‘Blood timber’ with a retail value of over €1.5bn is estimated to have entered the EU since sanctions took effect in July 2022. Twenty container-loads continue to arrive every day.

The Russian military profits directly from timber sales, and Russia is among the largest producers of wood in the world. The EU sanctioned wood imports from Russia and its ally Belarus in recognition of the industry’s importance to their economies, and in response to appeals by civil society.

Earthsight has spent nine months investigating clandestine trade in the most valuable sanctioned product – birch plywood. Now, we reveal the actors at every stage of the supply chain, from the manufacturing giants in Russia, through the firms laundering their products in China, Kazakhstan and Turkey, to their customers in the EU.

Earthsight found evidence that goods from seven of Russia’s 10 biggest birch ply manufacturers are still being sold in the EU. These include two firms whose largest shareholders are billionaire oligarchs who met with Putin on the day Russia invaded Ukraine. One of these, Alexei Mordashov, is also on the EU’s sanctions list, while the other, Vladimir Yevtushenkov, controls Russia’s largest logging firm. Our evidence also implicates Belarusian state-owned birch ply producers.

Sanctioned plywood is making its way into a wide range of products, including kitchens, flooring, furniture and toys. Birch ply suppliers in China, Kazakhstan and Turkey claimed to Earthsight undercover investigators to be laundering sanctioned Russian wood into the EU. Buyers of birch ply from the same firms, records show, include Walltopia, the world’s largest manufacturer of artificial climbing walls. Other buyers include a company whose products are stocked by leading Polish furniture chain Black Red White. Though we have no proof these European buyers are breaching sanctions or are aware of the risk of the plywood they buy being of Russian origin, other EU firms we met with undercover were all too aware of the provenance of the birch ply in their supply chains.

Illegal, blood-stained birch plywood has entered every EU member state, our research suggests. The biggest importers at present are Poland, Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Estonia and Greece.

Efforts to enforce sanctions on timber have been ill-coordinated and ineffective, with smugglers easily able to adapt and continue trading. The EU Commission and member states must take urgent, coordinated action to halt this trade, and Poland, by far the largest importer of blood-stained birch, must use its current Presidency of the EU to lead the charge.