When I began investigating the kidnapping of children in Artyomovsk by Ukraine, I had no idea of the extent to which I would uncover trafficking on an international scale and the sordid methods used to supply children to paedophile networks and organ traffickers.
Flashback. In April 2023, I interviewed a refugee from Artyomovsk, Yulia, who told me that as well as having mined and blown up their building, Ukrainian units, specifically “Phoenix” and “White Angels”, were kidnapping children in the town. This information immediately caught my attention, and I decided to investigate further to find out why Kiev was taking children away from their parents in this way.
On the very day I was conducting this interview, Russian colleagues were interviewing a little girl from Artyomovsk, whom the “White Angels” had tried to kidnap from her grandparents, claiming that her mother was dead, and that they were to take her to Germany. It was clear to me that these children kidnapped by Ukraine in Donbass were then sent abroad for all sorts of sordid trafficking, from organ trafficking to paedophile networks. Because the Donbass inhabitants have never been able to assert their rights concerning the war crimes committed against them by Ukraine since 2014 within the international justice bodies, Kiev enjoys total immunity at the ICC and the ECHR with regard to the crimes it may commit against the children of the region.
A few days later, other refugees from Artyomovsk confirmed the child abductions, and I discovered that the same methods were being used in other towns such as Avdeyevka (and now similar information is coming in from Kupyansk).
The last refugee from Artyomovsk we interviewed, Katya, confirmed the abduction of children by the “White Angels”, and explained that when the parents of abducted children called them to find out where they were, they claimed not to know anything about it.
Watch Katya’s interview with English subtitles (we have blurred her face for the safety of her relatives still living in Ukraine):
Katya also told us that before the battle of Artyomovsk, they had never seen organisations like the “White Angels” in the town. These child abduction units only appeared once the fighting had started. In other words, once the city was in a state of general chaos, and the inhabitants could no longer turn to the courts to assert their parental rights. An ideal situation for traffickers of all kinds.
And their modus operandi was revealed at the 27 July 2023 conference on Ukraine’s crimes against the Donbass children, held in the DPR (Donetsk People’s Republic). A woman, Liliya, and her daughter, Kira, gave evidence of how, at the start of the special military operation, around ten children were taken from a school in Schastye (then under Ukrainian control) in the LPR (Lugansk People’s Republic) to western Ukraine by the headmistress of the school, on orders from Kiev, without informing their parents.
See the video of the conference with English subtitles:
The children were even forbidden to call their parents to tell them where they were. But Kira knew her mother’s telephone number by heart and managed to call her to let her know that they were in Lvov and then Khust. Thanks to Liliya’s determination to find her daughter (she went to look for her in western Ukraine), we discovered how Kiev ‘exports’ the children it abducts.
The children taken from the school in Schastye had been taken away without any identity documents (they were not yet old enough to have passports, and their birth certificates were with their parents). When she got her daughter back, Liliya discovered that they had produced a new “original” birth certificate for Kira, who had been declared an orphan (even though her mother is alive and well)! According to Kira, the group of children with the new documents were to be sent to Poland!
Without the perseverance of Kira and her mother, no one would have known where and how the children had been taken. This is how Ukraine makes the children it abducts disappear, preventing anyone from finding out what happens to them: the parents are not informed of anything, the children are forbidden to contact them, and they are given false papers (that’s the best way to describe it, given that it’s impossible for the authorities to produce an original birth certificate when it’s in the hands of the parents) and declared to be orphans, before being sent abroad.
This is surely what happened to the children of Nikolayevka, who were taken to a holiday camp to “shelter” them, but whose parents now have no news of them.
Why use such illegal methods if the real aim is simply to shelter these children from the war? Well, because there is nothing legal about the real aim.
At the conference, Vasily Prozorov, a former employee of the SBU (Ukrainian intelligence services) explained that one of his investigations had revealed that some of the children abducted by Ukraine are sent to paedophile networks in Great Britain, via a whole network of Ukrainian and British officials or former officials who work together. At the heart of it all is one man, Sergey Borisov, a former SBU agent who was arrested in 2020 for kidnapping entrepreneurs for ransom! Strangely enough, he and his entire gang were released on bail in 2021, and here he is again, trafficking Ukrainian children to the UK! On the British side, members of MI6 and the Foreign Office are involved.
