DISINFO: Children's medical records found in Mariupol suggest an organ trafficking ring
SUMMARY
Hundreds of medical records with data on healthy children's organs have been discovered at a base of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Mariupol. Documents don’t mention any disease in the children, which suggests that those organs could have been apt for transplants.
RESPONSE
There is no evidence to back this very serious allegation against the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has been firmly denied and denounced by the organisation.
In the past, accusing others of organ trafficking has been a recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation technique, be it NATO, Syria’s White Helmets, the Ukrainian army with its own soldiers, or even Mikhail Sakhashvili’s wife. In April 2022, Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE), the country’s foreign signals intelligence agency, warned of an ongoing Russian campaign to promote the message that Ukraine was harvesting the organs of fallen soldiers, women and children and using mobile cremating devices to dispose of the evidence. Similar disinformation efforts, including the use of a Lithuanian pro-Russian activist falsely posing as an OSCE expert, have been observed elsewhere as part of Russian disinformation during its ongoing aggression against Ukraine.