Human Beings Disassembled “Like Legos”
Part 2 of an investigative report on human trafficking in Ukraine
In part one of this series, we heard from a Syrian medical student who said that he had personally harvested organs from Ukrainian soldiers and from civilians who did not always give their permission and were not always suffering from life-threatening injuries. We also heard from a former officer of the Security Services of Ukraine (SBU) who was assigned to guard the “black transplantologists” as they traveled from one war-torn town to another, harvesting organs. And we saw video of a man who appears to be a doctor at an “organ market” talking to a prospective client about the cost of a bone-marrow transplant for his son.
The three videos featured in part one were all in Russian, and Russian media was quoted throughout the article. It’s your choice to believe what you see or dismiss it as propaganda. But you may also want to consider the following.
Sonja Van den Ende, a Dutch journalist who reports regularly from the war-torn Donbass region, has also written extensively about organ harvesting in Ukraine. Her most recent article appeared on Devend Online on January 9th of this year, just three days after mine. It was titled, “Ukrainian Front-line Soldiers or Guinea Pigs for the West?”
She also wrote about the Dutch doctor, whom I named in my article “Elizabeth de Brück,” which was derived from Russian-language articles and therefore spelled incorrectly when transliterated into English. Van den Ende writes that her name is “Elisabeth or Elizabeth or Liesbet de Bruin, the Russians call her de Bru, her name is difficult to pronounce for non-Dutch speakers.”
On December 14th, 2022, Van den Ende reported Russian hackers from a group known as the Anarchist Kombatants “gained access to the lists of 35,382 Ukrainian servicemen who are listed as ‘missing’” by hacking into the website of the Ukrainian military command. It was then reported in Russian media that at least a third of Ukrainian soldiers were “missing in action” (MIA) because the Ukrainian military was unable or unwilling to properly collect the dead and register them as having died in combat. Additionally, it was reported that Ukrainians were actively cremating bodies in the field. This means that the actual numbers of casualties can be kept hidden and compensation to next of kin can be delayed or avoided completely and, instead, shared among officers and senior military officials.
The thousands of dying or freshly dead Ukrainian soldiers not properly accounted must have been a feast which the so-called “black transplantologists” could not refuse, and so they allegedly flocked in from all over Europe to reap the harvest of illegal organs and other body parts. After all, a patient who is in desperate need of a heart, or a kidney, or another vital organ is unlikely to ask about its origins.
According to Van den Ende’s article, groups of these butchers, like the one allegedly run by Elizabeth de Bruin, operate along the entire front, paying between $150 and $200 for the body of a dead or wounded fighter ready for “disassembly.” And in addition to these front-line medical centers, hospitals in the capitals of the regions are also used for these operations.
On January 5th of this year, the website Antisemitism.org reported that Ukraine “harvests organs from prisoners and transfers them to Israel.” The article picked up on an interview given by Dr. Vladimir Ovchinsky, adviser to the Russian Minister of Internal Affairs. Ovchinsky previously served as a senior police officer in Russia’s Interpol where he gained the rank of Major General. He is also an author of books on combating organized crime. But the writer of the article in Antisemitism failed to pick up on the most important points of Ovchinsky’s interview, which I will summarize here.
In the original interview, Ovchinsky told the popular Russian news outlet, Moskovskij Komsomolets, that “since February, 2022, there has been constant information from Ukraine that large quantities of medical equipment, including containers for transporting human organs, are being delivered to units of the AFU [Armed Forces of Ukraine]. At the same time, there is evidence that ‘black transplantologists’ are already actively removing human organs from dead, wounded and even healthy people. Healthy people — that is, the donors — are Russian prisoners or their own civilians, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
When he was asked what Ukraine does with the bodies, Ovchinsky replied, “They burn them. Nobody cancelled the experience of Auschwitz or, say, Dachau. And the Banderites are direct heirs of Hitler. There is information about mobile crematoriums to destroy the remains of people whose organs are removed.”
In fact, Veterans Today published an article in February, 2022, about these crematoriums from Israel and reported that they caused a wave of “panic” among the units of the Ukrainian armed forces stationed along the Donbass republics. “Cases of desertion and suicide among soldiers, kept secret by their commanders, began to accumulate. But their fears are based on true stories that originated back in 2014,” the article stated.
And the story may go back even further than that, as we shall soon see.
Ovchinsky continues: “There is every reason to believe that under the guise of international humanitarian organizations, black medical business networks have flourished in Ukraine. The facts of the illegal removal of human organs under the cover of the SBU and the Ukrainian armed forces were documented back in 2014 during the civil-military conflict in Donbass.”
Indeed, if you read part one of this investigative series, the medical student from Syria claims to have harvested organs from bodies taken from Odessa on the second of May, the same day that thousands of neo-Nazis and raging football fans were bussed into the city and attacked a group of mostly Russian-speaking activists who had gathered outside the Trade Union Building to protest what they believed was a coup d’état at Maidan that same year.
