The evidence of systemic issues within Ukraine’s state forestry sector is overwhelming:
- The European Parliament report on Ukraine’s EU integration clearly indicates the necessity of combating illegal logging.
- Prosecutors and the State Bureau of Investigation (DBR) publish weekly reports detailing new cases of illegal logging and issuing notices of suspicion to forestry officials.
- Prosecutor General of Ukraine Andriy Kostin publicly stated that: “For years, the system of the State Enterprise ‘Forests of Ukraine’ was entangled in corrupt schemes. Illegal logging, timber sales at undervalued prices, official negligence, and abuse of office turned the forest into a source of illicit profit for individual officials.”
- DBR Director Oleksiy Sukhachov explicitly noted regarding violations in the forestry sector: “The nature of the identified offenses, their geography, and their number indicate not isolated incidents, but the presence of signs of a centralized, vertically organized system of abuse.”
The leadership of the State Enterprise “Forests of Ukraine” (DP “Lisy Ukrainy”) at both central and regional levels are currently involved in criminal cases concerning illegal enrichment, procurement abuses, and illegal logging. Furthermore, the National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP) has produced a report identifying vast corruption risks across the entire forestry sector.
The Blame Game
In many regional forest management units (nadlisnytstva) under “Forests of Ukraine,” forest management plans (lisovporiadkuvannia – 10-year logging plans) have not been updated in a timely manner. This delay is sometimes due to a lack of funding, but often because foresters included logging activities that are now legally prohibited or because they refuse to account for the presence of Protected Areas.
However, the management of both the State Forest Resources Agency (Derzhlisahientstvo) and “Forests of Ukraine” acts as if these profound problems simply do not exist. Instead, they contend that all problems in the forestry sector are the fault of environmentalists and conservation restrictions on logging.
Consequently, they propose that the solution to the forestry sector’s problems lies in canceling the maximum possible number of environmental regulations. Specifically, they propose to:
- Abolish the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) procedure for logging.
- Cancel the expiration date and the need for approval of forest management planning materials.
- Abolish the legal requirement to preserve the oldest trees (veteran trees).
We have lost hope in the good judgment of the current forestry leadership. However, we want to believe that Oleksiy Sobolev, the new Minister of Economy, Environment, and Agricultural Policy, will not wish to go down in history as the one who destroyed Ukraine’s forests. We urge him to heed the views of law enforcement and conservationists, and not just the opinion of those facing criminal charges.
