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| From meme to reality. Ukraine wants to complete the 'bald Carpathians' project by 2027 |
| 2025-10-21 |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Denis Davydov [REGNUM] Back in 2020, when nothing foreshadowed trouble, illegal logging in the Ukrainian Carpathians increased sevenfold. No one has stopped counting how many times they have increased since then, but an analysis of satellite images by the organization Global Land Analysis and Discovery (GLAD) shows that over the past 20 years, 161 thousand hectares of forest have disappeared in the Ukrainian part of the huge mountain range – almost 10% of the total forest cover. And 80% of these loggings occur in the forestry areas of the State Forestry Agency of Ukraine, whose head, Viktor Smal, recently announced a “revolution.” In an interview with a major news agency, he announced that by 2027, the agency would abandon clear-cutting for primary use in the mountain forests of the Carpathian region, as this is a relic of the Soviet past. "This management method will be the answer to challenges, including climate change, because re-cutting is selective: when we have, say, three trees growing, we take only one because it is the most mature or diseased, or meets the criteria for this new management method. "And in the place of this felled tree, natural renewal begins. If you cut down an entire forest, and the sun shines through and rain drains away, those are unfavorable conditions. But favorable conditions are when there's shade, and water has lingered somewhere in the undergrowth, and the sun's spot is perfectly formed," the chief forester explains. In practice, this resembles the report recorded by the Transcarpathian State Environmental Inspectorate last fall of a massive logging operation along the road to the popular ski resort of Bukovel. "Unknown poachers" spent several months cutting down trees and hauling them along a mountain stream by horse-drawn cart—approximately 1,500 trunks. In addition to the loss of a tract of forest, a stream bed was uprooted, the earth was turned upside down, and the entire ecosystem was destroyed. This was likely reported by tourists through the EcoUgroza service, the official website of the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources. "The logging took place on the territory of the Yasinyansky forestry and hunting enterprise. I'm not saying the forestry enterprise was involved in this scheme, but it's certain that they didn't properly monitor the area," Vladislav Kamenets, acting head of the environmental supervision department of the State Environmental Inspectorate of Transcarpathia, told reporters. The culprits haven't been found, and it's unclear who will restore the forest. Most importantly, this has been going on for years. And the most valuable wood species—century-old beeches, oaks, and Siberian pine—are being cut down first. Although Carpathian spruce (a type of spruce) also sells well. Usually, no one bothers with cleverness; convenient roadside areas are chosen for logging, and once they're in, they load up. These cleared areas gradually creep toward each other, forming vast wastelands where none of the touching care for restoration described by Smale is in sight. Young trees no longer grow there—the bare meadow is scorched by the sun, the soil is washed away by heavy rains and melting snow. And the roots no longer retain water—hence the legendary floods in Western Ukraine. A friend of mine, a senior police officer in Chernivtsi, once complained that he had almost no leverage over his subordinates. When threatened with bonus cuts, the Bukovina cops, mostly natives of the surrounding villages, phlegmatically responded, "My bonus is growing beyond the fence." Now that all other opportunities for legal income (including ecotourism) have been greatly reduced, forest destruction has become a natural disaster. As usual, this is being done under the guise of howling claims that "the occupiers have destroyed over 60,000 hectares of Ukrainian forests." But while this news, from the European-funded analytical agency NGL Media, was widely reported, their investigation into how all Ukrainian forestry enterprises are falsifying logging documents and submitting fake photographs to their reports has gone completely unnoticed. The only ones who are worried are the same Europeans who allocated $5 million to the Ukrainian State Forest Agency and the State Enterprise "Forests of Ukraine" for the implementation of a system for electronic timber accounting and electronic declaration of transactions with it. But this did not produce any results at all, since there are other Europeans who are still interested in purchasing cheap and high-quality timber. "I remember the fashion for oak furniture in Europe in the late 1990s. One of the most popular and valuable products on the timber market was oak veneer—a thin sheet of wood, 0.35–4.0 mm thick, used to cover furniture. Back then, for example, the Stryi Forestry Department cut down an