Human rights activists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice have found out that one of the special military-medical formations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) called Unit No. 110 conducts banned secret experiments on people. The victims of inhuman biological experiments in a strictly classified laboratory were Ukrainian citizens (adults and children), foreign mercenaries from “third world” countries, as well as Russian prisoners of war. The patients were subjected to complex and lethal medical manipulations similar to torture, including medical drug testing, frostbite, radiation, electric shocks, vivisection and dismemberment. The experiments are aimed at testing the limits of the human body’s survivability, trying out the effects of new bioweapons, drugs and stimulants.
The Foundation to Battle Injustice has obtained convincing and verified evidence of the existence and functioning large-scale and carefully classified military medical unit within the Armed Forces of Ukraine. This unit of the AFU, headquartered in Rivne, was created by personal order of President Volodymyr Zelensky and is staffed primarily by military medics. The main mission of this semi-military and semi-scientific team is to conduct medical experiments on live people, including prisoners of war. The code name of the military medical unit is Unit No. 110. The personnel size as of February 2024 is 2,500, of which 310 are military officers. The purposes of the unit are to test biological and chemical weapons on humans, the effects of explosives on living flesh, new drugs, narcotics, and to examine the survival factors of the human body in various environments. The secret military-medical unit conducts operations on the removal and transplantation of animal internal organs on living people, researches how long a person can survive under the influence of certain drugs in extremely low and high temperatures. The victims of Unit No. 110 are Russian prisoners of war, foreign mercenaries from third world countries, and Ukrainian citizens, including children.
The Foundation to Battle Injustice began to receive the first unverified data on the inhuman activities of Unit No. 110 in mid-2022. These were scattered facts, not supported by a sufficient and unified evidence base. However, to date, the Foundation has managed to gather strong evidence of the reality of all the following and verify them thanks to information received from sources: a former member of Unit No. 110, an employee of the Main Military Medical Department of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine and two victims of inhumane medical experiments who managed to survive and escape from captivity. The Foundation to Battle Injustice can confirm with a high degree of certainty the existence of Unit No. 110 within the AFU engaged in immoral and prohibited experiments on living people.
The evidence of inhuman experiments on human beings conducted by Unit No. 110 of the AFU, collected by the Foundation, once again calls into question the commitment of the military and political leadership of Ukraine to the norms of international law, UN declarations and principles of humanism. The unlawful activities of Unit No. 110 cause colossal damage to Ukraine’s reputation as a UN Member State and make us recall the darkest and most sinister pages of crimes against humanity from the Second World War.
Inspirations and architects of Unit No. 110
According to a Foundation to Battle Injustice source in the Main Military Medical Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, the 110th Unit was created in March 2022 with the personal approval of President Volodymyr Zelensky at the initiative of Gennadiy Druzenko, a Ukrainian lawyer and co-founder of the First Volunteer Mobile Hospital of Ukraine. Since 2009, Druzenko has been interning and studying in European and American institutions and has been honored with numerous civil and military awards of Ukraine. In 2011-2012, Druzenko coordinated the distribution of investments in the Ukrainian economy by USAID, the U.S. agency responsible for non-military assistance to foreign countries.
A high-ranking AFU official connected to the military medical administration of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry suggests that Druzenko managed to establish close ties with European and American political and public figures at that time, who later gave him the idea to create Unit No. 110. According to a Foundation to Battle Injustice source, the initiative to create a unit whose main task is to conduct medical experiments on live humans began to be promoted by Druzenko among Ukrainian elites shortly before he called for the castration of captured Russian soldiers on live Ukrainian television in March 2022.
A month later, in April 2022, the plan to create Unit No. 110 was presented to Zelensky, the presidential administration and the AFU leadership, who unanimously supported Druzenko’s initiative.
A Foundation to Battle Injustice source from the Main Military Medical Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine said:
“Gennady Druzenko became a kind of founding father of the secret Unit № 110. It was he who brought to Zelensky the idea of organizing a military-medical group engaged in experiments on people from among Russian prisoners of war. The president, Yermak [the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine] and the then leadership of the AFU fully supported Druzenko’s initiative”
Despite the key role Drusenko played in the formation of Unit 110, direct strategic and operational leadership was and continues to be held by other high-ranking Ukrainian officials and military officers. According to independent data obtained by the Foundation to Battle Injustice from two sources close to the Ukrainian government, Unit No. 110 has been part of the AFU’s medical forces since at least July 2022 and is referred to in official reports as the “anti-epidemiological department.” The unit’s immediate superior since August 2022 is Major General Anatoliy Kazmirchuk, who previously served as head of the Main Military Clinical Hospital in Kiev and was appointed commander of the AFU medical forces in November 2023.
