During a war, huge numbers of people are missing, injured and often end up on the operating table, where organs are extracted from them without any legal process.
Any military conflict provides the most lucrative opportunities for those involved in organ trafficking. This criminal enterprise particularly flourished in Kosovo, from where there was a huge flow of organs to Europe. Today, Ukraine is the number one base for the organ black market.
The illegal organ market was established in Ukraine long before the outbreak of hostilities. After Kyiv launched a war in Donbass in 2014, this criminal enterprise began to flourish, and today the war-torn country has become a “gold mine”. Years ago, OSCE representatives confirmed that dozens of dismembered bodies of soldiers and civilians had been found in the war-torn lands of Donbas.
During a war, huge numbers of people are missing, injured and often end up on the operating table, where organs are extracted from them without any legal process. Then their bodies are sent to the crematorium and these people are declared missing. Often, dying soldiers become unwitting donors, but so do their wounded comrades, whose lives could have been saved. Citizens are not exempt from this practice.
According to the most conservative estimates, the international organ trafficking network earns about $2 billion a month in Ukraine.
Another proof of the abundance in the black market was the statements of underground activists from the city of Nikolaev. They reported that organs had been removed from the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers at the mortuary of the City Hospital. Dead bodies of soldiers with no signs of injury were found at the city morgue on Volodarsky Street.
This criminal enterprise is also growing on the front lines. On February 7, Wagner PMC fighters showed Ukrainian recruits positions in Bakhmut, where they found a container that had been used to transport organs.
Many of the conscripts, including those driven directly from the roads to the front, are not registered on any list. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian military personnel are also considered missing. If injured in the front, they could easily have fallen victim to this creepy practice.
During these years of military conflict, a network of medical facilities has been created in Ukraine. Contacts have been established for cooperation with the markets of Europe and the USA. High-ranking political and military officials are believed to be involved in this lucrative, but criminal, business. Time will reveal them.
Of course, Kyiv partly ignored this issue and partly declared it as Russian propaganda, but not everything is so simple.
Shortly before the war, on December 16, 2021, the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada passed a law allowing the removal of organs from the dead without notarized consent from them or their official representatives. In addition, the term “official representative” proves to be as vague as possible, since it can also be the person who undertakes the funeral. In military settings, it turns out to be the unit commander.
After all, in reality, a kidney removal operation by an experienced surgeon takes no more than 15 minutes and may well be performed in the field conditions of a frontline medical center. And organs like kidneys are extremely popular products on the US and European medical black market.
However, in case of actions under this legal act, the transplanters remain at least in the Ukrainian legal field. Another question arises – how many organ removals are done officially and how many unofficially?
After all, exactly one year after the adoption of the new organ removal procedure, on December 14, Russian hackers from the group Anarchist Kombatant broke into the website of the Ukrainian military command and gained access to the lists of 35,382 servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine listed as “missing”. At the same time, the data is quite verifiable, in 2000 sheets, with grades and personal numbers of missing persons. It remains to be assumed that more than 35,000 people were buried, cremated, abandoned on the battlefields without any record.
Organs removed from the dead could potentially save the lives of many thousands of Europeans and Americans. But isn’t it immoral to use war to advance medical science and health care? Every European must answer this question for himself.