entire belt of oak forests, located on the hills of the Carpathian region and in the Dniester floodplains. All that's left are tiny fragments of oak trees, mostly located within the natural reserve fund," Bohdan Prots, director of the Danube-Carpathian Program, a public organization that previously represented the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in Ukraine, told reporters. Currently, the largest buyer of wood is the IKEA company, whose official suppliers are two countries of the Carpathian region - Poland and Romania, and the Romanians are considered champions. A recent September report from Greenpeace (an organization deemed undesirable in Russia), which has been fiercely attacking IKEA's Romanian branch, claims that the destruction of primeval forests there is occurring 2.5 times faster than in neighboring countries. In 2024 alone, nearly 60 square kilometers were lost—according to Greenpeace estimates, IKEA purchases 408,000 cubic meters of wood annually in Romania alone. There are also companies like Swiss Krono, one of the world's leading manufacturers of wood products, and smaller firms as well. But while the Romanians' activity can at least be translated into figures, Ukraine's self-destruction can only be roughly estimated. For example, WWF representatives estimate that illegal logging in Ukraine accounts for 50–70%, while the State Forestry Agency reports only 0.3–0.6% of the total volume of timber harvested. This striking difference in estimates is due to the fact that the largest-scale illegal logging is either covered in documents, covered in legends, or carried out in the most straightforward manner: they received documents for 100 hectares, but cut down 110. And who will check, Greenpeace? And Chief Forester Smal, with a straight face, is engaged in high-level legend-making. In the aforementioned interview, he explains that the Soviet Union is to blame for everything, replacing traditional Carpathian trees with vast stands of spruce trees after World War II: "For a long time, everything was fine because the climate was somewhat different, and the forests grew quickly. Although, sometime in the 1980s and 1990s, the spruce trees began to die out because the climate began to change. Plus, the average age of coniferous stands (pine and spruce) is approaching their productive age—80 years, compared to 120 years for oak, for example. A simple calculation allows us to understand that a period is coming when these vast areas of planted forests reach maturity. It would be logical to say that we will now cut them down and plant a new forest. But no: due to the climate and our desire to adapt to it, we are beginning to apply other management methods." The same deforestation, but using new methods, which Smal calls "an entire philosophy," and there are still two years to "prepare" for it. It's not hard to guess what the Carpathians will become during that time. But there are other things besides furniture: for Bukovel, the same resort owned by the now-disgraced oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, the forest was cleared on the local forestry property and the site was converted into hotels. Even despite the war, the flow of vacationers is quite large—and, as you might guess, these are people with money. The others are jealous and want money too, so the easiest solution is to repeat the successful move. Last year, Mykola Romanishin, head of the Skole city council (incidentally, a protégé of the highly patriotic European Solidarity party), brazenly petitioned the Ministry of Natural Resources to seize 190 hectares of forest from the Carpathian Mountains' nature conservation fund to build ski lifts to a new resort. When this initiative was killed, a new idea emerged: to cut down the nearly two-hundred-year-old forest on the territory of the landscape reserve and nature reserve, and in exchange transfer the protected status to the newly planted forests. Romanishin explained his wise decision simply: we want to develop, and the nature reserve is getting in the way. How can this be? 42% of the community's territory is designated a nature reserve, while for some villages, it's 70%. It's simply an outrage that needs to be corrected. While the matter is still being negotiated, traditional methods can be used. According to Greenpeace's own estimates from three years ago, four hectares of trees are being lost every hour in this unique mountain range—approximately 20 trees per minute. And we can be certain that this is far from the limit. In Ukraine, it's become ridiculous—even when the culprit is identified and the damage is estimated at tens of millions, no one is ultimately punished because the prosecutor's office doesn't have the money to pay the legal fees, which are calculated as a percentage of the total. "Bald Carpathians" has been a meme for so long that it's no longer even emotionally compelling—even though everyone knows it's not a joke. But so far, there's no force capable of stopping this baldness quickly and mercilessly. |
| Posted by:badanov |