Moscow continues to push the discredited disinformation narrative that the Ukrainian state is systematically engaged in illicit organ harvesting. Russian officials and state-owned news outlets propagate speculations that Kyiv and the U.S. prolong the war to keep ongoing bioweapons experiments and uncontrolled organ harvesting.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova recently threaded these two propaganda lines together.

On Jan. 24, Zakharova claimed that Ukraine, with help from the West, was illicitly harvesting organs and selling them online.

She claimed that the U.S. deployed “Pentagon biolabs” to Ukraine “under the auspices of the Ukrainian Ministry of Health.”

“Ukraine was gradually turning into a testing ground for experiments of any quality with biolabs, obviously with organ trading,” she said.

On Jan. 25, Russian state-run media outlet Sputnik mirrored Zakharova’s allegations in a series of posts on the social media platform X.

Neither Zakharova nor Sputnik provided any documents or sources to support their claims.

One of Sputnik’s posts on X read, “How the West turned Ukraine into a global BLACK MARKET ORGAN TRADE HUB.”

Those claims are false.

Since first invading Ukraine in 2014, Russian disinformation efforts have focused on dehumanizing Ukrainians to damage their public support in the West, including by falsifying claims that Ukraine is engaged in systematic organ harvesting and biological experiments on their own people.

Concerning organ harvesting, Sputnik claimed on January 25 that, “Ukraine legalized organ harvesting from deceased individuals without consent in 2021, and private clinics now handle transplants, with organ sales abroad being legal.”

That is the opposite of reality. Ukraine’s parliament passed a bill legalizing posthumous organ transplantation after the death of the donor in 2018, on the condition the donor had provided consent. In the event where a donor had not provided their organ donor status, the law permits the family of the deceased to make a decision on organ donation.

Ukraine’s parliament adopted another law in December 2021 “to ensure the active development of the transplantation system in Ukraine,” and to address deficiencies in previous legislation to better facilitate the life-saving medical procedure.

That legislation provided legal grounds to introduce an online government portal where individuals can give lifetime consent or refusal to donate their organs in the case of death.

No part of that legislation legalized harvesting individuals’ organs without consent.

On Jan. 9, the Ukrainian parliament adopted another law prohibiting the transplanting of organs from the bodies of military and civilian casualties of the war from any area of Ukraine.

Previous legislation had only forbidden civilians and soldiers who died in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk from organ transplantation.

The law also prohibits removing organs from individuals who died from violent actions by security forces, and from orphaned children.

Zakharova alleged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had pushed through legislative acts to minimize monitoring and certification procedures, legalizing what she called “absolute lawlessness.”

Contrary to her speculations, Ukrainian legislation further enhances verification procedures for organ donation cases and provides for advanced oversight in selecting donors and reviewing transplantation procedures.

Russia began pushing organ harvesting conspiracy theories during Ukraine’s Euromaidan protests in 2014, which Russia used as a pretext to foment war in the country’s east and annex Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.

Russian media at that time falsely claimed that protest leaders were involved in the trafficking of human organs.

Russian media and officials, including Zakharova, have repeated variations of those accusations over the following decade.

Writing for Rossiyskaya Gazeta in August 2023, Zakharova claimed the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) found bodies in mass graves in Eastern Ukraine in 2014 whose internal organs had been taken and were likely the victims of illegal organ harvesting allegedly by the Ukrainians.

Sputnik repeated the same allegation.

In fact, the OSCE responded to similar Russian allegations at the time, stating in October 2014 that it “does not possess any evidence regarding possible organ harvesting in Eastern Ukraine.”

Other strains of this disinformation narrative include the baseless claim that the White Angels, a special unit of Ukraine’s National Police helping people evacuate from front-line areas, and the Ukrainian military were taking children to “harvest their organs,” or “deliver them to pedophiles.”

Russian state media also baselessly implicated the Ukrainian Red Cross Society in illegal activities involving children’s organs.

Russian officials have gone so far as to claim that the sale of children’s organs constitutes 7% of Ukraine’s economy.

Those and other false allegations regarding the harvesting of children’s organs corresponded with Russia forcibly deporting Ukraine children to Russia, a war crime that resulted in the International Criminal Court issuing an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, in March 2023.

Meanwhile, VOA has previously reported on the varied medical and logistical factors making the idea of a vast organ trafficking conspiracy in war-torn Ukraine impractical.

Likewise, there is no evidence that the mobile laboratories the U.S. provided to Ukraine to bolster its epidemiological surveillance capabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic, or any other laboratories the U.S. built or upgraded in Ukraine to better secure pathogens and toxins of security concern, were suitable facilities for organ transplantation or were developing bioweapons.

Source: voanews.com