Thousands of cubic metres of illegally harvested Siberian timber are smuggled by rail into China and Central Asia in what has become big business, with two traders alone moving more than 9,500 cubic metres across the border in 2021. It comes as the East Siberian Transport Prosecutor’s Office revealed on Friday that the pair’s timber was “systematically exported by rail across the customs border of the Eurasian Economic Union, using documents containing false information.”
The Chernovsky District Court in Chita, capital of Zabaikalsky Krai, sentenced the two men to eight years each in a strict-regime penal colony. Both are Chinese citizens, the court has since confirmed, after prosecutors described the pair as foreign nationals when announcing the sentences.
They were found guilty of organising a criminal community and of smuggling strategically important resources out of Russia. The court also fined each man 500,000 roubles and confiscated money equal to the value of the sawn timber, worth more than 190 million roubles.
It comes four days after the same prosecutors announced a separate sentence in Zabaikalsky Krai over timber worth more than 220 million roubles. The Chernovsky court had already jailed the organiser of another criminal group for 9 years in 2022 for smuggling timber into China from Buryatia and Zabaikalsky Krai.
That group moved more than 360,000 cubic metres worth more than 2.6 billion roubles out of the two regions between 2012 and 2019. Investigators said the group set up shell companies to declare the illegally harvested wood to customs in Chita.
Zabaikalsky Krai borders Mongolia and China, where the rail line heading south-east from Chita crosses the frontier at Zabaykalsk. Manzhouli, on the Chinese side of that crossing, is China’s largest inland port, where Russian timber is loaded onto trains.
Customs officers in Krasnoyarsk, in central Siberia, opened four criminal cases last month over 3,800 cubic metres of sawn softwood sent to an unnamed Asian country. Officers there had already uncovered another 10,000 cubic metres of sawn softwood worth 140.3 million roubles bound for Central Asia earlier this year.
As it stands, Russia counts 40 “friendly” countries that took nearly 24 million cubic metres of its sawn timber last year, with China leading the list. Exports of softwood and valuable hardwood logs have been barred since 2022, which means the timber leaving the country is sawn or processed.
China’s Belt and Road routes cut through the forests most at risk of illegal harvesting, with Russia supplying 29.6 per cent of the wood China imports. Dr Tyron Venn, a University of Queensland resource economist, found the origin of timber is not tracked as it moves through China’s mills.
Banned Russian wood is also being laundered into the European Union through China, Kazakhstan, and Turkey, according to producers in Estonia. A Czech investigation has found Russian larch relabelled as Chinese still reaching the country, four years after European Union sanctions cut off direct imports.
“Source Certain will clean up one client’s supply chain at a time,” says Cameron Scadding, the forensic firm’s founder and chief technology officer. Scadding and Venn both spoke on last week’s Beyond the Paperwork webinar on proving where timber comes from.
His team has traced Russian timber into British homes, but Scadding says the harvest continues because the product simply goes somewhere else. With government intervention on top, he believes those testing supply chain by supply chain can “make a really big dent by just getting going and doing something.”
