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It has also revived two young women’s hopes of finding their babies — alive or dead — and bringing to justice the people who spirited them away. “I want my baby back or I want someone to be punished,” Mrs Puzikova, who comes outside Kharkov, said.

She was not married when she got pregnant but insists that she and her boyfriend, Aleksei, wanted the child. “We’d even bought things — clothes, a cradle,” she said.

Her official pregnancy card, seen by The Times, shows the baby appeared healthy in pre-natal checks, as does a form filled in by the ambulance doctor on November 4.

She says three people were in the delivery room when she gave birth — the obstetrician, the doctor on duty and an unidentified woman — and that the latter took the baby away.

Larissa Nazarenko, the head of the hospital, dismissed that as “lies and provocations”. She said that Mrs Puzikova arrived at the hospital only 15 minutes before giving birth, without any official documents, and delivered a foetus that had been dead for “at least a week”.

“Other people convinced her that her baby was stolen,”, Dr Nazarenko told The Times. “She is just playing a role.”

Irina Tsapluk, the obstetrician, said she took the foetus out of the delivery room without showing it to the mother because it would have upset her.

What is suspicious is that the hospital’s documents show that Mrs Puzikova gave birth to a “non-viable foetus” in her 26th to 27th week of pregnancy, not in her 39th as her own documents show.

That meant that the foetus was buried as “biowaste”, along with 27 others at Kharkov’s Cemetery No 17. When the family demanded an inquest, officials exhumed the mass grave and found not 28, but 30 foetuses, many of which had had their internal organs removed.

Video footage seen by The Times shows four foetuses which have clearly had their insides and brains surgically removed, and fragments of a larger baby, about one month old, also with many organs removed. None was identifiable as Mrs Puzikova’s.

Prosecutors have since offered to compare DNA from four of the foetuses with that of Mrs Puzikova and her boyfriend, but they have refused to give a blood sample, fearing it will be tampered with.

Ukraine’s Deputy Prosecutor-General, Oleksandr Med-vedko, said: “We can’t do anything until we get the blood samples. That’s the procedure.” His office began an investigation into her case in March last year, but has yet to announce any results.

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