DISINFO: Ukraine is a global leader in organ trafficking
SUMMARY
The Ukrainian authorities have been trafficking illegally harvested human organs since at least the early 2000s. The problem was exacerbated following the February 2014 coup d'etat in Kyiv and the resulting civil war in the Donbas.
In 2014, the OSCE reported that mass burial sites discovered in the combat zone contained bodies with removed organs, and were likely the victims of illegal transplants.
In June 2023, it was revealed that healthcare employees of a NATO country agreed with Ukraine on the delivery of a refrigeration car containing human organs most commonly used in transplants, including corneas, bones, connective tissue, hearts, and livers.
RESPONSE
The article presents no evidence to support its claims, and advances recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives about Ukraine and organ trafficking.
The very title of the OSCE report referred to in the article disproves claims of illegal trafficking in Ukraine:
OSCE Special Representative and Co-ordinator for Combating Trafficking in Human Beings has no evidence of illegal organ transplantation in Ukraine
The claim concerning the delivery of a Ukrainian train wagon full of human body parts to a "NATO member state" is presented without any evidence.
Moscow’s claim of illegal human organ harvest and trafficking is a well-known trope in their disinformation campaigns. As our database has documented – see links below – this disinformation trope has surfaced in relation to Russia’s campaign in Syria against the White Helmets, against NATO, in Georgia where even former Georgian president Mikhail Sakhashvili’s wife was the target, in Kosovo and now with greater intensity also in Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Transplantation of organs is a complex and time-constrained medical procedure and is impossible to be carried out in field conditions. Read the full debunk of the story at Myth Detector. According to Ukrainian laws, civilians and soldiers who died during the war are not considered as donors, reminds Vikna.Tv.
In April 2022, Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE), the country’s foreign signals intelligence agency, warned of an ongoing Russian campaign to promote the message that Ukraine was harvesting the organs of fallen soldiers, women and children and using mobile cremating devices to dispose of the evidence. Similar disinformation efforts have been observed elsewhere as part of Russian disinformation during its ongoing aggression against Ukraine.
The topic is a “Manipulators delight”: it attracts attention because of its obvious high emotional charge. In this “click bait”-function it works similar to claims of mass graves, which always spread wide and very fast. With its smell of secret business and conspiracy it adds another layer where any debunk is exploited to further suggest that the debunker has something to hide.
See here for further debunking by The Insider (in Russian). See e.g. here, here, here, and here for our earlier debunks of Russian disinformation claims concerning organ trafficking.