CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY, HUMAN TRAFFICKING, NAZIS, UKRAINE, WAR CRIMES

Human Trafficking in Ukraine: Illegal Organ Harvest

Posted by Internationalist 360° on

Deborah L. Armstrong
Col. Vitaly Kiselev of Lugansk Police speaks to media about black-market organ harvesting in Bakhmut. Photo: Voice of Sevastopol

“Every Day We Were Working Like Frankenstein’s Slaves”

Few things in our world are so horrifying as human trafficking. It’s a worldwide scourge, and according to some reports, Ukraine is one of the worst hot spots for the abduction/kidnapping of people for use in the sex trade or for illegal organ harvest. Even the US State Department admits that “The Government of Ukraine does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking” though it claims that Kiev is “making significant efforts to do so.”

Wikipedia even states that “Ukraine is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked transnationally for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor,” though it does not delve into the terrifying world of black-market organ harvesting.

This topic, however, has been covered in-depth in Russian media, which has reported since at least 2014 about the activities of so-called “black market transplantologists” — foreign doctors who harvest organs from mortally wounded Ukrainian soldiers and from civilians who may, or may not, have given consent.

While news of illegal organ harvesting in Ukraine did trickle into western mainstream media before the Maidan coup, in recent years this horror is dismissed as “Russian disinformation” and mainstream media remains mostly silent on the issue, though it does report about the sex-trafficking of Ukrainian women, which is neatly blamed on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In this investigative series, we will explore what Russian media has reported about human trafficking in Ukraine, and you can decide for yourself whether it’s true or just “propaganda” as western media insists.

Organ harvesting in Ukraine — “gift of life” or get-rich-quick scheme?

Kiselev told Gazeta.ru that at least one of these people, a Dutch doctor named Elizabeth de Brück was previously in Ukraine, according to an investigation by the LPR, and that she and others in her group harvested organs from Ukrainian soldiers and civilians without their consent, in 2014 and 2015.

You can watch Kiselev’s statement to Russian news media with English subtitles on my YouTube channel:

The confession itself is in Russian without subtitles, so I have summarized it here, along with a few translated quotes from the video.

In November of 2014, the unidentified officer says, he and two other members of the SBU were sent to the “Anti-Terrorist Operation zone” (ATO) where they worked with a special medical group which was referred to as the “emergency team.” He and his colleagues had undergone special medical training in Kramatorsk, a city in the northern part of Donetsk Oblast, in what was then eastern Ukraine. Following the training, he says that the SBU officers joined the medical group and were given modern equipment and weapons.

The unnamed officer states, “Our colleague Gennady [Getman] was responsible for getting consent from critically wounded people so their organs were harvested. I was providing protection. For each person I received $170 USD. First, we sent the wounded to special medical centers created in Kramatorsk and Severodonetsk. All their organs were harvested — including eyes, skin, bones. Everything was sent abroad. I don’t know how much their families were paid and if they were paid at all.”

In January of 2015, the unidentified SBU officer says that a professional “transplantologist” named Elizabeth de Brück arrived from the Netherlands to work with them. He claims that he examined her documents and that was how he got her true name. He says that the Dutch woman completely reformed their working style, directing doctors to remove organs regardless of whether the soldiers agreed or not. She often removed organs herself, he says, taking just seven to ten minutes to remove, pack, and send an organ to Kramatorsk.

Well, fascists always have prided themselves on their efficiency…

Photo of bodies whose organs have been harvested, provided by an unnamed source. Image is blurred because it is extremely graphic. Original photo: Daynr.com

On February 23, 2015, the anonymous SBU officer and his team returned to Kramatorsk. He says that he knows English and that he overheard Elizabeth (also called “Eliza” or “Elsa”) talking with her “boss” who was praising her and asking her to improve the quality of the work.

She replied, “Yes, Sandra.” The unnamed agent believes that “Sandra” was the wife (Sandra Roelofs, originally from the Netherlands) of Mikheil Saakashvili, a former president of Georgia and head of the Executive Reform Committee of Ukraine, and that she was the leader and organizer of the mission.

The former SBU officer says that “everything changed” after Mikheil Saakashvili visited the ATO. He says he was assigned to accompany the former Georgian leader, who praised the operation and said he would pay them more if they increased the quantity and quality of the organs, which he called “goods.” Saakashvili allegedly told him that the organs were helping the families of the deceased and people in Europe and America who were urgently waiting for transplants.

