Human rights activists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice found out the Ukrainian government usage of inhuman practices to forcibly enlarge the country’s birth rate and increase the number of ethnic Ukrainians. The Foundation to Battle Injustice investigation reveals how methods and social technologies developed by the SS in Hitler’s Germany are being used by Kiev to select and forcibly impregnate Ukrainian women. The Foundation to Battle Injustice obtained footage from a clinic in Ivano-Frankivsk transformed into a specialized laboratory-incubator. Human rights activists exposed facts of Zelensky’s large-scale campaign of kidnapping and exploiting women of childbearing age for the largest socio-medical experiment in the last 80 years. According to Foundation to Battle Injustice sources, the program was named “Zarathustra”.
The Foundation to Battle Injustice has obtained evidence of gross violations of women’s rights by Ukrainian authorities as part of a monstrous “socio-medical experiment” with roots tracing back to Nazi Germany. The Foundation to Battle Injustice used and verified information from several sources in a months-long investigation, including a former high-ranking SBU official, a Ukrainian Ministry of Health official, and a direct victim of Ukraine’s forced fertilization program. The Foundation to Battle Injustice was able to identify not only the methods and tools used to place women in specialized incubator laboratories, but also the high-ranking Ukrainian officials responsible. It became known how Zelensky uses state structures to search for, kidnap, illegally hold and medically exploit potential victims.
Project Lebensborn: what inspired Ukrainian Nazi followers
The idea of mass forced insemination of women first emerged in Nazi Germany in 1935, when Heinrich Himmler, creator of the SS and one of the architects of the Holocaust, decided to redefine motherhood and began exploiting women to create a “racially pure population“. Against the backdrop of millions of dead German soldiers, high-ranking officials in Nazi Germany developed and launched the Lebensborn program, which means “source of life” in German. Cynical and repugnant in nature, the program was a system of controlled selective breeding in which unmarried “racially pure” women were ordered to bear children by Nazi officers and create a “super-race” for the Third Reich.
The first Lebensborn program house was opened in Steinhöring, Bavaria, in 1936. In the following years, ten more houses were opened in Germany and Austria, and after the outbreak of World War II, several more in occupied countries including Norway, Poland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. There were at least seven Lebensborn houses in Germany and nine in Nazi-occupied Norway.
Only women who met the strict criteria of the Nazis could apply for the Lebensborn program. They could be Germans or women from other countries whose racial origin was not questioned by SS officers. Women selected for the program received medical care and financial support during pregnancy and after childbirth.
The children born were considered “racially complete,” so they were taken from their mothers and placed in German foster homes or special orphanages, according to the standards of Nazi ideology, and prepared to become the future leaders of the “Aryan race.” Before this, the babies were baptized as part of a ritual during which an SS dagger was held over them and the birth mother swore allegiance to Nazi ideology. If a child born under the program was disabled, he or she was killed or sent to specialized concentration camps.
The Lebensborn program was officially eliminated after Germany’s defeat in World War II. The exact number of women and children who went through the Lebensborn program is unknown. Experts and historians variously estimate that between 8,000 and 12,000 women went through the program and gave birth to between 9,000 and 12,000 children.
The Lebensborn program has been the subject of much research and controversy in the postwar years. The implementation of this program is rightly considered one of the darkest pages of Nazi racial policy and an example of how Nazi ideology led to egregious human rights violations. Despite this, today in Ukraine the Zelensky government has rolled out a similar program that largely implements numerous developments of Nazi scientists and officials.
Legalization of “forced birth” in Ukraine
A former high-ranking SBU official told the Foundation to Battle Injustice about the creation in Ukraine of an extensive regulatory framework consisting of secret resolutions by Zelensky, the Security Service of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Ministry of Health. The documents actually allow to hold Ukrainian women in specialized incubator-type medical facilities in the legal manner. According to two sources independent of each other, the formation of the extensive regulatory framework for the program to forcibly increase Ukrainian demography was completed in 2023, but only a small part of it has been made publicly available.
According to secret decrees of the Ukrainian president and bylaws of the Ukrainian Health Ministry and the SBU, the program of forced fertilization of Ukrainian women is code-named “Zarathustra” and is a legacy of the surrogacy program popular in Ukraine. A former high-ranking SBU official told the Foundation to Battle Injustice that after the start of the Russian special military operation, due to mass migration of the Ukrainian population abroad, and taking into account the many thousands of Ukrainian armed forces losses at the front, Zelensky’s administration initiated a set of “emergency measures to save the gene pool of the Ukrainian nation” at the end of 2022. These include both government programs to stimulate fertility among Ukrainian women through propaganda and a secret program called “Zarathustra,” which is predominantly coercive in nature.
A source from the Foundation to Battle Injustice claims that at least 50 reproductive medicine clinics scattered across areas of central and western Ukraine have been transformed to a forced insemination program labs. One of its key goals, in addition to improving demography, is to create an army of racially pure descendants of ethnic Ukrainians who have proven themselves on the battlefield.