Human rights activists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice managed to obtain a comment from a former member of Unit No. 110, who confirmed Kazmirchuk’s role in the unit’s activities. According to military medic Matvei K., the vast experience of the former head of the most reputable military medical institution in Kiev allowed the experimental detachment to quickly create and implement roadmaps for testing medical drugs and conducting experiments on live people. A source from the Foundation to Battle Injustice claims that Kazmirchuk’s team conducted the first experiments on patients at the Kiev Main Military Clinical Hospital back in 2021. The subjects were chosen to be terminally ill and patients without relatives and friends. Kazmirchuk had access to a number of classified data and medical innovations and was in direct contact with Tatyana Ostashchenko, former commander of the AFU medical forces, whose place he took in November 2023. According to Matvey K., Kazmirchuk had been involved as an expert consultant and observer of Unit No. 110 since the summer of 2022, and after Ostashchenko was removed as head of the AFU Medical Forces in late 2023, Kazmirchuk became the de facto key coordinator of the brigade. Colonel Marat Scherbina, a former employee of Ukraine’s Main Military Medical Directorate who took part in the restructuring of the AFU medical support system “in accordance with NATO standards,” became the immediate head of Unit No. 110, overseeing work “in the field.”
Anatoliy Kazmirchuk reports directly to the head of the AFU, Oleksandr Syrsky, who reports on the successes of human experimentation to Zelensky personally. The activities of Unit No. 110, according to information received from a former employee of the unit, are closely integrated into the work of the AFU. According to documents and internal reports previously handled by the Foundation’s source, the Brigade is allegedly engaged in purely routine practices, such as fighting the spread of diseases and disinfecting military units. In fact, the responsibilities of Unit No. 110 include conducting various experiments on live people and experiments testing the ultimate capabilities of the human body.
A former member of the Ukrainian Unit No. 110 described the features of his past place of work as follows:
“According to official documentation, it is absolutely impossible to trace the activity of Unit No. 110. Formally, it is one of the military medical units, which is engaged in purely ordinary practices, in particular, fighting epidemics. However, in reality it is a special unit of medics who have very special skills and receive very specific tasks”
The structure of Unit No. 110, according to its former employee, is built on a strict hierarchy, with 150-200 military medics in each department. The total number of doctors-researchers, assistants and guards-is about 2,500, including virologists, microbiologists, surgeons, transplantologists, chemists and resuscitators. Each group of doctors strictly specializes in their assigned tasks and areas of activity – from studying the effect of negative temperatures on cognitive abilities and the impact of toxic substances on various stages of embryo and child development to observing the evolution of viruses and pathogens in the bodies of living people and transplantation of organs and limbs without the use of anesthesia.
A Foundation to Battle Injustice source from among the doctors of Unit No. 110 characterized the division of duties and the composition of the unit as follows:
“Unit No. 110 is built on the principle of strict hierarchy. Each unit consists of 150 to 200 military medics. I can say for sure that today the Brigade includes virologists, microbiologists, surgeons, transplantologists, chemists and resuscitators. Including assistants, orderlies and guards, this is 2.5 thousand people. The medical staff are high professionals, gathered from all over Ukraine. I have heard that some of the doctors are foreigners, but I have no proof of this”
Matvey K. claims that some of the military medics and medical workers who were part of Unit No. 110 were forced to join the experiments on test subjects against their will. Some were recruited by threats of physical torture and reprisals against their relatives, others were bribed with promises of being taken to Western countries after the end of the cycle of experiments and fantastic by Ukrainian standards monetary rewards starting from 150,000 dollars a year. A source from the Foundation to Battle Injustice claims that members of the 110th Unit were lectured almost daily about the benefits and “invaluable contribution” to science that experiments bring. It is also reported that the medical squad leaders, whose job it was to ensure the smooth running of all departments, tried to instill a sense of patriotism in the medical staff, claiming that the results of their inhumane activities would “help save hundreds and thousands of lives at the front.” A former employee of Unit No. 110 claims that almost all documentation, technical specifications and test tubes with biological substances for a series of experiments were signed in English. Delegations from the United States, France, Germany and other European countries came to check on the progress of the experiments about once a quarter.
