Who Owns Timber in Russian Far East (RFE), Trans-Baikal Zone and Eastern Siberia?
Let’s finish the theme of the forest fires, which spread throughout the regions bordering China this summer. At the beginning of August, Professor Kachanovsky from Khabarovsk city (the center of the “Russian Far Eastern federal region” established by Putin, on the Amur River, very close to the Chinese border) published, in the leftist Sovetskaya Rossiya, the article “Corruption in the Blood” analyzing the pandemic corruption in all of Russia and, particularly, in its eastern regions. The following statement is of special interest (comments in parentheses): “Forest fires became a calamity (in the eastern regions of Russia). During the last several years this disaster has become really terrible, because the criminals engaged in large-scale timber poaching are setting fire to the forests to hide clues to their crimes. The poached timber goes, as “round timber” (i.e., unprocessed, the cheapest timber), mostly to China and some other countries. On June 20, 2003, President Putin, in a TV int
