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Press Release
The International Science and Technology Center (ISTC) was established in Moscow by international agreement in 1992 to provide former Soviet weapons scientists with new opportunities for sustainable, peaceful employment.
As part of its ongoing disinformation campaign, the Russian Federation has accused the ISTC, as well as its sister center, the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine (STCU), of being involved in the development of biological weapons. These accusations are part of the Russian government’s absurd attempt to provide a plausible rationale for its unjust and unprovoked war against Ukraine. They are blatantly false and have been discredited numerous times.
Until 2015, the Russian Federation hosted the ISTC and benefitted from approximately $1.5 billion of funding from states parties to the ISTC, including the United States and the European Union, to support Russian weapons scientists—including Russian biological scientists—in their transition to peaceful research.
During the two-plus decades that Russia was an ISTC Party and ISTC Governing Board member, the Russian Federation directly approved the very same ISTC biological research and infrastructure projects that Russia is now slandering and Russian personnel at the ISTC were routinely involved in managing and overseeing these projects.
Following Russia’s withdrawal from the ISTC, the headquarters relocated to Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, where the organization’s mission remains to advance basic and applied peaceful scientific research collaboration among governmental, academic, and commercial partners in chemistry, biology, nuclear science and engineering, and numerous related disciplines.
The ISTC works in full transparency. Information about past and ongoing activities are publicly available on our website: https://www.istc.int/
More information about the true nature of our work can be found here:
The STCU’s statement and fact sheet refuting the Russian Federation’s claims can be found here: claims:
