Research: Belarusian wood continues to enter Lithuania and the entire EU Business

“We see that more than 120 million EUR worth of timber enters the European Union (from all third countries – BNS). Part of it goes to Lithuania. It gets here because the wood is brought into Poland, checked at the border, and then goes to Lithuania through the territory of the European Union, where there is no control. (…) By blocking the import of suspicious wood, Lithuania is still getting wood through the back door by implementing sanctions more effectively,” Stanislovas Ivaškevičius, head of the Belarusian Research Center, told LRT radio on Tuesday.

According to him, Belarusian wood is transported “through Kazakhstan”, and in fact – from Belarus – with forged documents – this is proven by the documents analyzed by the investigators.

“The wood transporter from Belarus told us directly on the phone that he was transporting wood from Belarus, not from Kazakhstan. The sender from Kazakhstan assured us that he knows this (Belarus – BNS) company, that they communicated and signed some kind of memorandum, but after that the company disappeared, the business failed. We can imagine that all this company needed was a contractor from Kazakhstan to be able to stick fake stamps everywhere,” said S. Ivaškevičius.

According to him, new ways of circumventing sanctions have also appeared – it is no longer necessary to register companies exempt from value added tax (VAT), “now it is enough to draw documents and it works at the Polish border”.

“Kazakhstan is a country with few forests, it is large, but the forest cover there is only 4 percent. “Kazakhstan imports its own wood, and the forests they have are 4-5 percent, half of them are steppe trees, which are not very suitable for industrial wood processing,” emphasized S. Ivaškevičius.

The investigation was launched a year after a similar investigation in December 2022, during which it was discovered that Belarusian timber enters the EU through Kyrgyzstan.

“When we found out that Belarusian wood can be supplied to the European Union as if it came from Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania closed the import of wood from Kyrgyzstan. That’s where the good news ends. We continue to see the intensive growth of wood from Kazakhstan to the European Union”, said S. Ivaškevičius.