Uzbekistan has taken delivery of the first direct freight train from Belarus, with timber, food, and chemicals pulling into Tashkent’s Chukursay station on 5 August. That is according to Belarusian Railways, whose Slavic Caravan service covered nearly 4,000 kilometres through Russia and Kazakhstan in under six days, as reported on Wednesday by state wire BelTA.
Seventy-one wagons left Orsha-Vostochnaya station with a ceremony on 30 July, loading 3,800 tonnes of wood-processing products alongside sugar, potato starch, and animal feed. Minsk and Tashkent agreed on the service during the Uzbek president’s state visit to Belarus in early July, with Belarusian Railways to run it twice a month at the initial stage.
“The train will run according to a passenger-train-style schedule,” Valery Verenich, head of Belarusian Railways, said at the send-off, claiming the service nearly halves delivery times and takes single 20-tonne containers from small shippers. A wagon on this route previously took up to two months, Vitebsk Oblast Governor Aleksandr Ragozhnik told the ceremony, with an identical train to make the return run loaded with Uzbek goods and fruit that does not grow in Belarus.
Belarusian wood cannot lawfully enter the European Union, as Council Regulation 2022/355 bans anyone under EU jurisdiction from importing, buying, or transporting wood products under Annex X since March 2022, and the United Kingdom enforces an equivalent prohibition.
Kazakhstan sits on the new corridor and on Europe’s laundering map at the same time, with Earthsight research putting more than €1.5 billion of Russian and Belarusian birch plywood into the European Union through third countries since sanctions took effect. Its investigators traced a further €273 million through China, Kazakhstan, Turkey, and Georgia between November 2024 and April 2025.
Traders move the wood on fraudulent certificates of origin, repackaging consignments in the transit country and presenting them as though the trees grew there. The Belarusian Investigative Center, Lithuania’s Siena, and OCCRP documented the pattern from late 2022, and European producers say it still undercuts legitimate mills.
“It is obvious that there is an increasing number of countries and intermediaries,” Nerijus Mačiulis, chief economist at Swedbank Lithuania, told OCCRP of the routes helping Russia bypass sanctions. That investigation counted EU wood imports from Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan climbing from €445,000 across 2020 and 2021 to more than €30 million between June and October 2022 alone.
Tree cover in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan is less than 6 per cent, and both countries stopped exporting most wood types in late 2021, yet customs officers in Lithuania and Latvia soon began registering record volumes of Kazakh and Kyrgyz wood.
As it stands, Belarus exports more than 1 million cubic metres of timber each year through organisations under its Forestry Ministry, which reported revenue above US$180 million for the first 11 months of 2025, up by $20 million year on year. “Growth is also observed this year,” Sergei Kasyanov, Deputy Chairman of the state woodworking concern Bellesbumprom, said at July’s Forum of Regions of Belarus and Uzbekistan, referring to Uzbek trade, which he counts as tenfold over the past few years.
Uzbekistan has attracted Russian and Belarusian exporters as it expands into a Central Asian trade hub, with Chinese-funded rail, road, and sea projects underway, and fears that the country could become a new trading post for conflict timber.
It comes as Minsk turns its trade east, with Belarusian lumber exports to China rising 25 per cent in June, while Russian shipments to the same market fell 30 per cent.
Belarusian Railways sent a second Slavic Caravan train out of Orsha-Vostochnaya on 3 August, loading more than 4,000 tonnes and adding transit cargo for Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan while the first train was still crossing Kazakhstan. Kyrgyzstan last featured in this trade as a paper origin, the state whose certificates investigators found used to disguise Belarusian wood bound for Europe.