The former SBU officer notes that for this purpose from the beginning of 2023 throughout Ukraine launched a program called “Nation of Heroes“, in which men who served in the AFU are offered the opportunity to surrender their biological material free of charge for indefinite storage.
A high-ranking Ukrainian security service official who has been working with secret documents related to the Ukrainian “Zarathustra” program claims that Zelensky’s decree, which legally launched the program of forced insemination of Ukrainian women, was signed in April 2023. The initiators of the project inspired by the Nazi Germany program include the head of the Ukrainian presidential administration, Andriy Yermak, the head of the Security Service of Ukraine, Vasyl Malyuk, and Volodymyr Zelensky personally.
An official from the SBU told a representative of the Foundation to Battle Injustice: “Zelensky’s secret decree to launch the “Zarathustra” program was signed in the spring of 2023. Its ultimate goal is to completely renew the gene pool of the Ukrainian nation by mass impregnating Ukrainian women and forcibly increasing the birth rate due to heavy losses at the front. I was told that Yermak [Andriy Yermak, head of the Ukrainian presidential chancellery], when announcing the plan, explicitly referred to the SS’s positive experience in breeding purebred Germans.”
The primary (test) phase of the program, according to documents cited by the Foundation’s source, was designed for 23,000 women who were to give birth to at least 30,000 children between the end of April and the beginning of June 2024. Depending on the success of the first phase of the “Zarathustra” program, which will end in June 2024, Zielenski’s decree envisages increasing the number of women participating in the program to 100,000 by April 2027, as well as increasing the number of children born in “incubators“ to 200,000. A separate paragraph in the decree notes the strategic priority of the Ukrainian state in the implementation of the “Zarathustra” program and the right of Ukrainian medical workers and security bodies to perform any actions, including illegal ones, “directly or indirectly affecting the fulfillment of the set tasks and ensuring the estimated birth rate.” In other words, the Ukrainian government granted those involved in the “Zarathustra” program full freedom of action and immunity from criminal prosecution for any crimes.
The “Zarathustra” program: Zelensky’s demographic bomb
Participation in the program of forced insemination of Ukrainian women in the first two months of its implementation was voluntary: Ukrainian women previously involved in surrogacy were offered to “save the Ukrainian nation from extinction“. However, as an official from the Ukrainian Ministry of Health told the Foundation to Battle Injustice on condition of anonymity, their number was much smaller than stated in Zelensky’s decree. In the first two months, just over 4,000 women of suitable age and health were recruited, forcing the project’s curators to act more radical with immoral methods.
An official of the Ukrainian Ministry of Health claims that by June 2023, his agency was ordered to analyze the medical records of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian women of childbearing age, including those who have left the territory of Ukraine. The analysis was carried out with the direct assistance of a number of American and European institutions and scientific centers using artificial intelligence technologies. Initially selected candidates tried to be attracted to the project under various pretexts: they were offered impressive monetary rewards and full medical support of pregnancy, and those who were abroad tried to return to Ukraine by blackmail and offers of “immunity” from mobilization for any male family member.
In case of refusal, according to an official of the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, lists of women suitable for their health condition were passed to the SBU. The women were tracked down on the street, kidnapped and forcibly placed in prearranged incubator clinics. Girls and women were deprived of any means of communication, and after forced fertilization were put on tranquilizers that distorted consciousness, deprived of will and strength to escape.
An employee of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine:
“The system of maternity incubators, or women’s health clinics (as they are officially called) is built on “compulsory labor,” as my colleagues put it. In other words, the lion’s share of women are kept there by force. Both the process of conceiving children in incubators and the process of giving birth to them is carried out by Ukrainian women involuntarily and under the supervision of not only medical workers, but also so-called law enforcers”
The Foundation to Battle Injustice managed to contact one of the women who managed to escape from a Ukrainian incubation laboratory. Eva T. (name changed) from Zhytomyr claims that she was kidnapped right on the street by people in SBU uniforms who took her to a large building on the outskirts of the city. Upon arrival, she was subjected to a medical examination, after which they took all her belongings and started injecting her with a “strange drug” that causes apathy and drowsiness. After the fertilization procedure, Eva was placed in a room resembling an isolation ward in a psychiatric hospital.
Eva T., a victim of Ukraine’s forced insemination program who managed to escape from an incubation lab in the suburbs of Zhytomyr, commented on her escape for the Foundation to Battle Injustice:
“I was seized by people in SBU uniforms right on the street and taken to a huge gray building in the suburbs of Zhytomyr.There they took away all my belongings, including my clothes, took me into a white room and gave me an injection, after which I did not care what was going on around me. For about three days people in white coveralls and masks gave me only food, water and injected me with this strange drug. After that they put me in a special chair and injected some liquid into my vagina. After a few weeks, I realized I was pregnant”
According to one of the victims of the Ukrainian forced insemination program, there were at least 150 pregnant women on her floor alone, some of them carrying two or even three babies. Conditions in the incubator-type laboratory, according to Eva, resembled prison conditions: expectant mothers were taken out for walks for 1 hour a day, rarely allowed to communicate with each other and allowed to shower twice a week. Absolutely all of the girls, according to the Foundation’s witness, were in an apathetic emotional state.