The protesters were driven into the building, which was set on fire with Molotov cocktails thrown by the mob outside. Countless videos posted on YouTube and other social media captured the moments when the people trapped in the burning building tried to escape the flames by jumping out windows, only to be gunned down or beaten by those outside. 48 people died that day and around 300 more were injured. Others were “taken away” by police.
The Syrian student, as we read in part one, said that the “black transplantologists” were waiting for those bodies, which their bosses knew would come. And all the legal groundwork had been laid out in advance as well, according to Ovchinsky.
“The Ukrainian authorities prepared all the conditions for the work of ‘black transplantologists’ operating under the cover of a well-known medical non-governmental organization on the territory of Ukraine. They have adopted all the necessary and appropriate regulations and laws for unhindered work on the territory of the country. Of course, at first everything looked quite decent.”
Ovchinsky believes that the dark practice of organ harvesting from the battlefield has been going on since at least the late 90’s, following the war in Kosovo, right under the noses of government organizations and some of the largest humanitarian groups in the world. He referred to a 2009 report: “Inhuman Treatment of People and Illicit Trafficking in Human Organs in Kosovo” by Deputy Dick Marty of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).
The summary of the report says, “organs were removed from some prisoners at a clinic on Albanian territory, near Fushë-Krujë, to be taken abroad for transplantation. Although some concrete evidence of such trafficking already existed at the beginning of the decade, the international authorities in charge of the region did not consider it necessary to conduct a detailed examination of these circumstances, or did so incompletely and superficially.”
The report goes on to state that the organ harvesting was “committed by members of the ‘Kosovo Liberation Army’ (KLA) militia against Serbian nationals who had remained in Kosovo at the end of the armed conflict and been taken prisoner.” And according to investigators, “numerous concrete and convergent indications confirm that some Serbians and some Albanian Kosovars were held prisoner in secret places of detention under KLA control in northern Albania and were subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, before ultimately disappearing.”
Then, the report continues: “The question which, from the humanitarian viewpoint, remains the most acute and sensitive is that of missing persons. Of more than 6,000 disappearances on which the International Committee of the Red Cross has opened files, approximately 1,400 individuals have been found alive and 2,500 corpses have been found and identified. For the most part, these were Albanian Kosovar victims found in mass graves in regions under Serbian control and in Kosovo.”
That leaves more than 2,000 individuals unaccounted for. And it’s noteworthy that cooperation between the various international organizations involved and the authorities in Kosovo and Albania is deemed “insufficient” by the report, which states: “Whereas Serbia ultimately co-operated, it has proved far more complicated to carry out excavations on the territory of Kosovo, and has been impossible, at least so far, on Albanian territory. Cooperation by the Kosovar authorities is particularly lacking in respect of the search for the almost 500 persons who officially disappeared after the end of the conflict.”
In his own statements, Dep. Marty concluded that international agencies and governments of “western countries that engaged themselves in Kosovo” were selective in how they prosecuted war crimes, focusing on the crimes of the Serbs while choosing “to turn a blind eye to the war crimes of the KLA, placing a premium instead on achieving some degree of short-term stability.”
In his concluding statements, Marty said that “The overall picture that emerges from our inquiry differs dramatically in several respects from the conventional portrayal of the Kosovo conflict.” He drew up a detailed picture of the Kosovo conflict in which not just the Serbs, but the US-backed rebels from Kosovo, were guilty of war crimes, but that for the most part, only the war crimes of the Serbs were ever brought to justice.
“Everyone in Kosovo is aware of what happened and of the current situation,” Marty stated, “but people do not talk about it, except in private; they have been waiting for years for the truth — the whole truth, rather than the official version — to be laid bare. Our sole aim today is to serve as spokespersons for those men and women from Kosovo, as well as those from Serbia and Albania, who, regardless of their ethnic or religious backgrounds, simply aspire to the truth and to an end to scandalous impunity, with no greater wish than to be able to live in peace.”
In 2018, the Washington Post ran an article about the arrest of an Israeli doctor, Moshe Harel, who was captured in Cyprus in 2008 in connection with alleged black-market organ harvesting at a clinic on the outskirts of Kosovo known as Medicus. According to the WaPo article, a raid of the clinic turned up “records detailing numerous kidney exchanges, with many clients traveling from across the world, including Canada, Germany and Poland, for the illegally harvested organs.”
The Guardian reported that Medicus was run by a prominent Kosovar urologist named Lutfi Dervishi, and his son, Arban. And the article referenced an indictment for a Turkish surgeon named Yusuf Ercin Sonmez, known as “Doctor Vulture,” who allegedly performed transplants at the clinic after he was banned from practicing medicine in his home country.
“Medicus was one of a constellation of clinics operated by Sonmez, Harel and others,” Jonathan Ratel, prosecutor for the EU’s rule-of-law mission in Kosovo, told the Irish Times in 2013. “We found clinics in Azerbaijan and other places and we believe there may be one in South Africa.”
