CHISINAU, Moldova – Konstantin is desperate. His daughter is sick and needs an operation abroad costing thousands of dollars. The 30-year-old father sees one option left – to sell part of his body.
“I am willing to sell my kidney, in the worst case bone marrow,” he writes in an advertisement on a Ukrainian website, naming his price as 25,000 euros.
“Please help!” he signs off.
Konstantin is part of a growing trend in Ukraine and its neighboring former Soviet countries to sell organs for cash. Some donors are tempted by the chance to make a quick buck. Others are tricked into the illegal organ trade, recruited by intermediaries who then sell their body parts at a huge profit.
I am urgently selling my kidney, a part of my liver or spinal marrow. 25 years old. I don’t drink or have any sexually transmitted diseases. The price is $45,000.
– Post on a Ukrainian website.
“Medicine is business, and it always will be,” said Ruslan Salyutin, who is in charge of coordinating organ transplants at Ukraine’s Health Ministry.
A search on the Internet shows there is no shortage of people openly hawking body parts.
“I am urgently selling my kidney, a part of my liver or spinal marrow. 25 years old. I don’t drink or have any sexually transmitted diseases. The price is $45,000,” reads one post on a Ukrainian website.
Offers another: “I am selling the liver of a 16-year-old boy. He is healthy, he doesn’t drink. The price is 60,000 hryvnias ($7,500). Mirgorod, Poltava region.”
Nicolae Brdan of Molodova shows marks from where a kidney was removed. (Nikolae Pozhoha)
The donors are primarily from Ukraine, Russia, Moldova and other former Soviet countries, where poverty makes the allure of a large paycheck much brighter.
According to human rights activists, intermediaries buy kidneys for anything from a few hundred dollars to $10,000, before selling them on at five to 10 times the price.
The donors are often volunteers, desperate for cash by any means. Others are trafficked abroad by recruiters who trick or force them into leaving Ukraine and going to countries where donating organs to non-relatives is legal.
Nicolae Brdan is one such victim. He left his impoverished Moldovan village in 2000 having been promised a job in Turkey.
Arriving there in a group of people from Moldova, Ukraine’s western neighbor and Europe’s poorest country, his passport was seized from him by the people who had recruited him.
They offered him only one way home – by selling one of his kidneys. “I hesitated for a month,” whispered Brdan, 35, through yellow teeth. “But I had no choice. You can’t come back without your documents.”
He had been tricked into going to Turkey by a woman in the neighboring village.
“Few come back,” said Marina Yevsyukova, director of the legal department of the human rights center La Strada Ukraine. She says the operations are often done unprofessionally, causing injury and even death to the victim: “Sometimes, they even cut out the victims’ hearts and both kidneys.”
Yevsyukova described a call to one of the center’s psychologists from a man who travelled to Israel to work as a nurse in a private clinic. One day, he found himself lying in a medical ward after an operation. Upon returning to Ukraine he went for a medical checkup and learned that he was missing a kidney.
Yevsyukova estimates several hundred Ukrainians are trafficked for organs every year, although she says it’s impossible to estimate the number of victims. As the crimes occur abroad, those that perform the operations are generally able to avoid being caught and prosecuted in Ukraine, where they could face prison sentences of five to seven years.
Those who recruit people to sell their bodily organs for transplants find fertile ground in impoverished rural areas, such as this village in Moldova. In Ukraine, hundreds of people – sometimes wittingly, sometimes not – get caught up in the trade. Meanwhile, a strong tradition of organ donation hasn’t taken root in Ukraine. (Nikolae Pozhoha)
The Interior Ministry reported last fall that it had broken a criminal network of organ traffickers, who for the past three years delivered organs from Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Ukraine and Moldova to Israeli recipients in Azerbaijan and Ecuador.
One of those accused is leading kidney-transplant surgeon Vladislav Zakordonets from the Shalimov Clinic, one of the most well-known transplant clinics in the country. Zakordonets, along with two other doctors from the clinic, are currently in detention while the case is under investigation.
“None of the alleged donors told Zakordonets: ‘You have recruited me, you have trafficked me and you have bought my organ,” his lawyer, Ihor Ivanov, told the Kyiv Post.
Zakordonets has told the Ukrainian press that he is not guilty because the operations took place in Azerbaijan, where organ donations from people other than close relatives is allowed.
Vasya Shopko, 12, hopes for a kidney transplant in Kyiv’s Shalimov Clinic. (Oleksiy Boyko)
Zarkordonets’ continued imprisonment means that one of his patients at the Shalimov Clinic had his transplant left incomplete.
The surgeon took out one of 12-year-old Vasya Sopko’s kidneys, and was supposed to remove the second and replace it with one of his grandmother’s, but was detained before he could.
The low level of transplant expertise in Ukraine means that there is no one at the clinic who can complete the operation.
Meanwhile, in Moldova, organ trafficking victim Brdan is struggling to survive. He had been promised $3,000, but was given $1,700, and then had to pay $100 for transport home – by bus, one week after the operation.
He can’t work, and the pain from his back, where his kidney was removed, has spread down his left leg. When he walks, he limps badly.
In his remote village, situated on Moldova’s border with Romania, he isn’t the only one suffering. Locals estimate that almost half the village’s inhabitants – as many as 18 people – have sold their kidneys after being tricked, like Brdan, by the promise of work in Turkey.
Anna Rotary, a 49-year-old cleaner, saw them go and return. “People needed money. Everybody needs money,” she says.
Kyiv Post staff writer Irina Sandul can be reached at [email protected]
