KYIV — It is Nov. 1, 2024, in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s wealthiest and second most populous city. The first snowfalls announce the approach of winter. In perfect Spanish, Ksenia Stadnichenko describes her work as head of customer relations for the Feskov clinic, founded by gynecologist Alexander Mikhailovich Feskov, dedicated to assisted reproduction and surrogacy.
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In the three-story building, a few dozen women are sitting, waiting to be attended to by the medical staff. Before you enter, you have to cover your shoes with protective pads. Dozens of pictures of chubby, white smiling babies are hanging on the walls.
Outside, the population of this city of 1.5 million inhabitants is determined to go on with normal life, keeping its parks and avenues well maintained and illuminated. But at only 40 kilometers from the border with southern Russia, shelling is still a regular occurrence. The night before the interview with Stadnichenko, a shell landed next to a shopping mall and the shock wave shattered the windows of several buildings in the surrounding area.
In the hotel where the Feskov company accommodates clients who take the “VIP” or “Deluxe” package, the detonation shattered some of the windows on the top floor. The anti-aircraft sirens have become part of the soundscape of everyone’s lives.
An industry in motion
“The births in Ukraine take place in Chernihiv, a city next to Romania, which is totally safe. But even there, many people still don’t dare to come. That’s why we recommend the Greece pack to Europeans — we can now arrange the delivery in Greece — because there they can register the babies directly in the family’s name, so they only have to apply for their nationality in a court in their own country,” Stadnichenko says.
In addition to Ukrainian and Spanish, she speaks Italian, French and German. These are the languages of most of her clients, although in recent years more and more come from China and Arab countries. Although the few legal phrases regulating surrogacy in Ukraine state that surrogacy deliveries can only take place on Ukrainian soil, most clinics already offer it in countries such as Greece, Cyprus or Georgia. Countries where, increasingly, Ukrainian surrogacy companies are opening branches or establishing contacts with local clinics to expand their market.
The Feskov clinic is accused, in a Spanish report, of breaching the ban on advertising surrogacy.
Most of her clients, Stadnichenko explains, choose programs costing between 60,000 and 90,000 euros. In the event that the birth takes place in another country, they will have to pay for a lawyer to manage the judicial authorization as well as the expenses related to the procedures to be carried out in the family’s country of origin.
“We study each embryo with the NGS PGD system to implant the ones that present all chromosomes right. This mechanism is not legal in other countries. This way we make sure we have a healthy baby. And also, we give the option of choosing the sex, something that many clients do,” adds Stadnichenko, who repeats the key ideas: the guarantee that once the package is paid for, there are no additional costs; the guarantee that with their techniques, there is no possibility of a sick baby; the guarantee that the cost being higher than that of other clinics is a sign that there will be no errors in the process.
Spanish accusations
Dr. Alexander Feskov is 66 years old, has lush white hair, a starched white shirt and has to extend his arm and body to wave from the other side of his huge hardwood desk. “We have been doing surrogacy for 15 years and of course the law could be improved regarding the protection of pregnant women, medical insurance… But it is not going to be done, not because the European Union says so, but because there is still a long time to go before we join the EU and the mentality of Ukrainians is very different from that of Europeans. When they talk about reforming the law they are really just playing politics,” he says, surrounded by trophies and diplomas.
Feskov is confident that his business can only grow and trusts the scientific development of human reproduction. He takes it for granted that in the not too distant future, gestation will be done in machines, without the need for women’s bodies.
The Feskov clinic is one of the 11 clinics accused, in a report by the Spanish Government’s Women’s Institute, of breaching the ban on advertising surrogacy, included in the 2022 reform of Abortion Law. The institution, which falls under the Ministry of Equality, has asked the Attorney General’s Office to open an investigation, based on the information gathered. But as explained in the dossier published by La Marea, several of them are not based in Spain, so it is difficult to fine them.
Feskov is one of the companies that does not have an office in Spain. It does, however, have a website in Spanish and seeks to expand its clientele in Spain — well aware that BioTexCom, the best-known Ukrainian company so far, is suffering a reputational crisis due to irregularities investigated in 2018 and 2019 by the Ukrainian Prosecutor’s Office in a process that was aborted by political intervention.
All the kindness shown by the Feskov team and their predisposition to allow us to interview some of their clients during these months of investigation vanished when we asked them about this report by the Spanish agency.
