Original article (in Albanian) was published on 17/02/2026; Author: Patris Pustina
As the war in Ukraine enters its fifth year, the claim persists on social media, including Albanian-speaking platforms, that in the territories occupied by Russian forces, underground tunnels have been discovered as part of a widespread network for trafficking children to extract their blood.
However, the above post provides no evidence, sources, or references to substantiate this extraordinary claim.
The post seems to be an Albanian translation of a February 11 X/Twitter post by a user named Paul White Gold Eagle, who presents himself on Facebook as a broadcaster of “daily messages of 5D energies and the New Earth.”
No international media have reported such an event, which, if true, would have been widely covered by the press, similar to the extensive media attention given to the files released by the U.S. Department of Justice concerning the American pedophile and trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
In 2023, when AFP asked about allegations of organ trafficking supposedly carried out by Ukrainian soldiers, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine stated that “none of the members of the UN mission has ever heard of such a thing.”
Jakub Kalenský, the chief disinformation expert at the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, told AFP that “fabricating lies about Ukrainian crimes against children has been a preferred goal of Kremlin disinformation channels and the ecosystem that repeats their falsehoods, at least since 2014.”
“Creating disinformation stories about abused and harmed children is intended to provoke the strongest possible emotions in the targeted audience and thereby suppress critical thinking,” Kalenský said. “So far, we have seen no evidence that Ukrainian authorities have committed crimes against children. On the contrary, there is substantial evidence of Russian crimes against Ukrainian children. It is a typical and cynical case of ‘the thief” calling them “the thief.’
Meanwhile, in March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova, accusing them of deportation and the illegal transfer of children from occupied Ukrainian territories to the Russian Federation, acts classified as war crimes.
