Ukrainian authorities are cracking down on the country’s ‘shadow timber’ trade, charging a crime syndicate after detectives searched more than 60 offices, warehouses, and private residences, according to the ESBU’s Kyiv office.
The scheme was built on falsified forest transport waybills — known as TTN-lis documents — that were purchased from third-party enterprises, with no actual transactions underpinning any of them. The forged documents were then submitted to obtain export permits. The timber had been bought for cash from individuals across Kyiv and the surrounding region over several years. Nobody could say where it came from.
Oak, ash, pine, birch and alder were moving through the scheme. So was processed lumber and firewood.”The participants of the scheme legalised and attempted to illegally export significant volumes of oak, ash, pine, birch, and alder, as well as lumber and firewood,” a government spokesperson said.
It unravelled when detectives intercepted a shipment of commercial-grade oak and pine at the border. A court then placed the seized products under arrest, with the oak subject to special confiscation upon conclusion of the proceedings.
The case is the latest in a long line of enforcement actions against a trade that has ballooned since Russia’s full-scale invasion. Soaring wartime demand for timber — to fuel reconstruction, military fortifications and energy supply — has made Ukraine’s forests among the country’s most valuable remaining economic assets, and among its most exploited.
Last year, the WWF warned that timber had become Ukraine’s third-most-corrupt industry, behind only customs and public procurement. Wood Central has tracked the trade through a string of investigations — from the Zelenskyy government’s push to end the “gray wood” racket through a blockchain-style accounting system, to crime syndicates harvesting inside the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, to a senior Ukrainian official linked to nearly 60,000 cubic metres of conflict timber sold into the European supply chain.