Political support in Ukraine
“I advocate that, at least while the war lasts, surrogacy should only be legal for Ukrainian families. We have a demographic issue that, I’m afraid, is going to get worse in the coming years because of the war. That’s why I pushed for the law that allows our defenders — referring to soldiers — to freeze their sperm or eggs. That way, when they come back from the front, if they can’t have children, they can use their genetic material. And if that doesn’t work either, then they can use surrogacy,” says Oksana Oleksandrivna Dmytriyeva, a deputy for President Volodymir Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, and chairwoman of the Ukrainian Parliament’s National Health Commission.
In 2023, after the European Parliament declared surrogacy to be contrary to “the human dignity of women, since their bodies and reproductive functions were used as a commodity” and showed concerns about how Ukraine had become one of the most important markets for this industry, the Ukrainian president presented a package of laws that included a ban on surrogacy, albeit only to foreign couples. The proposal was rejected by the majority of the parliament.
The law is so crucial for our soldiers to be able to freeze their genetic material.
“It was a very large set of laws. It was not voted against because of the prohibition of surrogacy, but because it involved too many mixed issues. That is why we are now trying to improve the proposal with specific topics. Anyway, as I keep saying, in the EU they are not living a war. We have to manage an exceptional situation and our population’s reproductive challenges. Moreover, Europe is also interested in alleviating the low birth rate it is experiencing,” explains Dmytriyeva, who before becoming a deputy was a dental entrepreneur and Miss Ukraine International.
“We have identified that the war is causing mental and physical health conditions that prevent many women from becoming pregnant. That is why the law is so crucial for our defenders to be able to freeze their genetic material. The clinics, both private and public, that are under the program have the duty to keep it for up to three years after the donor dies or the war is over. We have cases of women who have become pregnant after their husband died,” she adds, visibly proud.
When asked if she was aware of the investigations on the BioTexCom clinic and if political measures are underway to stop the sexual trafficking that Ukrainian women have been suffering since the 1990s, she said she was not aware of any of these issues and asked, with laughter, where we heard such lurid stories.
Women paid off the books
In 2018, a team of five prosecutors resumed an investigation into the BioTexCom clinic, which had been suspended months earlier by high political authorities. “The first thing that struck us was that it was a multimillion-dollar business, that it was barely declaring or paying taxes and that the pregnant women were being paid off the books,” explains one of the team members who meets us in a bar on the outskirts of Kyiv.
“We found that, since 2012, BioTexCom was working with a systematic and massive pattern all over the Ukrainian territory: They were organizing sham marriages to single men so that they could qualify for legality because in Ukraine surrogacy is only allowed for married heterosexual couples who prove that they are unable to have children. They were also giving babies to homosexual and heterosexual couples who could not prove they had reproductive disorders — in violation of Ukrainian law. And they were making them pay into secret accounts in tax havens,” explains Boryslav (not his real name) one rainy morning. When a customer enters the premises, he lowers his voice and his companion checks that they are not headed for our corner.
In many cases, the babies had no genetic ties to those who took them.
“The worst thing is that in many cases, the babies had no genetic ties to those who took them. The paperwork was a shambles: There were even cases where they said they had taken material from the father and claimed the blood tie was to the mother. But BioTexCom gave the couple a document accrediting the genetic filiation,” he continues, saying that he is sure that other companies ”followed their school.”
“But not to the same extent: where BioTexCom performed several thousand pregnancies a year, the others, altogether, did not exceed a few hundred,” he adds.
Most of the clients were — and still are — from European countries, but, as the then Prosecutor’s Office investigator explains, “in the Odessa and Nicolai area, border officials identified how Chinese men crossed the border, did not declare any money and returned weeks later with a baby.”
Arranged marriages
“We found out,” he continues, “that they were arranging marriages for them with Ukrainian women in order to qualify for surrogacy. Afterward, they would divorce and the mother would give all rights to the father, who would depart with the baby. We collected many of their passports, took them to the Chinese consul, who told us not to say anything because this crime is punishable by death in his country, and they were going to kill them. We later found out that the children were given to rich and powerful families in China, so the ones the consul was protecting were the aristocracy of his country.”