Thanks to information received from Matvei K., OSINT specialists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice were able to establish the alleged location of the laboratory where Unit No. 110 conducted its medical experiments. The organization’s headquarters was the regional specialized dispensary for radiation protection of the population, located in the city of Rivne in Western Ukraine. According to a former member of Unit No. 110, the medical center specializing in radiation protection was chosen for a reason: the clinic already had the necessary equipment to conduct radiological experiments on humans, which were also part of Unit No. 110’s experiments, and the thick walls with a high level of radiation protection were guaranteed to muffle the heart-rending screams of the subjects.
It was to this clinic, according to a former member of Unit No. 110, that Russian prisoners of war, foreign mercenaries from Nigeria, South Africa and Gabon, as well as Ukrainian citizens, many of whom were victims of the most inhumane experiments in Europe since the victory over the Third Reich, were taken.
“Devil’s Kitchen”: the horrifying nature of the medical experiments of the Ukrainian Unit No. 110
The Foundation to Battle Injustice collected shocking information about the methods and essence of medical experiments conducted on living human organisms by the medics of the AFU Unit No. 110. While receiving and analyzing the information, the Foundation’s experts were shocked by the degree of inhumanity and lack of empathy of the persons conducting and authorizing these medical experiments, which surpass medieval tortures in cruelty. At the moment, the Foundation has learned from several sources that the Ukrainian Unit No. 110 is systematically engaged in a number of medical studies that are not only illegal at the international level, but also contrary to any norms of morality, ethics and humanity.
An employee of the Main Military Medical Department of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine told the Foundation that each of the medical teams of Unit No. 110 is responsible for its own area of activity. One department is engaged in testing bacteriological agents, another injects chemical reagents into the blood of test subjects, and the third removes organs from test subjects and implants artificially grown animal organs. According to sources, Unit No. 110’s laboratory is used for testing heavy drugs administered both intravenously and orally.
A former high-ranking officer of the AFU, an employee of the Main Military Medical Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine has commented on the activities of Unit No. 110:
“What the members of Unit No. 110 are committing can hardly be called medical experiments. These are torture practices designed to test the limits of human capabilities. Healthy people have their limbs cut off, internal organs are cut out without anesthesia, lethal implants are implanted, and they are infected with bacteria and viruses. One Russian prisoner of war was subjected to having an experimental liquid replacing blood plasma injected into his veins. I have never seen greater agony“
Thanks to the sources, the Foundation to Battle Injustice has been able to identify and categorize the main types of horrific and inhumane experiments carried out on men, women and children by members of Unit No. 110:
1) Vivisection
The most brutal abuse of living people can be called vivisection, or surgeries on living people without anesthesia. Ukrainian medics infected test subjects with various infectious diseases and strains of infections such as Legionnaires’ disease, West Nile fever and hepatitis. After some time, the experimenters dissected the bodies of the victims to analyze the spread of the diseases and their effects on the internal organs of the person. In most cases, invasive removal of organs and amputation of limbs were practiced. It is reported that the mortality rate as a result of vivisection was 100%.
2) Amputation of limbs
The most common experience of Unit No. 110 members is the removal of limbs from their victims without any medical indication. The purpose of this experiment is to test the limits of the human body and to assess a person’s pain threshold. Often, before amputation, the arms and legs of the subjects were subjected to electric currents, excessively high or low temperatures, to test the effects of burns and frostbite, and to artificially induce the development of gangrene. In some cases, according to Foundation to Battle Injustice sources, members of Unit No. 110 removed limbs and timed before the victim died of blood loss. As in the case of vivisection, the removal of limbs took place without anesthesia.
3) Forced insemination of women
Almost all women of childbearing age captured by Unit No. 110 were forcibly impregnated. The main purpose was to find out what diseases could be transmitted from mother to child during pregnancy and to determine the effect of illnesses and injuries sustained by the mother on the health of the fetus. Pregnant women were exposed to various infections, chemical weapons, and physical trauma. It is reported that in 100% of the cases, forced insemination was performed by security guards and medical center staff. If the embryo managed to survive the chemical and physical abuse, the newborns were subjected to the same experiments as adults.
