After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, on 2 March 2022 the European Union imposed a complete ban on the export of Belarusian timber, while the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) fully suspended all trade certificates for materials of Belarusian and Russian origin. This deprived Belarusian companies of the right to legally label and directly export their timber to Europe, forcing Belarus to resort to grey re-export schemes that involve document forgery in CIS countries and Central Asia, where FSC certification is either absent or easily falsified.
Today, sanctioned timber reaches the EU market primarily through countries such as Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey and China. Intermediary companies in these states falsify certificates of origin and legalise the wood as their own exports, while taking a cut of the profits.
According to the Belarusian opposition outlet Pozirk, as part of the “Slavic Caravan” project, a second through-freight train (a train that travels to its destination without re-forming or with only minimal technical operations at intermediate stations) departed for Uzbekistan on 3 August 2026. According to the press service of the Belarusian Railway, the train left Orsha-East station and, travelling via Russia and Kazakhstan, was reported to be delivering “export products of wood processing and high-value-added food cargoes with a total weight of over 4,000 tonnes” to Uzbekistan.
Central Asian states serve as key re-export hubs where Belarusian raw materials, as a result of document forgery, change their labelling for subsequent entry into the European market. In response, customs and other regulatory authorities in Poland, Lithuania and the United Kingdom have begun using laboratory analysis to determine the geographical origin of timber and have imposed sanctions on intermediary companies involved. Yet despite origin checks, this channel for the supply and legalisation of sanctioned raw materials remains one of the main ones.
According to European media and monitoring centres, the European market has seen a significant increase in supplies of timber and sawn timber from Central Asian countries in recent years. Analysts note that as early as the start of the sanctions in 2022, volumes of timber imports into the EU from Kazakhstan rose 74-fold. According to the British environmental NGO Earthsight, the total volume of imports into the EU of sanctioned timber and plywood from the actual introduction of restrictions in 2022 until the end of 2024 exceeded €1.5 billion.
In March 2024, Gazeta Wyborcza, together with the Schemes project of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, published a new investigation revealing that more than 40 contracts worth millions of euros had been concluded between the EU, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. In all cases, the documentary origin of the goods was altered. Notably, Kyrgyzstan itself does not possess sufficient forest resources to support its own exports on such a scale.
In January 2025, Earthsight published an investigation titled “Blood-stained Birch: Exposing the EU Trade in Russian Conflict Ply,” which stated that the average intensity of grey supplies to the EU market during 2024–2025 was approximately 22 freight containers of sanctioned timber per day. The total volume of sanctioned timber from Russia and Belarus brought in under these schemes from the moment the ban was introduced until the beginning of 2025 was estimated at over 500,000 cubic metres, with a total value exceeding €1.5 billion.
Trade between Belarus and Uzbekistan remains substantial. In July 2026, Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Transport reported that freight traffic between the two countries reached 850,000 tonnes in 2025, an increase of 30%, with timber and timber products listed among the main import categories.
The shadow export mechanism relies on a network of specially created or recruited intermediary companies in Central Asia, Turkey and China that forge certificates of origin. Journalistic investigations by the Belarusian Investigative Center (BIC) in cooperation with Siena and Kloop have exposed specific companies that issue false documents. Among them, the Kyrgyz firm “Certificate KG,” with assistance from the Belarusian “Standard of Quality” centre, issued forged certificates for Belarusian sawn timber, while the firm “Agro KG” supplied pallets from Belarus to Lithuania via the local importer Vivalsa. In Kazakhstan, similar timber legalisation schemes were most often carried out by the company “Manufactura Plus” (linked to the Belarusian holding “Pinskdrev”), which declares sanctioned Belarusian plywood and timber as its own production from the Kazakh “Semipalatinsk Woodworking Plant No. 1.”
In parallel with the Central Asian route, supply channels through Turkey and China have intensified. There, Belarusian and Russian timber also undergoes primary processing and changes its documentary origin. Turkish and Chinese intermediaries issue new declarations and quality certificates through local chambers of commerce and industry, as a result of which the sawn timber enters the European Union under the guise of products of Asian origin.
According to the NBD Trade Data database, on the Uzbek side the company most frequently involved in timber re-exports is OOO WOOD NAM IMPORT, whose counterparties include the Belarusian forestry enterprise “Slutsk Leskhoz,” as well as the companies “Magistral-Transit” and “Les Resource.” According to the same data, WOOD NAM IMPORT’s imports of Russian and Belarusian timber from 2022 to September 2025 were estimated at approximately $35.8 million.
Despite the existing EU sanctions, an extensive re-export network allows Belarus to freely sell sanctioned timber on the European market. The involvement of fictitious shell companies and intermediary firms in Central Asian countries formally legalises timber supplies. Spot laboratory checks at the borders of Poland and Lithuania, as well as criminal cases against individual importers, are still insufficient to shut down the scheme, as high margins and strong European demand continue to incentivise the use of grey schemes.