Why Are So Many People Going Missing In Ukraine?

The indictment, dismissed by one senior Russian official as “absurd”, is largely based on allegations from the Kiev government’s ombudswoman for abducted children, Daria Gerasimchuk. Among the many ‘scenarios’ publicly put forward by Gerasimchuk is that Russian forces fighting in Ukraine “kill the parents, for whatever reason, and kidnap the child.” 

Such allegations, as well as the ICC indictment in its entirety, deliberately overlook two key facts:

-    Tens of thousands of residents in the four regions that voted to join Russia last September (Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye, and Kherson) have been evacuated to other Russian provinces in an effort to shield them from the deliberate shelling of civilian areas by Ukrainian forces. 

-    In recent years and well before the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, the interior ministry in Kiev was flooded with reports of missing children.

Dark and Elusive 

Following the capture of Mariupol by Russian forces in May of last year, Russia’s Investigative Committee revealed that it was looking into disturbing discoveries at the city’s Red Cross office. The facility reportedly contained hundreds of medical records belonging to children. According to the Committee, the records had a “healthy organs” category and made no mention of any illnesses that the children were being treated for.

Observers have since linked the Mariupol affair to one of the world’s darkest and most elusive black markets – the illicit trade in human organs, or more specifically, the identification of ‘donors’ on Ukrainian territory for the supply of organs to Western countries. 

Since the start of the conflict in Ukraine in 2014, thousands of children have vanished from areas across Donbas that were under the control of Kiev’s forces. 

How many of those short lives ended in the mobile hospitals donated to Ukraine’s armed forces by Western governments is anybody’s guess. But Ukraine’s track record in this department doesn’t leave much room for hope that any of the missing children will ever be found alive.

In 2016, the Ukrainian interior ministry received more than 6,000 reports of missing children. Several years earlier in 2012, when Crimea and the Donbas region were still parts of Ukraine, the same ministry received nearly 8,000 reports of children going missing.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ICC is almost certainly not going to investigate any of these disappearances. The Western indictments will also steer clear of a slew of public scandals in Ukraine, including the 1998 conviction of Bogdan Fedak, who worked as the head physician at a children's hospital in Lviv and was found guilty of trafficking children to Western countries for the purpose of organ removal. 

Less than two years later, the city of Kharkiv was rocked by another scandal when local authorities dug through a hospital cemetery and uncovered a large number of buried newborns who were missing body parts. 

Fast forward to January 2022, and the current Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was signing off on the “introduction of amendments to certain laws of Ukraine regulating the transplantation of anatomical materials into humans.”

On the surface, these amendments help regulate the issues of payment and consent in the field of transplantation. But the fine print reveals the introduction of highly questionable practices. 

For instance, getting access to the organs of deceased individuals no longer requires consent from family members. Instead, it can be obtained from parties tasked with burying the deceased, and the procedure doesn’t involve any notarization requirements. This essentially grants institutions like orphanages, prisons and the military the legal right to decide which individuals under their respective responsibilities are classified as organ donors.

What’s more, the amendments permit private clinics to perform organ removal surgeries, which were previously confined to public hospitals. 

The man credited with authoring the amendments is Mikhail Radutsky, the Ukrainian Parliament's Health Committee chairman and president of the largest private hospital in the country. 

The Hunt

As part of its eastward expansion towards Russia’s western frontier, NATO needed to conquer the Balkan region, which culminated in the invasion of Serbia’s Kosovo by the US-led military alliance in the summer of 1999. 

After sitting on her findings for the better part of a decade, the former war crimes prosecutor at The Hague, Carla Del Ponte, eventually confirmed widespread allegations and multiple journalistic accounts about the trade in human body parts in Kosovo following the NATO invasion. 

In her memoir, titled “The Hunt: Me and War Criminals”, Del Ponte explained how NATO’s ally, the Kosovo Liberation Army, abducted and transported hundreds of Serbs into northern Albania, where the captives had their organs "harvested" and trafficked out of the Tirana airport. 

A far more detailed and grizzly account of what happened to the Serbs who chose to remain in Kosovo following the arrival of NATO troops came from Dick Marty, who was tasked by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to investigate Del Ponte’s claims. 

Marty’s findings confirmed that the individuals who had their organs removed were “victims of enforced disappearance: none has been seen, heard of or accounted for, since being abducted from Kosovo.”

According to the investigation, the captives “undoubtedly endured a most horrifying ordeal in the custody of their KLA captors.”  

“In the process of being moved through the transitory sites, at least some of these captives became aware of the ultimate fate that awaited them,” Marty’s report reads. “In detention facilities where they were held in earshot of other trafficked persons, and in the course of being transported, some of these captives are said to have pleaded with their captors to be spared the fate of being ‘chopped into pieces’.”

