Fact Check: Is Ukraine photo of organ harvesting victims’ “mass grave”?

The 17-month-old war in Ukraine has been characterized by astonishingly detailed and harrowing examples of brutality and human rights abuses.

From mass graves, torture and allegations of violent sexual crimes, reports have depicted Russian aggression and debasement with terrifying and saddening descriptions.

While there has been seemingly convincing evidence of some Russian and associated paramilitary atrocities in Ukraine, one Kyiv critic included what appeared to be a photo of an exhumation along with a separate allegation of organ trafficking in Kharkiv.

The Claim

A tweet by “Conspiracy Theorist” Wall Street Apes, posted on July 30, 2023 and viewed 1.4 million times, appeared to suggest that organ harvesting was happening in Ukraine.

The tweet stated: “What’s Really Going On In Ukraine? UNIMAGINABLE EVIL

“‘Lost babies & corpses without organs fueled allegations of trafficking in body parts in Ukraine’ after a grave was excavated at Hospital 6 in Kharkiv.”

The tweet provides a long list of accusations related to organ harvesting in Ukraine and ends: “This was all discovered in 2010 but you know if it’s happened, it still happening. Only more sophisticatedly.

“The United States Government is funding this with our tax dollars.”

The Facts

There are a number of misleading elements to this tweet, principally the photo. The picture is actually from an exhumation of a mass grave in Lyman, about one week after Ukrainian troops reclaimed the formerly Russian-occupied city.

One hundred and eighty bodies were said to have been found, including “whole families” with young children.

By including pictures of Lyman next to the tweet that mentions organ harvesting, it creates the impression that the two are linked, which is not the case. Kharkiv is more than 120 miles from Lyman.

A series of similar photos from the exhumation site are available via Getty Images.

Further, the accusations on Twitter are based on reports, some of which date back as far as 20 years ago, when Viktor Yushchenko was the Ukrainian president.

The tweet takes most of its content from an article published on the European Centre for Law and Justice website 14 years ago, attributed to Graeme Smith of the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail.

There were investigations during the mid-2000s into allegations that healthy newborn babies had been killed in Ukraine to feed an “international trade in stem cells” (as reported by the BBC in 2006). The European Parliament was asked to examine the allegations on a number of occasions from 2007 to 2011.

However, disturbing as those allegations were, this has nothing to do with the photo of Lyman nor does it relate to any contemporaneous stories.

The allegation made by Wall Street Apes that this happened as recently as 2010 is also unverified. Investigations dated to 2003, according to the report by the BBC and other accounts.

The notion that the U.S. is funding the practice (if it did exist) either explicitly or tacitly, and that the practice is continuing to this day, is completely unsupported and without evidence.

The Ruling

False.

The photo in the tweet is not of an organ harvesting site in Kharkiv, but an exhumation in Lyman, Ukraine, from October 2022.

The photo depicts the uncovering of a mass grave in Lyman about a week after Ukrainian troops reclaimed the formerly Russian-occupied city. It has nothing to do with the material the tweet describes.

While there are reports from 20 years ago of an alleged scandal involving the harvesting of organs among newborns and fetuses, that has nothing to do with the photo, nor does it come from contemporaneous sources.

FACT CHECK BY Newsweek’s Fact Check team