We know, we know, when one sees a headline like this, it immediately falls in to the "too gross to be true" category. Your heart doesn't want to believe it.
Then you start thinking, this must be some kind of smear propaganda op.
But when we examined this submission from one of our contributors, we had to admit that the facts and arguments are worthy of serious consideration. It comes from Mark Chapman, who writes a well-respected blog on Russia issues. We can't give it the imprimature of fact the way a large news organization could, because we are just a group of volunteers, doing this in our free time.
Hey mainstream media, look at this as a friendly tip. You actually have paid professionals on your staff. Why not put an investigative journalist on this and get to the bottom of it?
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It's a story that won't die.
Bodies of dead Ukrainian soldiers found with their stomachs cut open and organs missing. Ukraine's heroes, lauded in nearly every conversation in Kiev and western Ukraine – "Slava Ukraina, Geroyim Slava" – plundered of their hearts and kidneys and livers, for transplant into the living who can afford to pay.
Profits to be reaped from such trade, in the order of 10 times the investment even when the broker has to pay a poor donor who will sell a kidney to lift himself out of poverty.
From a generous crop of the newly-dead who cannot speak for themselves - lucrative indeed.
Mass graves are said to have been found in the Donetsk region, apparently of civilians with their hands bound behind them, shot in the head, the bodies showing evidence of torture before the coup de grace was administered. Some of them have been decapitated. Some of these, too, are said to be cut open and missing organs.
You will have to dig deep, though, to find any information on that, or at least that is my prediction. Because the U.S. State Department, in a move which would be outrageous if it were not so predictable, has turned the investigation of these allegations over to the very authority which was in all likelihood behind it – the Ukrainian government.
Allegations of the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers being used to service the contraband organ trade have surfaced earlier in this conflict. StopFake, a site which moves quickly to discredit stories which might reflect badly on the Ukrainian government – and sometimes plants false stories or strawmen so as to roundly demolish them and enhance its own credibility - was on this one quickly.
However, its hypothesis that the story is a ridiculous fabrication because organs must be removed as soon as possible after death, refrigerated in special containers and expressed out of the battle zone is challenged by New Eastern Outlook's Tony Cartalucci.
Tony, who runs a popular blog called "Land Destroyer", and whose analysis has regularly been very reliable despite its chilly reception by western governments, describes testimony by employees of international airports such as Boryspil, which recount sightings of many small chartered aircraft loaded with special refrigerators used for transporting human organs. Additionally, specially-equipped vehicles and modern ambulances have been observed in close proximity to Ukrainian army hospitals. Although ambulances near a hospital is hardly a shocker, it has been widely reported that Kiev cannot even provide its soldiers with proper uniforms or adequate food, so the no-expense-spared trimmings around the hospitals looks somewhat suspicious.
Especially given Ukraine's sordid history in the organ-trafficking trade. In 2010, four surgeons and four unnamed others were arrested by the Ukrainian interior ministry (article from the Guardian) for trafficking in human organs, most of them kidneys taken from impoverished young women. These desperate women were paid about $10,000.00 for a healthy kidney, which was then transplanted into a recipient in an operation which cost the recipient $200,000.00. Nice work if you can get it. This investigation later widened to include 12 people, operating in a ring headed by a Ukrainian-born Israeli man.
Apart from his other sensible reasoning, Cartalucci makes one other excellent point – social-media accounts of illegal organ harvesting are pooh-poohed by western outlets such as the BBC as the product of too much TV and some overheated imaginations. "These would be the same 'social networks' frequently cited by the Western media to substantiate claims made against the targeted governments of Libya and Syria.
Now that Western interests are backing a regime trying to consolidate its power against armed fighters, such stories are 'wild' and unworthy of further investigation", says Cartalucci.
