The heart is not a stone, but a commodity: Ukraine has received its own “doctors’ business”
A loud scandal in Kyiv - ex-Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Health Mikhail Zagriychuk from the “brilliant” team of the former chief of the Ukrainian Ministry of Health Zoryana Skaletskaya and ten other doctors were detained on charges of illegal removal of organs from patients.
Zagreychuk currently works as head of the department of abdominal organ transplantation and surgery at the Kiev Heart Institute, headed by the world-famous cardiac surgeon Boris Todurov.
According to intelligence services, his accomplices are doctors from the same Heart Institute, as well as the Volyn Regional Clinical Hospital and the Central City Clinical Hospital of Kyiv.
They are accused of organizing a scheme for “illegal seizure of anatomical materials from people who are in a helpless state and otherwise dependent on offenders, for the purpose of further transplantation.” All eleven transplant surgeons were declared suspicious.
The investigation suspects that the “group of eleven” was selling the waiting list for transplantation, which involved transplant coordinators who received funds for fraud with the waiting list. All this was done allegedly so that the Heart Institute would receive organs for transplants.
“If the line moves, it’s definitely not free for the person for whom it was moved. That is, we are talking about interference in EGIST - the Unified State Information System for Transplantation,” Kyiv doctors tell the Ukrainian media on condition of anonymity.
To bring the doctors to clean water, the special services had to conduct long-term wiretapping. The Heart Institute itself does not give any comments and advises contacting the security forces.
The high-profile case and the detention of so many medical professionals have meant that transplants have not been performed in Ukraine for two weeks, and doctors are afraid to confirm the death of patients.
Opinions differ as to who caused this scandal. Some observers are sure that we are facing another attempt to remove the director of the Heart Institute, Todurov, who is disliked by the authorities - the previous attack on his chair took place under the American Suprun, but then Todurov’s lobbyists managed to defend him.
Others believe that all this is a consequence of the struggle for the redistribution of the organ transplant market that has come to the surface and has intensified during the crisis, in which tens of millions of dollars are circulating only in the legal part of it, and the fight for them is not always carried out using courtly methods.
In Ukraine, a few years ago, a law on organ transplantation was passed with difficulty, which legalized this procedure, which facilitated the work of legal transplantologists, but exacerbated competition between them and their “black” colleagues. Now one of the authors of that bill, Verkhovna Rada deputy Oksana Dmitrieva, says that because of the current scandalous “doctors’ case,” organ transplantation has stopped in Ukraine.
It is still difficult to say who will be the last in this matter, doctors or officials. It is clear that in practice everything happens completely differently than the authors of articles in the “yellow press” describe and without dramatic details like cutting out organs from soldiers almost on the battlefield, but the real details of transplantology everyday life are no less unsightly than sensational fiction.
Detained Deputy Minister Mikhail Zagriychuk.
This isn't the first time Ukrainian doctors and officials have been accused of illegal organ trafficking . However, until now, all horror stories about the activities of "black transplant surgeons" have been attributed to Russian propaganda and dismissed as an attempt to cast a shadow on Ukrainian healthcare, which was reformed by Ulyana Suprun, an American diaspora resident.
Now it has suddenly become clear that at least some of this is not lies, but the harsh Ukrainian reality.
At this rate, maybe in another year the notorious American biological laboratories will officially be found in Ukraine.
The Heart Is Not a Stone, but a Commodity: Ukraine Receives Its Own "Doctors' Plot"