources, she dropped a test tube containing the plague on 25 September, became ill and died within 48 hours of being admitted to hospital.

Shipilova’s neighbours said a team of hazmat experts arrived to deep-clean her apartment, leaving behind a strong antiseptic smell. The hospital in the nearby town of Shelekhov where she died was placed under quarantine. It is no longer admitting or discharging patients. Regional authorities posted, then deleted, a notice asking residents not to travel to the town. Nearly 200 people who had been in contact with her were placed under medical observation. Russian media have since reported a second death in the region, which the authorities have not confirmed. Russia’s federal health organisation claimed to have found ‘no evidence of microorganisms related to her professional activities’.

Shipilova worked in the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute, a prestigious centre founded in 1934, which employs 95 scientists. It carries out research on plague, cholera, brucellosis, tularaemia, anthrax, arboviruses and other dangerous diseases, assisting Rospotrebnadzor (the Federal Service for Surveillance on Consumer Rights Protection and Human Wellbeing) in epidemic control. The institute’s expansion paralleled that of the Soviet bioweapons programme, and it surely benefitted financially from Russian efforts to weaponise diseases, although there is no evidence it took part in offensive weapons work. The institute publishes research on encephalitis, vaccines and herd immunity, Covid-19, and the plague, including a 2025 study of different strains in the Tuva region, and a 2026 paper on immunity after plague vaccination.

Plague is endemic to Siberia, with traces of the disease found in hunter-gatherers who lived more than 4,000 years ago near Lake Baikal – only 70 km from today’s Irkutsk. By the end of the 18th century, bubonic plague had been restricted largely to Persia and the Ottoman Empire. Catherine the Great, who saw herself as an enlightened despot, played to a largely European-educated audience, corresponding directly in French with Voltaire and Diderot, seeking their approval for her policies. She was mortified when the plague ravaged Moscow in 1770-72. She deflected Voltaire’s concerns in a letter, joking that the plague’s dead would be resurrected in the future. But Catherine could hardly pretend to be a fully modern leader when her backward empire faced a plague epidemic that wiped out one fifth of the population of Russia’s largest city, causing public riots.

The plague travelled north from the Ottoman front of the Russo-Turkish war, through Moldavia and Ukraine, with soldiers, merchants, rats and fleas in cartloads of textiles bound for Moscow’s cloth mills. When news of the plague’s approach reached her, Catherine ordered checkpoints on rivers below Moscow, but it was too late. The plague spread rapidly through the filthy, amorphous city, where graveyards abutted markets, slaughterhouses operated next door to residences, factories and their dumps were on the same block as the workers’ quarters, and where cesspools, ponds and swamps everywhere sported a huge population of flea-infested rats that carried the plague. Once the disease struck, it could not be controlled. Those still living surreptitiously dumped dead bodies on the street at night, and hid from inspectors, lest they, too, be quarantined. Very few doctors could help; Russia lagged far behind the West in education, science and public health, with Moscow University awarding its first medical doctorates only in the 1790s, and most doctors concentrated at court and in the military. Public health measures have always lagged behind technological advances in Russia.

What has changed since the time of Catherine? Russia is a modern society with an extensive medical system and active biomedical research programmes. The World Health Organization (WHO) puts the risk at ‘moderate to low’ in Irkutsk and low for Russia as a whole. In general, plague is primarily contracted through contact with wild animals. For example, in 2016, a 10-year-old boy in Russia developed the infection while helping butcher marmots. The US averages seven cases of plague annually, primarily from bites from fleas feeding on infected rodents. Bubonic plague is treatable with antibiotics if caught early, but untreated it can become pneumonic plague, which is harder to treat and has a higher mortality rate.

An incompetent, secretive Russian government has delayed the proper response to the Irkutsk incident, a typical pattern that dates back to the Soviet era. What makes the Russian case stand out is precisely the reticence of public health officials and leaders in addressing it. There is also significant embarrassment about asking the West for help and expertise. The ongoing Irkutsk crisis sullies the country’s effort to be seen as a scientific superpower, and it reveals all too well how Russia is an ambivalent partner in public health efforts, all of this against the backdrop of an extensive, secret bioweapons programme.

