Ukraine has become a world leader in black-market trafficking, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has claimed
Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova © Ekaterina Chesnokova; RIA Novosti
[RT] Russia's
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman has alleged that members of Ukrainian
President Vladimir Zelensky’s administration are personally engaged in,
and are covering up, the illicit export of human organs.
In an article
published on the Foreign Ministry's website, Maria Zakharova cited
media reports suggesting that the organs of killed Ukrainian soldiers,
such as hearts, kidneys and livers, have been appearing on some of the
biggest marketplaces of the dark net, with prices starting at €5,000
($5,500). One dealer allegedly claimed that it takes 48-60 hours to
receive any desired organ in a medical box, with deliveries limited to
EU countries.
Zakharova noted that organs were also being traded
offline, citing reports from June that representatives of a health
ministry in a NATO country had struck a deal with some “private businessmen”
who were assisted by Ukraine’s Health Ministry and Presidential Office
to deliver a refrigerated train car full of human organs and body parts.
According
to the spokeswoman, organ trafficking in Ukraine has boomed since the
authorities in Kiev passed a number of laws that “drastically simplified the work of transplant specialists in the country.”
Specifically,
Zakharova pointed to last year’s Law No. 5610, which exempted
transplantation from value-added tax, and the December 2021 Law No.
5831, which removed the need to notarise the written consent or
authenticate the signature of a living donor to give up their organs.
In
an explanatory note attached to the 2021 bill, Ukrainian lawmakers
explained the simplification of the country’s organ transplant
regulations by the need to increase the efficiency of the
transplantation system, in order to save more lives. Additionally,
Ukrainian law prohibits buying or selling human anatomical materials and
bans the harvesting of organs from orphaned children, unidentified
persons, or people who died in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Nevertheless, Zakharova claimed that according to experts, Ukrainian
organ sellers are not able to specify the origin of biomaterial that
they schedule for delivery. It’s apparently believed that many of these
organs are supplied by black-market transplant specialists, who
illegally remove them from the bodies of dead soldiers and burn the
unclaimed remains.
Zakharova claimed that such suspicions are
backed by the high death rate and the large number of missing Ukrainian
soldiers, as well the shortage of specialists and reagents for studying
corpses in Ukraine.
“This allows these criminals to cover their tracks and send human organs and body parts to the western regions of Ukraine, where they are prepared to be sent abroad for transplants,” she said.