From the Altai Mountains to the Pacific coast, logging ravages vast Russian forests, leaving behind strips of scarred land covered only with lifeless tree stumps.
It is obvious to many Russians who is to blame: the Chinese.
Twenty years ago, China strictly limited commercial logging in its own natural forests and turned to Russia more and more every year, and in 2017 removed a huge amount of forest from there, trying to meet the colossal needs of its construction companies and furniture manufacturers.
“Siberians understand that they need forests to survive,” said environmentalist Yevgeny Simonov, who studies the implications of commercial logging in Russia's Far East. "And they know very well that today they are stealing their forest."
Russia deliberately condones this: it sells cheap cutting rights to Chinese companies and, according to the opposition, turns a blind eye to the fact that they are cutting more forests than the law requires.
Chinese demand is driving deforestation in other regions, from Peru to Papua New Guinea, Mozambique and Myanmar.
In the Solomon Islands, the current pace of logging by Chinese companies could deplete the country's once pristine rainforest by 2036, according to the environmental group Global Witness. In Indonesia, activists have warned that illegal logging by the company with its Chinese partners threatens one of the last orangutan habitats on the island of Borneo.
Environmentalists say that China has simply brought excessive logging, with all its consequences, from home abroad, despite the fact that it is not economically profitable. Some warn that the scale of logging today could destroy the planet's last pristine forests, contributing to global warming.
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At the same time, China is concerned about protecting its own forest resources.
Two decades ago, the communist government, worried about deforested mountains, pollution of rivers and devastating flooding in the Yangtze River valley, intensified by water bodies clogged with floating forest, was forced to take measures to reduce logging in the country.
The demand for timber in the country, however, has not diminished. As well as the global demand for plywood and furniture, the main wood products that China produces and exports.
It's one thing when Chinese demand for timber devastates small countries desperate for money, and quite another when it depletes the resources of a much larger state, which also considers itself a superpower and sees China as a strategic partner.
The timber trade has once again made it clear that Russia relies too heavily on its natural resources. It also caused a negative reaction from the population, exacerbating the previously warm relations between the leaders of the two countries - Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
Protest movements have sprung up in many cities. Members of the Federation Council sharply criticized officials for turning a blind eye to the damage caused to the nature of Siberia and the Far East. Local residents and conservationists are outraged that logging is contaminating water bodies and destroying the natural habitat of the endangered Siberian tiger and Amur leopard.
“What is happening now in Siberia and the Far East is destroying the last remnants of the primeval forests in these regions,” said Nikolai Shmatkov, director of the WWF's forest program in Russia. The organization documented the damage to the forest by receiving satellite photographs taken during the period of Chinese logging in the country.
“It's not safe for the environment,” he added.
Nothing will be left
The incredible transformations that have taken place in China's economy over the past forty years have generated such demand. Today it is the largest timber importer in the world, followed by the United States. China is also the largest exporter, with most of the wood imported here processed into products, which are then sent to Home Depot and Ikea stores around the world.
China's total wood imports - unprocessed logs, sawnwood and pulp - have increased more than 10-fold since they restricted logging in 1998 to $ 23 billion in 2017, the highest ever, according to data IHS Markit's Global Trade Atlas.
The government extended regional logging restrictions to the entire country by the end of 2016. Commercial felling is now allowed only in those forests that are subsequently restored. Environmentalists believe that other countries should strive for such a model.
The problem is that few countries do this, which is what China uses.
More than 500 Chinese companies now operate in Russia, often with Russian partners, according to a report by Vita Spivak, a China expert at the Carnegie Moscow Center. Russia once supplied almost no timber to China; it currently accounts for over 20% of China's timber imports in value terms.
"If the Chinese come in, there will be nothing left," Marina Volobueva, a resident of the Zakamensk District, which lies south of Lake Baikal, told a local TV channel after a Chinese company received plots of land to be cleared there for 49 years.
Russia sells such logging tickets at prices that vary greatly by region and species of wood, but average about $ 2 per hectare, or 80 cents per acre, per year, according to WWF's Mr. Shmatkov. It is much cheaper than in other countries.
In 2017, China exported almost 200 million cubic meters of timber from Russia.
Artem Lukin, Associate Professor of the Department of International Relations at the Far Eastern Federal University, noted that corruption at the state level, crime and the lack of economic development in Siberia and the Far East only exacerbated the crisis.