The team of prosecutors also met with embassy representatives from the UK, Italy and Spain. “The British and Italians told us that they were not going to do anything because it would be meddling in the private lives of their citizens and that we should not turn it into a scandal. The Spanish, on the other hand, offered to create an international team of specialists to investigate it. That would have been fantastic, because many of the clients were from Madrid and Barcelona. But, unfortunately, it did not come to fruition because the other two countries opposed it,” explains the man about what he considers one of the major cases of the Public Prosecutor’s Office.
That’s when Dolores Delgado, Minister of Justice at the time, ordered the Spanish Embassy in Ukraine to stop registering babies born through surrogacy. A measure that, since then, has been extended to the consulates and embassies of other countries where surrogacy is legal, but does not have a judicial process to recognize the so-called “intended” parents.
“There were contracts in English, with no translation into Ukrainian, stating that the gestating women would be paid between 8,000 euros and 12,000 euros, depending on various factors. Since they did not understand English, when they ended up receiving only 8,000 euros they could not complain. Another big issue is that there is no registry of babies, so we can’t keep track of where they are and how they are doing,” Boryslav says.
During the interview at the Feskov company, Stadnichenko actually mentioned as a quality feature that, while pregnant women undergo psychological assessments and various interviews to determine their mental stability, clients are not subjected to any tests or questions in this regard.
BioTexCom’s impunity
According to a source close to the case, Albert Tochilovsk, the Moldovan-German oligarch who owns BioTexCom, warned the chief prosecutor, Yuriy Kovalchu, during a hearing that if he did not suspend the investigation, he would be fired.
When the latter asked him why he did not pay for the treatments needed by the women who suffered health complications due to pregnancy, when, say, 35,000 euros was nothing to him, Tochilovsk allegedly replied: “If I do it for one, I would have to do it for all of them and I don’t give away my money.”
In the following months of 2019, 77 deputies wrote the same letter to the parliament: they accused the chief prosecutor of doing his job poorly and of harassing Tochilovsk. According to the same source, each of the politicians allegedly received between 3,000 euros and 5,000 euros for supporting that motion, which resulted in the withering dismissal of the five investigators. La Marea has sent a series of questions on these aspects to Tochilovsk, but has not yet received a response.
When the government ordered the closure of the investigation on BioTexCom, investigators had already discovered not only the alleged illegalities committed by BioTexCom in the surrogacy business, but also Tochilovsk’s business network dedicated to tax evasion and money laundering: At least 15 companies registered in the Seychelles, United Kingdom, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Moldova in the name of front men, all of them registered at the same address in the Ukrainian province of Kirovohrad.
We proved that there had been hundreds of cases since 2012.
He also owned several companies related to assisted reproduction and surrogacy: Sana-Med LTD (registered in St. Kitts and Nevis), as well as Human Reproduction Group LTD, Alpha Group Investments LTD and Junispere LTD Company (registered in the United Kingdom). It way also found that he had bank accounts in the Czech Republic, Latvia, Cyprus and Switzerland, into which numerous clients reportedly paid their bills for babies conceived in Ukraine under the label of “medical services,” according to the investigator.
The list of crimes for which the prosecution team wanted to try him included child trafficking, using women from the Russian-occupied territories of Lugansk and Donetsk in surrogacy programs (which is prohibited), tax evasion through offshore companies in the Seychelles (among other tax havens), money laundering from child trafficking through the purchase of real estate in Ukraine, and taking over companies through coercion and illegal actions.
“At first, when we talked at the office about child trafficking they laughed at us. But when we proved that there had been hundreds of cases since 2012, they started to take us seriously,” Boryslav recalls. “They put up huge billboards offering €10,000 in villages where people are very poor. How can they refuse it?” he says.
“One of the stories I cannot forget is that of a baby who was born with stomach disorders. The French couple who had ordered him did not want him any more and BioTexCom gave him to an orphanage. He died after three months and a long time went by without anyone claiming his body. Until they found out at BioTexCom that we were investigating his case and then, they got the pregnant mother to sign so they could incinerate him quickly,” he says.
Unprotected pregnant women
It’s raining, it’s windy and Viktoriya vigorously pushes open door of the McDonald’s where she meets us, in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Kyiv. Her daughter Maria is two years old and was born with Down syndrome. They live together in the house that Viktoriya could buy thanks to the baby she gestated in 2019, when she could not even pay the rent for the room she lived in with her first child.
