Huge volumes of rare old-growth forests continue to be cut down by Russia’s largest timber company on an industrial scale. Much of this timber is then traded into China (and potentially India), which is on-sold into the global supply chain for forest products.
That is according to Kedr.media (Kedr), an independent Russian-language media service, which revealed that the Segezha Group—once the world’s second-largest pulp and paper producer—was still “cutting through a commodity window to Asia at the cost of century-old Karelian trees.”
“In February 2024, Vladimir Putin said that since 2021, more forests have been restored in Russia than have been cut down”, according to investigative journalists Anastasia Troyanova and Yulia Omelina. And whilst the president is correct, the area of reforestation in Russia, according to statistics, in recent years exceeds the area of not only felled but also dead forests.”
“However, there is a nuance: in our country, axes are more often used not by secondary massifs, which are felled, for example, in China or Finland, but by pristine, century-old forests, which from an environmental point of view cannot be replaced by fresh plantings.”
The problem is that the Segezha Group, controlled by the family of billionaire Vladimir Yevtushenkov, was, from the 1990s until mid-2022, subject to full FSC certification. This meant that the timber giant agreed to a moratorium to protect millions of hectares of ecologically rich Karelia forests near the Finnish border in exchange for selling timber into “ecologically sensitive” EU markets.
“Between June and November 2022, Segezha Group opted out of the logging moratorium in ecologically valuable forests across Russia: from Karelia to Komi, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and Arkhangelsk,” Vox Europe said last year. “According to World Wildlife Fund, the total forested area Segezha withdrew from protection and is now allowed to log is 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres).”
According to Vox Europe, Segezha refused to protect valuable forests because sustainable land use no longer made economic sense for the company. “After the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the EU imposed sanctions on the import of Russian timber products, and FSC suspended certifications for responsible forest management in Russia.”
Now, SPOK—a public organisation responsible for monitoring intact forest landscapes—has revealed that the previous moratoriums cover less than 25% of those protected forests: “Today (the past FSC) moratoriums have been withdrawn for 342,000 hectares of forest out of the previously protected 460,000 hectares,” SPOK told Kedr in a statement.
Described as “a stain on the reputation” of Russia’s timber industry, experts have warned that the decision to roll back the mortarium makes any future return to “ecologically sensitive markets” very unlikely. “If your planning horizon is a few months or a year at most, and you’re not thinking generally about the future, then from a purely financial standpoint, the company’s actions seem entirely logical.”
“But, as they say, ‘Après moi, le déluge,'” – a French term used to express selfish disregard for problems that may occur in the future, especially after one’s death or reign of control.
- Click here for Kedr’s investigative report to learn more about the huge volumes of timber that continue to be cut from Russian old-growth forests. To learn why Russia could be poised to regain all major timber markets once if and when the Ukraine War is resolved, click here for Wood Central’s special feature.