“In many rural areas of the Russian Far East and Siberia, there are few other ways to make a living other than squeezing natural resources from the vast local forests,” he said.
Transformed by the forest
For China, however, this trade has become an impetus for development.
Most of the Russian forest crosses the border with China in the city of Manchuria. Once only nomadic tribes lived here, but at the turn of the 20th century it became an important point of the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Manchuria city in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China.
Over the past 20 years, more than 120 plants and factories have appeared here. They process raw or roughly cut lumber into plywood and produce cladding boards, laminate flooring, doors, window frames and furniture.
The factories occupy dozens of acres on the outskirts of the city and have created more than 10,000 jobs in the city of 300,000, according to a local municipality official.
New buildings have turned the city into an architectural monument of Russian culture. Many buildings have typical features such as onion domes. There is even an exact copy of St. Basil's Cathedral, which houses a children's science museum, and a hotel in the shape of a nesting doll - according to local authorities, the largest nesting doll in the world.
Manchuria city in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China.
Zhu Xiuhua has witnessed the flourishing of trade with Russia during her career.
Ms. Xiuhua, now 50, moved to Manchuria when China began to restrict logging. She became an intermediary in the import of timber, and in 2002 began trying to obtain the right to direct logging in Russia. Four years later, she founded the company she now runs, Inner Mongolia Kaisheng Group, one of the largest in the city.
Ms. Xiuhua currently operates three factories in Manchuria and is licensed to harvest 1.8 million acres of Russian forest near the town of Bratsk, near Lake Baikal, and transport them to China. “We are growing every year,” she said.
When they began to question her in more detail, she refused to discuss the details of the transactions, but the company's official website indicates that she had invested $ 20 million in Russia by 2015. The official Chinese news agency Xinhua in 2017 estimated the conglomerate's assets at $ 150 million.
According to Ms. Xiuhua, this commercial activity is a classic case of supply-demand response. She believes - perhaps presumptuously - that the trade will continue for a long time.
Going forward, she plans to negotiate new logging deals as she moves west. “Krasnoyarsk,” she said, first using the Mandarin version of the name before naming it in Russian. "You can't cut everything out there in 100 years."
Laundering the forest
There are international protocols that are designed to control where and what types of trees are cut, and the United States passed amendments to the Lacey Act in 2008, banning the import of illegally harvested timber anywhere. However, such decisions are difficult to enforce.
In some countries, such as the United States and Canada, logging is tightly controlled, but Chinese companies often take advantage of the weaker control in other countries to clear protected forests, officials and environmentalists say.
In Russia, deforestation usually goes beyond the designated boundaries of the sites, and companies exporting timber to China are known to falsify accounting documents.
Illegal logging is also common, and some people are suspected of deliberately setting fire to the forest: burnt trees can be legally culled and sold.
In 2016, the US Department of Justice accused Lumber Liquidators of smuggling hardwood parquet flooring, which was mainly produced in China using timber illegally harvested in the Russian Far East.
Rumors of corruption in Russia have sparked popular anger. When asked about the extent of illegal logging, Mr. Putin gave a very harsh response at his annual press conference in December. He called the Russian forest industry "a very corrupt area."
Barbarian felling
A protest movement against deforestation - and specifically against Chinese logging - is gaining momentum in Siberia and the Russian Far East. This only heats up interethnic tensions between Russians and Chinese along the border, which stretches for more than 2,600 miles. These peoples have long been distrustful of each other because of political and cultural differences.
One protest last May in Ulan-Ude, the regional capital on Lake Baikal, ended in clashes with police and eight arrests. “Stop the barbaric deforestation,” the protesters' banner read.
The political situation around this issue has become so destabilized that in January the head of the Russian Federal Forestry Agency Ivan Valentik was asked an uncomfortable question in the Federation Council, which usually does not address critical remarks directly to members of the Putin government.
Then he supported the sale of logging permits and tried to shift the blame to Chinese companies, which, he said, did not fulfill their obligations - for example, to restore forests. He suggested that Russia may have to cut off direct timber supplies to China.
China State Forestry and Rangeland Administration did not respond to our letter with questions. Officials previously promised that Chinese companies would adhere to local laws and consider their environmental impact.
Ms. Xiuhua first said that she was not worried about the protests inside Russia, since her company's activities were strictly within the framework of Russian law. However, after the final round of public hearings in Moscow, her comments were less optimistic.
“Things are changing in Russia now,” she said over the phone, and then declined to answer any further questions.
Steven Lee Myers