One of Ukraine’s largest green groups is fighting to keep the State Forestry Agency out of the country’s revived agriculture ministry, four days after a Kyiv reshuffle left the forest sector without a confirmed home. That is according to the All-Ukrainian Ecological League, which has written to the new Economy and Environment Minister Oleksandr Kravchenko in an appeal reported on Monday, urging him to hold on to a sector whose reforms took annual profit from 200 million hryvnia to 6.9 billion (US$154 million) in five years.
“Turned into a commercial tool for extracting resources” is the future of the League’s forest letter maps under agrarian control. Alongside the commercial warning, the letter says the transfer would halt the alignment of Ukrainian forestry standards with European law and could result in young self-seeded forests being destroyed and converted to farmland.
Behind the fight is last week’s overhaul in Kyiv, with the Verkhovna Rada confirming Naftogaz chief Serhii Koretskyi as Prime Minister on 16 July and dividing the year-old ministry holding economy, environment, and agriculture between Kravchenko’s economy and environment portfolio and a restored Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food under Taras Vysotskyi.
Wood Central understands that neither of the new ministry’s founding rules has been adopted, leaving open which minister will coordinate the agency, its 10.4 million hectares of state forest fund, and the 24,000 people working across the sector.
Pressure to move the sector the other way is already public, with Oleksandr Kovalchuk, deputy head of the parliament’s finance, taxation, and customs committee, urging the new government to return forestry, woodworking, and furniture to agrarian policy.
“There is no time to lose,” Kovalchuk said, arguing that Vysotskyi ran the working groups that steered the sector’s reforms. Changing the set-up in wartime, he claims, would break working ties and stall decisions already adopted.
The ecologists have won this fight before, with the agency answering to agriculture ministers from its creation in 2010 until 2019, when Kyiv moved forests into the environment portfolio. A 2021 push to reverse the shift collapsed after nine green groups signed a joint statement opposing the transfer.
Money is where both cases meet, with agency chief Viktor Smal reporting a net profit of 6.9 billion hryvnia for 2025, 2.76 times the previous year, on timber sales of 30.4 billion hryvnia and a sector record of 16.1 billion hryvnia in taxes paid at every level.
“The reforms we carried out have proven their effectiveness,” Smal said at his March annual report, comparing the record year with the 200 million hryvnia the sector earned in 2020, before the reform, on access to a larger resource.
Europe is where the stakes sharpen, with Ukraine holding a low-risk status under the EU Deforestation Regulation on the strength of electronic felling tickets and digital chain-of-custody reforms. Agrarian control, the League cautions, could shake European trust in Ukrainian timber certification before the rules start on 30 December, and put at risk the foreign aid behind restoring and demining war-damaged forests.
A Cabinet resolution adopted in the spring of 2025 already commits the sector to ending clear-cut final fellings across the Carpathian mountain forests from May 2027. Three years is the time the agency says it has given its workforce to prepare for close-to-nature forestry, a change the League fears farm control would unwind.
It comes as Forests of Ukraine reported this month that Russian fibre-optic drones are hunting timber trucks through Kharkiv’s border forests, the latest strain on a wood trade that stands among wartime Ukraine’s few growing export earners. Kravchenko himself is untested in forests, with the incoming minister arriving from the managing partner’s chair at McKinsey & Company’s Kyiv office after a career spent in strategic consulting and rebuilding finance, and no public record on green policy.