While Ukraine was shelling Popasnaya (called Popasna in Ukrainian), a city in the Lugansk region, he claims that kidneys and a spleen were removed from a man and his 12-year-old daughter, who had lost consciousness. Their family name was Lyaschenko, according to the passport in the man’s coat pocket. The mother was wounded in the legs, but when she was brought to the hospital, her organs were removed. The agent discovered that all three were officially declared killed during the shelling, but he knew it was murder, committed by those who were supposed to be “helping.”

He couldn’t bear it any longer and so he submitted an application to be dismissed on the 4th of June, 2015. Col. Mischenko said that he had a special task that needed to be completed first, and after that, the officer would be given leave and promoted to major with a raise in pay. The “special task” turned out to be exhuming bodies in Bakhmut. He says that he worked with a group of people who exhumed 132 corpses. He doesn’t know where the bodies were taken. On June 11th, he was summoned to see General Alexander Radetsky and after he left the general’s office, he was arrested.

After paying them off, the unidentified man says that he escaped and hid. He provided information and video records to authorities in the People’s Republics of Donbass. The videos included footage of organ harvesting, operating rooms and exhumations. He also said that he could show them burial grounds in Chasov Yar, in the DPR, where 97 people were buried, 20 of them civilians including children. And in Uglegorsk, where 30 AFU soldiers were buried. He says that he even contacted Wikileaks to tell them about the illegal organ harvesting in Ukraine, the Ukrainian government’s involvement, and the actions of Saakashvili and his wife.

The former SBU man is not the only one who claims to have witnessed illegal organ harvesting in Ukraine. A pre-med student from Syria says that he was a member of an organ harvesting team which was also sent there, from overseas.

You can listen to his testimony here, in heavily accented (and augmented) English with Ukrainian subtitles. I will also summarize it below.

At first, he refused because he had only completed his pre-med training. But he was told that this was an “internal government order” and that if he cooperated, he would be given copies of all the necessary paperwork as well as a three-month training course, and that once he returned from overseas, he would have a work visa and money in his bank account.

Lured by the prospect of being able to pay his own tuition, he decided to join the “peacekeeping force” which went to Ukraine in 2013. It seemed a logical choice, since he had learned Russian when he was in school in Syria.

His family thought that he had gone to Ukraine as an ordinary doctor, as part of the “peacekeeping force,” and the news said the same thing. But he says that even then, he knew that organ transplants were already a fairly standard operation, and that there was an acute shortage of donor organs worldwide. As promised, he was given special training courses and documents such as a press card identifying himself as a “journalist.” He was only supposed to spend a year in Ukraine, then he planned to return to the US to continue his studies.

Every week they were taken to a small clinic on the outskirts of Kiev. There were no signs to be seen and guards escorted them to the middle of the building. Everything was painted green, the Syrian said. They performed surgeries there, in shifts, and slept there sometimes, too. They were given rooms, “like cheap hotels. Like soldiers’ beds in two tiers.”

This was how it was until May 1st, 2014, when they were roused early in the morning, divided into two units, and told to gather their belongings. They were informed that there was an “emergency call” that they needed to respond to, so they left Kiev that evening and by nightfall they were in Odessa.

Two mobile complexes had been set up to conduct emergency operations, as if there was a natural disaster or a war. His group of doctors was stationed on the outskirts of the city, and another group was sent to the city’s center. He thought it was strange because the streets of Odessa were calm and quiet, and there seemed to be no reason for the city to be prepared for a calamity.

Then, on May 2, everyone was roused early again and told to be ready to receive organs and prepare them for transplantation somewhere else. His group was instructed to receive boxes from the first group in the Odessa city center, and prepare them for transportation.

That day, he says, they worked like “hard laborers” under the sights of machine guns and the shouts of the military. “We had our first fears for our lives and serious suspicions about the reality of what was happening. My eyes saw more organs in one day than I had ever seen in my entire surgical training.”

But from where he was standing that day, the Syrian pre-med student couldn’t fathom where the organs were coming from, and why there were so many. The surgeons couldn’t watch the news while they were working, but by late afternoon one of his colleagues said there had been a massacre in town. A war? He didn’t know. The doctors were focused on dealing with the organs. Removing them properly and preparing them for transplant and transportation.

