After two hours of labour, Svetlana Pusikova delivered her firstborn at 4am on November 4, 2002. Medical staff whisked the baby out of the delivery room, leaving the 22-year-old waitress to recover in Maternity Hospital No 6 in Kharkov, eastern Ukraine.

She never saw the child again.

Seven weeks later Yelena Stulnyeva gave birth at the same hospital. She says she saw her baby girl wriggling and heard her crying before medical staff took her away.

She, too, never saw her daughter again.

In both cases the hospital says the babies were stillborn, and buried by local authorities because the parents did not ask for the corpses.

But both sets of parents say hospital authorities repeatedly refused their requests to see the babies, and have yet to provide proof of where and when they were buried.

The truth, they fear, may be more harrowing — that their babies were either stolen for adoption, or sold for research into bioproducts used in medicines and cosmetics.

For three years, their demands for a proper investigation have been thwarted by bureaucracy, prejudice, incompetence and even physical threats.

But last week a rapporteur from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (Pace) visited Kharkov and demanded that Ukrainian authorities renew their investigations.

“After my discussions with the mothers and others involved, I am really sure that children disappeared,” the rapporteur, Ruth-Gaby Vermot-Mangold, said. “There’s so much contradiction, and the parents still have no answers to their questions.”

She said she knew of five such cases in Kharkov alone, and was concerned about 300 other Ukrainian babies that have disappeared in recent years. She is demanding an investigation into charges that Ukrainian babies are being sold to the West for adoption or, even worse, being used for medical research.

Establishing such an investigation has now become an important test of the Ukrainian Government’s commitment to human rights as it lobbies for membership of the European Union.

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