No direct evidence suggests that the Irkutsk institute is linked to bioweapons activities, and there may be nothing to the lab-leak rumours. But with so little transparency, it is hard to take Russian officials at their word, especially since they have long used chemical and biological weapons for nefarious purposes. Plague is one of a series of pathogens that the Russians have tried to weaponise, along with anthrax, smallpox and Ebola. These pathogens can be aerosolised for this use. According to the Washington Post, satellite imagery of a former bioweapons facility outside Moscow shows significant expansion. A recent US Annual Threat Assessment added that ‘Russia’s CBW threat is expanding. Russian scientific institutes continue to research and develop CBW capabilities, including technologies to deliver CBW agents’. The report concluded that ‘Russian forces almost certainly continue using chemicals against Ukrainian forces, with hundreds of reported attacks occurring since late 2022’.

While these were not bioweapons, Russia used the nerve agent Novichok on the dissident Alexei Navalny – who survived the attack but died in a penal colony in 2024 – and on the former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England, who also survived. In 2002 Putin’s security forces caused between 130 and 200 deaths, most of them civilians, when they pumped a fentanyl-derivative aerosol into the Dubrovka theatre in Moscow to eliminate Chechen hostage-takers.

Since the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s propaganda regime has mounted a disinformation campaign about biological weapons being developed in Ukraine for use against the Russian population, perhaps in an unsuccessful attempt to justify its unjustifiable war. Russia lies. For decades, its elites lied about the fact that it had illegally dumped significant quantities of radioactive waste into the Arctic Ocean at levels twice as high as those of all previously known dumping worldwide, in violation of Soviet commitments to the 1972 Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution (London Convention). It lied and continues to lie about its violation of the BWC, and it proceeds by way of blatant fabrications in accusing the US of assisting Ukraine in using bioweapons on Russia.

Authoritarian regimes with centralised, unquestioned power are paradoxically incapable of responding rapidly to disasters. Since their leaders supply the impetus to a smoothly functioning bureaucracy, their words – or their silence – mean a great deal to responsible underlings, in this case to those tasked with directing recovery efforts. If leaders are not interested in a disaster, emergency responses will be less effective. Worse, in closed systems, leaders deny the extent of the problem for fear of international embarrassment. The USSR covered up the extent of the Chernobyl disaster (1986) and delayed evacuation of its citizens from harm’s way for days and weeks. Putin, then prime minister, was late in responding to the peat fires that threatened Moscow in August 2010. And he made no comment when, in June 2026, Ukraine launched its largest drone attack on Moscow in years.

Granted, Mikhail Gorbachev was more proactive after Chernobyl in his response to the 1988 earthquake in Spitak, Armenia, which killed 25,000. Putin and Dmitry Medvedev showed immediate concern over a series of disasters in Russia’s coal mines that killed dozens of miners, and over the sinking of the Bulgaria river cruise ship in July 2011, when 122 people were lost. Putin reacted presidentially to the 2014 floods with a televised meeting in the Kremlin, a table of advisers sitting around him, to advertise that his administration had done ‘everything necessary to save lives, avoid major damage and protect people’s property as far as it was possible’. But where is his response to the plague? What would Catherine the Great have done?

Modern governments in a highly interconnected world of movement of people, commodities, foods, diseases and viruses, including computer viruses, have the obligation to be forthcoming about the genesis of epidemics. According to the Wall Street Journal, the US State Department has warned the Kremlin that its failure to disclose details about the death of the young laboratory worker from a plague research centre runs counter to its international health obligations. Secretary of State Marco Rubio remarked that US officials are ‘watching and monitoring’ the Irkutsk situation. Indeed, the State Department’s 2025 compliance report found that Russia maintains an offensive biological weapons programme in violation of the BWC.

Given Russia’s violation of weapons treaties over the decades, its development of bioweapons since the 1920s, and its continued pursuit of them after its 1972 signature to the BWC, how can anyone believe Russian denials? And how can Rospotrebnadzor, both the nation’s health agency and its consumer-rights regulator, manage the threat of a plague epidemic? Rospotrebnadzor is known for its lack of transparency. It also serves as a tool of Kremlin foreign policy in issuing denials and instituting food embargoes against nations that have somehow wronged the Kremlin.

The Irkutsk crisis has all the hallmarks of Russian dissimulation: intransigent silence, failure to cooperate with international authorities, criticism of the West, failed local response, and tacit confirmation that Russia continues its bioweapons efforts in violation of international law. The lesson? Never expect transparency from Moscow.