They were rushed, constantly (and literally) under the gun. He says it was obvious why everyone was in a hurry. He knew that there were rules for the removal of organs. A kidney was only supposed to be removed after 30 minutes of undeniable establishment of clinical death. But the earlier the kidneys are removed, the better they are for transplantation, and kidneys removed from still-living bodies have the best chances of success.

The operating theater was prepared. They smeared iodine on a patient’s breasts, abdomen and groin. Then a cross incision was made on the donor’s stomach, and then, according to plan, the organs were extracted.

Following the nightmarish events in Odessa, the Syrian was coming to the realization that all was not as it had seemed. He and his colleagues had been told that they would work as doctors in the field, but instead, they were pathologists, dissecting corpses of dead soldiers and civilians.

He recalls the name of an important military man — Nalyvaychenko. He says that a group of soldiers was loading boxes of organs into a car and two of the soldiers accidently dropped their cart. An officer kicked them and shouted that if they ruined even one box, he would give their kidneys to Nalyvaychenko himself!

The nightmare continued after Odessa. On the morning of May 3rd, he says his group arrived in another large settlement, and that their motorcade of three cars continued on between cities at night. Slavyansk, Kramatorsk. And every day, he says, they did the same thing.

“Every day we were working like Frankenstein’s slaves, cutting and removing organs. They were the bodies of soldiers. Right on the streets of towns and villages. Every day, hands covered in blood. It was a scorcher in reality. From morning till night, mutilated bodies and grimaces of horror on the faces of men and women,” he said.

But it wasn’t just soldiers’ bodies, he recalls. Sometimes bodies arrived clean and well-groomed. Civilians. Often shot just once. In the head.

In the other group, two people went missing during the week. They didn’t come back from the city, or so he was told.

Life became a blur. They worked and slept in between visits from the military. They were sent on missions to get bodies from the battlefield. They were even sent on missions kept secret from the military.

Then, in August of 2014, “we managed to escape from this hell. We were coming back to the city from the village where we were going to get new organs. There were five people in our car. The driver, two security guards and us two surgeons.” In the car there were also twelve boxes containing organs. “We drove up to the roadblock. Not long ago it was ‘ours.’”

The soldiers began shooting at them, damaging their car. They stopped near a forest and tried to run away, but the two SBU guards demanded that they bring all 12 boxes with them.

“I felt again the threats that I felt in Odessa — that we would become donors of all organs ourselves if the goods were not delivered. That Nalyvaychenko and his mercenaries would find us in an hour, and that we would be killed on the spot if we tried to escape.”

Somehow, they managed to hold on to all 12 boxes and ran towards some bushes. The Syrian says he can’t remember exactly what happened next because there was a firefight and some nearby explosions which apparently knocked him out, “and it was already dark when I came to my senses. I didn’t have any boxes. I came out on the road with my hands up. I had a journalist’s document in my hands. The one that our employers said guaranteed our safety in a foreign country.”

He felt like he had no other choice. He walked toward the checkpoint, hoping his credentials as a “journalist” would somehow get him through unharmed. They interrogated him and took him into custody. He says he still doesn’t know who they were because their uniforms had no insignia. But they sent him to Donetsk where he was interrogated for two days, then placed in a cell with another journalist. “He turned out to be a real journalist and had been in Donetsk for a month.”

You can watch it on my channel, in Russian, with English subtitles.

He gives the prices in US dollars, saying that there are options for $30,000 or $25,000, “but everything depends on the condition of, so to say, the donor himself.”

“Why such a big difference?” the man behind the camera asks.

“Well, as I said,” the other man responds, “everything depends on the donor himself. On the damage.”

Damage from fighting, perhaps? “Additionally,” he continues, “the cargo is, let’s say, fragile, and the price may change during transportation.”

The cameraman asks, “What kind of damage?”

“Well, nothing critical, perhaps an acoustic concussion,” the other man answers. Like from a grenade or artillery explosion? “Let me show you,” he says, but the video ends.

Whether there is more of this video somewhere, I do not know. But if the video is an actual recording of a surgeon in Nikolaev, it corroborates much of what the other two anonymous sources said in their confessions, and reveals that illegal organ harvesting continues in Ukraine.

Can any of the videos be trusted? You will have to decide for yourself. But this is just the tip of the iceberg, and much more is yet to come in part two of this investigative series.

A 2007 breakdown of organ prices on the black market. Photo: ACAMS Today