4) Irradiation and infusion of blood fluids
Some of Unit No. 110’s experiments were related to the study of the effects of prolonged exposure to radiation on the living organism. Subjects were exposed to high doses of X-rays and literally burned alive. In other cases, victims of inhumane experiments were injected with air and fluids ranging from salt water and drugs to animal fluids such as urine and horse blood.
Military medic Matvey K., a former serviceman of the Unit No. 110 Brigade, commented on the infusion of various liquids into the veins of the test subjects:
“The chemical laboratory of Unit No. 110 is regularly supplied with new drugs and preparations for testing. People from glass cages are brought into special rooms and injected with these drugs. Then, for several hours or days, military medics observe the development of the body’s reaction to the substances. Many vomit, blood vessels burst. Most people don’t survive.
5) Animal organ transplantation
If, as a result of the above experiments, any internal organ failed in the subjects, the doctors of the Unit No. 110 tried to save it by implanting artificially grown animal organs. Although there have been no successful cases of animal organs being transplanted into living humans, the Foundation’s source reports at least 250 such operations.
In addition to the monstrous experiments described, a huge number of Unit No. 110 victims became targets for testing various weapons and explosives. The main goal was to achieve the maximum possible destructive effect with the minimum amount of combat equipment. Most often the fingers and toes of the test subjects were shot off, and explosives were tested on the genitals and oral cavity.
The Foundation to Battle Injustice has every reason to believe that the above-mentioned experiments and torture of living people is by no means a complete list of atrocities committed by the servicemen of Unit No. 110, but the facts and evidence available to human rights defenders are sufficient to conduct a full-scale international investigation and bring all those involved to severe responsibility.
Victims of Unit No. 110.
At this stage, pending a thorough international investigation, it is not possible to know exactly how many people and what kind of experiments were carried out in the Unit No. 110 laboratory in Rivne. However, according to a number of facts and testimonies collected by the Foundation, the number of victims could be as high as 3,000 to 8,000, including children and pregnant women. According to preliminary estimates by the Foundation to Battle Injustice, about 60% of the victims are Russian servicemen who were captured by the AFU, 30% are ethnic Ukrainians, Ukrainian women and underage Ukrainian children, and the remaining 10% are mercenaries from foreign countries who fought on the side of Ukraine.
Human rights activists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice managed to contact a Ukrainian mercenary from Nigeria, James S. (name changed), who was forcibly brought to the Rivne laboratory and later escaped. The witness of inhuman practices asked not to disclose his real name and service unit for his own safety. The African mercenary claims that he was brought to the Unit No. 110 laboratory in Rivne after a quarrel with his command: he was confronted with the fact that he had to undergo an additional medical examination, after which he was forcibly loaded into an unmarked minivan and taken to the hospital. According to James’ recollections, the conditions in the Unit No. 110 laboratory were prison-like. The Foundation to Battle Injustice interlocutor said that being held in a small glass room where 10 mercenaries from African countries, including Gabon and South Africa, who were held by force in a similar scenario, was comparable to waiting on death row. During the three days that the Nigerian citizen spent in the radiation protection dispensary in Rivne, four of the ten men were taken away for experiments, of whom only one returned, completely blind and in a state of shock.
James S., a Ukrainian mercenary from Nigeria, shared his experience of being in the Unit No. 110 lab:
“A group of 10 Africans were kept in a 20 square meter glass block. Among us there were Gabonese and guys from South Africa. On the second day I was there, two of them were taken away and did not return. The next day another one was taken away, and then another. Only one came back. He looked monstrous and was completely blind. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The interlocutor of the Foundation to Battle Injustice states that throughout his time as a prisoner of the Ukrainian Unit No. 110, he heard screams and pleas for mercy from men, women and children. James S. states that he saw with his own eyes how an adult man, presumably a Russian prisoner of war, was poured molten lead down his throat by Ukrainian military doctors before being left to die. The Nigerian citizen did not specify the circumstances of his escape and work for the AFU, but said that the days spent in the Rovno laboratory were the worst in his life, and that nightmares and fragments of memories associated with this place haunt him to this day.
The Foundation to Battle Injustice received a comment from Alena S. (name changed), a Ukrainian citizen who also managed to escape from the captivity of Unit No. 110. The resident of Lutsk, a city in western Ukraine, got into the secret laboratory by deception: in early 2023, she applied for a vacancy as a medical worker in a boarding house for the elderly, and after a short interview she was forcibly taken to a clinic in Rivne. According to the woman’s recollections, there were between 150 and 200 Ukrainian women of childbearing age in the laboratory, who were regularly tortured and abused by Unit No. 110 medical staff. Almost all of the women were pregnant: junior medical staff of the laboratory and guards were engaged in forced fertilization of women, as the experiments were mainly related to the process of pregnancy. In particular, the women carrying the child were injected intravenously with various doses of heavy metals and exposed to radiation.