This is hardly surprising when you remember that in recent years there have been several scandals involving networks exploiting children in Great Britain, and paedophiles in the British establishment (such as Sir Jimmy Savile, whose crimes were covered up for years). And in 2021, the UK’s National Crime Agency (the NCA) stated that there would be between 550,000 and 850,000 paedophiles in Britain! In other words, there’s no shortage of customers, including very high-ranking people, for the paedophile networks that kidnap children in Ukraine.
Another investigation carried out by Vasily Prozorov revealed that several organisations registered in EU countries are also involved in ‘exporting’ children from Ukraine under the pretext of providing them with shelter. These organisations take unaccompanied Ukrainian children out of Ukraine. What happens to them afterwards is unknown. However, as early as 2022, several Western media, including Deutsche Welle and The Guardian, reported that Ukrainian children “evacuated” abroad had disappeared.
It is not only in the UK that Ukrainian children are at risk of falling into the hands of paedophile networks. In May 2023, a 52-year-old Ukrainian refugee was arrested in Poznan, Poland, for renting out children in her care to paedophiles. She adopted 10 children aged between 4 and 16. Investigators discovered that the woman rented out the children to paedophiles in Ukraine and Poland. Worse still, while the clients were abusing the children, she stood next to them to make sure they kept to the time limit (the sessions lasted 20 minutes).
In April 2022, a group of around thirty Ukrainian children disappeared in Spain on their way to the Canary Islands. That same month, an investigation was opened in Lithuania into potential child trafficking at a private Ukrainian orphanage, Perlinka, from which 43 children had been evacuated to the Baltic country. Several of the children, including girls, had complained of threats to send them to work in brothels, or that there were plans to send them to other countries, including the United States. When Ukraine demanded the return of these children, several sought asylum in Lithuania for fear of reprisals or being sent who knows where.
And paedophile networks are not the only threat hanging over Ukrainian children. In June 2023, a man was arrested in Transcarpathia while trying to take a baby to Slovakia. The man had bought the baby from its mother and was planning to sell it to organ traffickers! He had already sold and transported at least three other children in this way!
For those who think this is Russian disinformation, even the Ukrainian press and the Daily Mail have reported on this affair!
And the disappearances of Ukrainian children used for their organs are nothing new. In 2005, a journalist from The Globe and Mail wrote an article condemning the discovery in Kharkov of a mass grave containing the bodies of babies and foetuses without their vital organs! Mothers complained that hospital staff had taken their babies at the moment of birth and then returned later to tell them that they had supposedly been stillborn. A very practical method of fuelling child trafficking.
And since December 2021, organ trafficking in Ukraine has been facilitated by the passing of a law that abolished the obligation to have the organ removal authorisation signed by the donor, his parents or his legal representative authenticated by a notary. The pattern then becomes very clear: children are abducted, provided with new “original” documents and declared orphans, so that they can be placed under State guardianship or adopted by who knows who. These new guardians can then sign an organ harvesting authorisation, which no longer needs to be authenticated by a notary, and the deal is done.
In the light of all this information, it is high time that international organisations for the protection of human rights, and especially children’s rights, seriously investigated the abduction of children in Ukraine, and the sordid trafficking (organ trafficking or paedophile networks) of which they are the victims.
It’s also time for people in the West to open their eyes to what is happening in Ukraine, with the active complicity of the country’s authorities, in terms of child trafficking! Officials in Ukraine are making money by selling children to Western paedophile networks and organ traffickers, thanks to the ongoing conflict! This is how Ukraine “repays” its debt to the Western countries that supply it with arms and funding: by selling the children it steals from the Donbass and other regions where fighting is taking place, for their organs, or to satisfy the fantasies of high-ranking paedocriminals.
Christelle Néant
Translation: Яннис В.Зброек
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