Belarusian mills sold 24.9 per cent more lumber into China in June than a year earlier, shipping 83,300 cubic metres worth US$16.8 million as the value of the trade climbed 32.9 per cent and average prices reached $201.8 per cubic metre. That is according to customs trade data covering Belarus’s lumber exports, putting June prices 6.4 per cent higher than a year earlier, in a market where Russian rivals are selling nearly a third less.
It comes as Russian sawn timber exports to China fell 30 per cent year-on-year across the first four months of 2026 to 2.6 million cubic metres, with revenue down 26 per cent to $603.7 million, according to Russian export figures reported by Vedomosti. China bought 11.2 million cubic metres of Russian sawn timber in 2025, half of everything Russia exported, before a property crisis cut the country’s real estate sales 9.5 per cent to their lowest level since 2009.
“China is the top importer,” Forestry Minister Aleksandr Kulik said in May, confirming during a visit to the Pinsk forestry enterprise that Chinese buyers take between 400,000 and 500,000 cubic metres of the 1 million cubic metres of lumber Belarus exports each year. Kulik’s enterprises have chosen Chinese producers for ten new sawmill lines in 2026, with the first two already acquired for testing at Pinsk and the minister crediting equipment that uses less energy and less raw material.
Neither trade moves in a straight line, with the same monthly series counting Belarusian shipments down 28 per cent in May before June’s rebound.
Beijing’s dominance dates back to the European ban, with Brussels shutting Belarusian wood out of the EU in mid-2022 and stripping away customers who once accounted for 56 per cent of the country’s exported lumber. By August 2023, Kulik was telling President Aleksandr Lukashenko that China’s share had jumped from 37 to 52 per cent, with monthly volumes recovering from 60,000 cubic metres before the sanctions to an all-time high of 77,000.
Minsk has pushed its redirected wood well beyond China, trading more than 365,000 cubic metres into 15 friendly nations in a single quarter of 2024 and sending nearly 85,000 tonnes to Iranian buyers under a food-for-timber arrangement.
“This is a competitiveness indicator for our enterprises,” Belarus’s Ambassador to China Aleksandr Chervyakov said in Beijing last month, putting bilateral trade at $3.7 billion so far this year, up 17 per cent, with Belarusian exports growing 27 per cent. The state-run Belarusian Universal Commodity Exchange, now running its own Shanghai office, moved $129.3 million of goods into China in 2024, with softwood lumber the largest single line and timber carrying 83 per cent of exchange-traded exports in 2025.
Regulators now treat wood processed in China as the sanctions regime’s pressure point, with Brussels flagging birch plywood carrying trade links to Russia or Belarus, and Chinese hardwood plywood entering the EU under duties of 86.8 per cent since November 2025. Four years after Brussels closed Europe to its wood, Belarus is processing 4 million cubic metres of commercial timber a year, with China, on Kulik’s own count, buying up to half of everything that leaves the country as lumber.