The baby was one year old at the time and had a slow growth development, which his mother said was caused by an overdose of anaesthesia during a medical intervention. This is when she turned to BioTexCom’s office to ask for a job as a surrogate mother.
“I made three attempts at pregnancy. In the first one, the embryo did not implant. In the second, I had to abort it because it had some problems. And the third time, three embryos made it through. When they told me that they had to leave me only one, I cried and asked them to let me carry at least two because I felt healthy and strong enough to do it. They told me that it was up to the parents to decide. They anaesthetized me and took them away,” she recalls.
I don’t know if 12,000 euros is enough, but for me it was a fortune.
“In the first few months of pregnancy, I had to be injected with stimulation hormones every hour,” she recalls. “When I gave birth, I asked to see the baby, but they wouldn’t show it to me. I asked a nurse to take a picture, but she said no,” she says in an aseptic tone. She admits she found it hard to hand over the baby because “a mother’s natural instinct is to hold him.” “Of course I felt a connection with him,” she says, “but from the beginning I had the support of my grandmother, who thought I was helping other people. Thanks to her, I made up my mind throughout the pregnancy that I would have to give him up.”
Viktoriya met the child’s contracting father, who she says promised her that he would “give him a good education, that he would learn several languages, that he would have everything.” “And I calmed down. Of course, I would like to know how he is doing, what his life is like, but I signed a contract in which I agreed not to get in touch with the family or the baby,” she continues. Viktoriya answers the questions concisely and clearly, without emotional charge or pretended coldness.
“I don’t think they should restrict surrogacy. Many people can’t have babies and we give them the opportunity. They are very hopeful people who even bring us fruit to the hospital.” BioTexCom paid her 12,000 euros. “I don’t know if it’s enough, but for me it was a fortune,” she says. And she concludes, “If I were younger, I would do it again. You give meaning to other people’s lives. I would tell young women who are considering it not to hesitate and to do it”.
Viktoriya has to leave quickly after the interview. She has a doctor’s appointment for Maria, and then she has to pick up her son from the special education center.
A form of slavery
Ukraine legalized surrogacy in only a couple of sentences in the 2002 Family Code and a few orders issued by the Ministry of Health in 2013. At that time, India, a country where commercial surrogacy was also allowed, was experiencing an intense debate around the images of the so-called “pregnancy farms.” The scandal forced the Asian giant to slightly change its legislation, first by banning the procedure “for payment” to foreigners in 2015 and then in all cases in 2019.
Ukrainian jurisprudence has not been so lengthy. There, it has been primarily the feminist movement that has publicly denounced this business.
Natalia Semchuk is a lawyer from Kyiv who came across this issue while investigating obstetric violence with other colleagues. Nurses drew her attention to the fact that “these women suffer higher rates of depression than other pregnant women, and their babies suffer more health problems because of the amount of hormones they are injected with to help the embryo take root.”
From there, this feminist lawyer began to investigate and found that most of the contracts that lawyers make for the clinics do not include the majority of the conditions in the terms, but leave them in an unofficial appendix. “That’s where they put what the women can and can’t do, where they have to live, how they can’t have sex and the fines they will receive if they don’t comply. It’s a form of slavery,” she explains in a noisy coffee shop in a Kyiv shopping mall.
Most members of parliament are rich men who don’t care about this issue.
“There are connections between the clinics and Parliament. Besides, most members of parliament are rich men who don’t care about this issue. They do not mind selling other people because they will never have to resort to getting pregnant or giving up a baby to survive,” she concludes, before having to leave in a hurry to take care of her child.
Maria Dmitrieva is director of the Center for the Development of Democracy, one of the country’s oldest feminist organizations. “As demand continues to grow and many Ukrainian women have fled to other countries, companies are getting women from Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan… They’re also taking women to give birth in Cyprus, Greece or Georgia, which is completely illegal. But no one is going to say anything because if a member of parliament speaks out against surrogacy, they’ll have problems continuing their political career,” she explains in the lobby of a central Kyiv hotel.
Dmitrieva has a clear solution to end this business: “If the EU and its member countries prohibit their citizens from using surrogacy, this exploitation of women and minors will end. Only 5% of surrogacy arrangements are for Ukrainian couples; the rest are for foreigners.”