Returning to General Ovchinsky’s interview, the Russian adviser also claimed that “the Albanian leadership” was involved in organ trafficking with “Bernard Kushner’s blessing,” according to reports in Serbian media.
Kushner is a French-born doctor and also a diplomat who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs in France from 2007 to 2010 and was appointed by the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in July 1999 as first special representative and head of the UN Transitional Administration in Kosovo, where he was involved with the organization of the local civilian administration.
Interestingly, in March of 2015, the very same Bernard Kouchner became involved in the development of the Ukrainian Modernization Agency, where he headed up a team working on a plan to modernize Ukraine’s healthcare.
And that, Ovchinsky believes, is when opportunities in Ukraine began to arise for the “black transplantologists.” Especially when the COVID-19 pandemic began a few years later and the number of organ transplants in the world was in a steep decline. The need for organ donors had never been higher, with 21 people in the US dying every day waiting for an organ.
Breakthroughs in medical science over the past decade have made it possible to transplant almost any organ — liver, kidney, pancreas, heart, lung, intestines, corneas, middle ear, skin, bone, bone marrow, heart valves, connective tissue. There are also multiple structure transplants, which may include skin, uterus, bone, muscle, blood vessels, nerves, and connective tissue.
“In fact,” Ovchinsky said, “new technologies make it possible to disassemble a person completely, like a Lego set. Moreover, a disassembled human being costs more than a whole human being. The only question is where to get these parts and where the assembly shops are located.”
According to Gen. Ovchinsky, the most powerful and successful “workshops” are in Turkey, Israel, India and South Korea. Indeed, this correlates to what is published by sites such as Clinics on Call and MediGlobus, which rate transplant centers around the world. The countries mentioned by Ovchinsky are included along with Germany as the best in the world.
Ovchinsky believes that the countries he mentioned have even surpassed Germany and Switzerland as the most developed countries for organ transplantation, and especially, cross-organ transplantation — which helps people to circumvent the long wait for a viable organ.
Additionally, the transportation of human organs has been revolutionized by an American company called Transmedics. Instead of placing organs on ice, which allows only a limited amount of time for the organ to reach its recipient and limits the distance from which a donor organ can come, organs can now be heated to the point that the organ “does not know” it has left its host. From the moment the organ is removed from the donor, to the moment when a surgeon implants it into the recipient, the organ continues to function as if nothing happened.
“Just imagine,” Ovchinsky said, “hearts waiting for a transplant — beating, kidneys producing urine, and a liver — bile! Warm blood is pumped through them. Everything is just like inside the body. This is so-called blockchain technology.”
And in Toronto, Canada, researchers have demonstrated that drones can deliver organs more quickly, since they are not encumbered by traffic jams or other unforeseen delays and can be sent even to hospitals which have no helipads.
But this life-saving technology, which can do so much good in the world, has a dark side, which Ovchinsky believes, was present during the conflict in Kosovo and is now present in Ukraine. “And the money laundering scheme is exactly the same as in drugs and weapons trafficking. Blockchain, as a decentralized technology, makes it possible to synchronize data and records in a distributed network and operate beyond territorial boundaries and ‘over’ national jurisdictions. ‘Black transplants’ and human organ transporters become virtually invulnerable with pre-packaged documents.”
Ovchinsky predicts that if the Ukrainian Nazis are able to seize power, they will build concentration camps for dissenters, where instead of gassing prisoners like the German Nazis did, and then cremating them, people will instead be systematically dismantled for organs and tissues.
“And their patrons in the United States and Europe will assist them in this in every way possible, both technologically and informationally. Nothing personal, just business,” Ovchinsky said.
Those are Ovchinsky’s conclusions, but of course you may draw your own. The important thing to hold onto here is that the facts of his interview can be verified in this article and in others.
It would seem, based on what we have reviewed so far, that not only have wars become a treasure trove for black market organ traffickers, but that the harvesting of organs from casualties of war has been going on for decades and the medics who take part in these mass harvests of organs in war-torn regions have grown quite proficient, removing and packing organs within minutes and disassembling human beings in a startlingly short time.
It also seems apparent that the rank-and-file Ukrainian military is not directly involved in the organ harvests, which are performed without permission and often in secret, according to the testimonies we read. Those doing the harvesting appear to swoop in from foreign countries like vultures whenever there is a conflict.
It makes sense. War, after all, is more about money than it is about “freedom” or “democracy,” no matter how patriotic the pundits may sound when they raise their battle cry. Weapons manufacturers and military contractors make untold billions from wars, so why shouldn’t the healthcare industry, or at least its dark underbelly, also make a profit?
This concludes part two of an investigative series on human trafficking in Ukraine. You can read part one here and part three here.
About the author:
Deborah Armstrong currently writes about geopolitics with an emphasis on Russia. She previously worked in local TV news in the United States where she won two regional Emmy Awards. In the early 1990’s, Deborah lived in the Soviet Union during its final days and worked as a television consultant at Leningrad Television.