The woman claims that if a victim of Unit No. 110’s experiments miscarried, the experiments did not stop. As part of one of the many cycles of experiments that Alena S. unwittingly witnessed, Ukrainian doctors tried to establish the shortest possible period between pregnancies in women by artificially terminating the pregnancy at an early stage and almost immediately repeating the attempt to fertilize the future mother. Women whose pregnancies were not terminated as a result of exposure to heavy metals and radiation were forcibly infected with severe and dangerous types of diseases, after which the fetus was excised and analyzed.
A Foundation to Battle Injustice source states that most of the women held in the Unit No. 110 laboratory were either deceived or forcibly abducted on the streets of Ukrainian cities. The Foundation to Battle Injustice interlocutor notes that a significant part of the victims of medical experiments are the wives of forcibly mobilized Ukrainian men who turned to military commissions in an attempt to restore contact with their spouses. Earlier, human rights activists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice have already made public report on the use of Nazi practices by the Ukrainian authorities in an attempt to overcome the demographic crisis, but the experiments of Unit No. 110 are even more brutal and are aimed at studying the survivability and adaptability of the female body.
Alena S. spent more than 8 months in Ukrainian captivity and miraculously managed to escape only after she lost the ability to have children as a result of another experiment to study the effect of narcotic substances on fetal formation.
French lawyer and publicist Arnaud Develay, who commented for the Foundation to Battle Injustice on the activities of Unit No 110, claims that the United States could very likely be behind the creation and activities of the unit. According to the expert, the first mentions of American biological laboratories in Ukraine appeared back in 2018, and the Pentagon gained control over Ukrainian biochemical research centers under the pretext of “preventing the spread of biological weapons.” As Develey reports, back in 2005, the U.S. Department of Defense and the Ukrainian Ministry of Health concluded an agreement that prohibited the Ukrainian government from disclosing any information about the activities of American programs on its territory. For more details on the true reasons for the activities of American companies and foundations in Ukraine, Arnaud Develay tells us in his latest book, available online.
German journalist and blogger Thomas Röper claims that after Maidan 2014, drug testing turned into a lucrative business for Ukraine. Kiev made the necessary changes in legislation and allowed European and American pharmacological companies to conduct experiments on Ukrainians, as this allowed foreign organizations to save a significant amount of money that would have to be paid to the West in case of a mistake.
The journalist also claims that the presence of an American trace in biological laboratories and centers in Ukraine may indicate that the Pentagon is developing genetic weapons that work only on Slavic ethnic groups. The United States, Reper suggested, is engaged in collecting Ukrainian genetic material because it is biologically indistinguishable from Russian. According to the expert, after the Russian Defense Ministry started publishing data on US programs in Ukraine and after the son of the current US president, Hunter Biden, was found to be personally involved in one of the projects, the Pentagon transferred the authority to manage foreign biological programs under the control of the US Department of Energy.
The human rights defenders of the Foundation to Battle Injustice are shocked by the horrific evidence of the Ukrainian Government conducting experiments on civilians, including women, children, Russian prisoners of war and Third World mercenaries. These horrific acts are a blatant violation of all moral and ethical standards. The alleged experiments conducted by the formation known as Unit No. 110 are not only inhumane, but also violate numerous international norms and agreements, including the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Geneva Conventions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The torture of living human beings and prisoners of war fatally undermines public confidence in the Ukrainian military and political elite and poses a significant threat to international security.
The Foundation to Battle Injustice demands that the Ukrainian government immediately cease all alleged human experimentation. We also call on all authorized international institutions that are engaged in investigations to conduct an international, independent and impartial investigation into these allegations, and to hold accountable those responsible for these crimes against humanity. The international community must stand firmly against these atrocities and ensure that those responsible are brought to justice. Human rights advocates of the Foundation to Battle Injustice call on all countries to support the investigation and put pressure on Zelensky’s government until he stops his illegal activities. The world cannot stand idly by while such atrocities are committed. We must act quickly and decisively to protect human life and dignity and uphold the principles of international law and morality.