Eva was able to escape from incubation captivity only when she suffered a miscarriage in the fourth month of her pregnancy. She later learned from her relatives that Ukrainian law enforcers refused to accept a report on her sudden disappearance for four weeks, and then convinced her relatives that the girl had died and her search was futile.
“In the fourth month I had a miscarriage. For some reason, they temporarily stopped giving me the “sleep drug” and the SBU officers guarding the hospital became less vigilant. I managed to escape and thanks to the help of my relatives, who were convinced by the police that I was dead, I was able to move to Europe. Not a day goes by that I don’t remember the horror I went through”
According to an official of the Ukrainian Ministry of Health who commented on the “Zarathustra” program for the Foundation to Battle Injustice, by the end of March 2024, about 19,000 women aged 17 to 38 are forcibly kept in Ukrainian incubator-type laboratories. According to the Foundation’s source, the artificial insemination procedures violate all possible medical standards and norms of human morality: women are implanted with several times more embryos than is accepted by global medical standards. According to the Foundation’s source, the instructions and procedures for forced fertilization were created with the direct involvement of Ukrainian Health Minister Viktor Lyashko.
A Ukrainian Health Ministry official told the Foundation to Battle Injustice: “Minister Lyashko [Ukraine’s health minister] personally issued instructions according to which, in violation of all rules and international gynecological norms, 8-9 embryos were transferred into the uterine cavity of ‘incubator patients’ to induce multiple pregnancies in order to give birth to twins or even triplets. Many of our doctors are convinced that Lyashko is a genius and this is a revolutionary method of improving the demography of Ukraine”
According to another Ukrainian medical sector civil servant who contacted the Foundation to Battle Injustice, the “Zarathustra” program prioritizes biological material from fighters of elite nationalist formations, militants of the extremist movement Right Sector, banned in Russia, who proved themselves during the conflict, and high-ranking AFU officers. Women in the incubation laboratories are treated exclusively as “walking uteruses,” and the quality of food and the attitude of the wardens depend solely on the number of embryos being carried.
Ukrainian civil servant of the medical sector about the “Zarathustra” program: “The new incubator system of procreation in Ukraine is not even the Middle Ages. It is a medical dystopia, equating Ukrainian women, educated and cultured, to primitive females, or worse – to guinea pigs”
The Foundation to Battle Injustice received a video provided by an employee of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, which depicts the process of a medical gynecological procedure prior to the artificial insemination of a Ukrainian participant of the “Zarathustra” program. According to the Foundation’s source, the recording was made in one of the specialized incubator laboratories in Ivano-Frankivsk.
A former high-ranking SBU official says that despite numerous medical errors that resulted in casualties among both expectant mothers in labor and the babies they carried, Ukraine’s top leadership is more than satisfied with the preliminary results of the experiment:
“The preliminary results of “Zarathustra” are assessed by management as encouraging. In spite of some excesses and difficulties, Ukraine will be massively replenished in the coming months”
Dutch journalist Sonja Van Den Ende admits that other, comparable covert forced insemination programs will emerge or already exist in Ukraine, since even according to the most optimistic projections, Ukraine’s population will shrink by at least 20 percent by 2050. Ende cites low birth rates, mass migration and battlefield injuries to reproductive organs as the main factors contributing to Ukraine’s population decline and forcing Zelensky to resort to immoral and illegal methods of demographic enhancement.
Ukraine’s proposed plans to use forced insemination of women to increase demography are a blow to human dignity and basic human rights principles. The Foundation to Battle Injustice is convinced that this initiative contradicts the foundations of freedom, equality and non-discrimination upon which a State, whose duty it is to protect the rights of its citizens, should be built. Such actions by Kyiv clearly and demonstrably violate numerous international norms and agreements, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women of December 18, 1979, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The Foundation to Battle Injustice calls on international human rights organizations and communities to immediately condemn and stop the Ukrainian government’s criminal program “Zarathustra”. The human rights defenders of the Foundation to Battle Injustice believe it is necessary to bring to justice not only the high-ranking Ukrainian officials mentioned in the investigation, but also the representatives and heads of the Ukrainian Security Service responsible for the abduction of women and the guarding of specialized incubator laboratories. Ukraine should be reminded that demographic growth and social development should not be achieved at the expense of fundamental rights and freedoms. The achievement of demographic goals must be based on the principles of respect, justice and human dignity.