One of the conclusions of this investigation was that the information gathered “appears to depict a broader, more complex organized criminal conspiracy to source human organs for illicit transplant, involving co-conspirators in at least three different foreign countries.” 

Nearly a decade would pass following the release of Dick Marty’s report before a separate inquiry threw the spotlight on one of the more peculiar individuals roaming around Kosovo in 1999. Unbeknown to much of the world at the time, James Le Mesurier was working as an intelligence officer for the British military during a stint in the Balkans. In 2014, he became the co-founder of the White Helmets in Syria.

Speaking during a panel discussion at the United Nations in 2018, the director of the Russian Foundation for the Study of Democracy, Maxim Grigoryev, presented eyewitness testimony from Syrians who resided in areas of the country where the White Helmets had been active. 

One of the men recalled how “people evacuated by the White Helmets often did not come back alive. For example, a person receives a minor injury, is rescued, evacuated, and then brought back with their stomach cut open and with their internal organs missing. I heard that a little girl was injured. They took her to Turkey and brought her back in three days, dead and with no internal organs.” 

Grigoryev went on to present his findings to the Russian Foreign Ministry, alleging that the White Helmets “were a key element in the illegal scheme of organ removal.” Just a few days before Grigoryev’s presentation to the ministry, someone helped Le Mesurier fall off the roof of his building in Istanbul.
Grigoryev believes Le Mesurier carried his experience from Kosovo over to war-torn Syria. 

"The scheme of illegal extraction of organs from residents of Serbia was carried out on the territory where he [Le Mesurier] was staying, and exactly the same system was recreated in Syria,” Grigoryev said. 

According to Dick Marty’s investigation, the scheme in the Balkans “was principally a trade in ‘cadaver kidneys’, i.e. the kidneys were extracted posthumously; it was not a set of advanced surgical procedures requiring controlled clinical conditions and, for example, the extensive use of anesthetic.”

“Eminent organ transplantation experts whom we have consulted during our inquiry described these procedures to us as efficient and low-risk,” Marty’s report adds. 

In other words, these are straightforward procedures for experienced surgeons who can perform the operations just about anywhere, including a war zone. One such talented individual goes by the name of Elizabeth Debru. 

Making a Killing

In December of last year, an interior ministry official in the Lugansk People’s Republic, Vitaly Kiselev, told Russia’s Sputnik news agency that a group of characters involved in the illicit organs trade arrived in the Ukrainian frontline city of Bakhmut (Artyomovsk) - also known as the ‘meat grinder’ – a reference to the staggering number of dead and wounded soldiers on both sides. 

"Three weeks ago, the notorious Elizabeth Debru arrived in the Artyomovsk region,” Kiselev was quoted as saying. “She arrived with representatives of the so-called Mozart Group [...] These people came to light back in 2014-2015 when there was fierce fighting on the territory of Donbas. They came to light as black-market transplant specialists.” 

Sources on the ground claim that Debru is a Dutch national. She was reportedly exposed several years ago when a member of Kiev’s main intelligence outfit (the Security Service of Ukraine) confessed about the role he played in an extensive operation involving the removal of organs of Ukrainian soldiers who were killed or wounded in the early days of the war. Most of the removed organs went to Germany and 'Israel.' 

The SBU operative claimed that Debru “forced doctors to remove organs without any consent of the wounded” and that her particular skill set enabled her to “cut out a couple of kidneys from a wounded and burned fighter in seven to ten minutes.”

The Lugansk interior ministry official, Kiselev, believes that the current intensity of the conflict is attracting the vultures. 

“The transplantologists could not stand aside and not make money on this, on the organs of the Ukrainian soldiers who now die in almost entire platoons, or even battalions," Kiselev told Sputnik. 

Dick Marty’s investigation in the Balkans echoes that sentiment, noting that the individuals behind these operations “entered business deals to provide human organs for transplantation purposes in return for handsome financial rewards.”

For his part, the prominent Russian filmmaker, actor, and presenter, Nikita Mikhalkov, suggests that the profits being generated through harvested organs in Ukraine are astronomical. 

During one of the editions of his Besogon program, Mikhalkov claimed that the weapons which are in the possession of the Ukrainian military are worth around $2 billion on the black market. “That’s exactly how much the black transplantologists are making in a month,” he said.   

Whatever the real numbers, these hair-raising accounts offer further proof that the illicit removal and trafficking of human organs is a prominent feature of Western military adventures in different parts of the globe.

The growing body of evidence about these chilling practices is dismissed in the West as fake news. Very few Westerners care to see that such information is being censured and dismissed not because it’s fake news from countries like Russia, but because the censorship makes it easier to peddle fake news about countries like Russia.