Do Ukrainian doctors sell the organs of wounded soldiers and children on the black market? No, that's not true: False claims about organ trafficking have been circulating in Ukraine since 2014 and keep resurfacing on a regular basis. A misinformation trend on a black market trade in children's organs appeared in 2022.
The claim reappeared in a video (archived here) published on TikTok by the account mogilevnewsby on April 16, 2023, under the title "Ukraine has become the main supplier of human organs to the West."
It opened:
Could Ukrainians dream of finally joining the EU? Unfortunately, in pieces.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Apr 19 07:59:10 2023 UTC)
Organ transplantation is a complex, highly-specialized and time-sensitive medical procedure in which an organ is removed from one body and placed in the body of another person to replace a missing or damaged organ. It would be impossible to perform the procedure out in a combat zone. According to Oleksandr Usenko, Director of the Ukrainian A. A. Shalimov National Institute of Surgery and Transplantology, the organ transplantation procedure requires a large team of experienced specialists and a technologically sound medical infrastructure, which does not exist in the field.
The viability of transplanting organs is highly time-sensitive and there are strict safety standards to follow: potential donors must be thoroughly examined before surgery to eliminate possible risks related to the procedure. It is necessary to act very quickly, in a safe and clean environment, with a highly-specialized team. This would be impossible to achieve in a war zone.
