Even After the 10-Year Export Ban Expired, Logs Still Can’t Leave the Country: Ukraine’s Forests and Timber

Since 2015, Ukraine has banned by law the sale abroad of “unprocessed timber” — logs that have only been stripped of bark. This ban was set for a ten-year term, and for species other than pine the period ended on November 1, 2025. The government has therefore continued the same effective ban through the end of 2026 using a different mechanism: an export-permit system with a “zero quota.” This article traces the extent of the forests, the content of the 2015 law, the arbitration with the European Union (EU), and the consolidation of state forestry enterprises, based on legislation and public-body announcements as of September 2026.

How the country divides into forest, forest-steppe, and steppe zones is covered in our article on rivers, climate, and chernozem, and the nature reserves within the forests are covered in our article on nature reserves.

Forests Cover 15.9% of the Country

The “National Forest Management Strategy through 2035,” approved by the Cabinet under Order No. 1777-r of December 29, 2021, gives, based on figures from the State Forest Register, 10.4 million hectares of land registered as forest, of which 9.6 million hectares are actually covered by trees. The forest’s share of the country’s land area (the forest cover ratio) is 15.9%.

According to the same strategy, forests are distributed very unevenly across the country. Zaporizhzhia Oblast has the lowest forest cover ratio, at 3.7%, and Zakarpattia Oblast the highest, at 51.4%. The strategy also states that half of Ukraine’s forests were planted by people.

Under Article 7 of the Forest Code (enacted 1994, fully revised in 2006), a forest’s owner may be the state, a local government, or a private party. However, Article 8 of the same code declares “all forests” other than those established as belonging to a local government or a private party to be state property.

The 2015 Law Stopped Species Other Than Pine First

Timber exports were originally governed by Law No. 2860-IV of September 8, 2005, “On the Specifics of State Regulation of Business Activity Related to the Sale and Export of Timber.” Article 2 of this law bans, with no time limit, the export of logs and sawn boards of ten “valuable and rare” species, including acacia, pear, walnut, chestnut, yew, and cherry.

Law No. 325-VIII of April 9, 2015, added Article 2-1 to this law, banning, “temporarily, for ten years,” the export of goods under tariff classification 4403 (unprocessed timber). The start date differs by species.

Law No. 2531-VIII of September 6, 2018 (effective January 1, 2019), added provisions to support this ban. One added Article 201-1 to the Criminal Code, making it punishable by three to five years’ imprisonment to move timber whose export is banned across the border evading customs control. The other, Article 4 of Law No. 2860-IV, capped domestic use of unprocessed timber at 25 million cubic meters a year. The provision explicitly cites Article 20(g) of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) as its basis — the provision under which export restrictions may be permitted as an exception for measures to conserve exhaustible natural resources, on condition that domestic consumption is restricted in the same way.

The EU Arbitration Found the Ban in Breach

The EU, arguing that this ban violated its 2014 Association Agreement with Ukraine, requested consultations under the agreement on January 16, 2019. The consultations failed to resolve the matter, and an arbitration panel was established on January 28, 2020. According to the European Commission, this was the first time the EU had used the arbitration mechanism of a bilateral trade agreement.

The panel issued its final report on December 11, 2020. According to the European Commission’s explanation, it found as follows.

• The blanket ban on unprocessed timber exports that began in 2015 violates Article 35 of the Association Agreement, which does not permit export bans, and no basis for justifying it was found in either the Agreement or the GATT.
• The export ban limited to ten species that began in 2005 can be partly justified as an exception to protect plant life or health (Article 36 of the Agreement and Article 20(b) of the GATT).

The European Commission announced that Ukraine must promptly withdraw the 2015 ban. However, looking at the amendment history of Law No. 2860-IV in Ukraine’s legal database, no amendment repealing or narrowing the ban in Article 2-1 was made after the December 2020 report, and the provision remained in place until the end of its ten-year term.

After the Deadline: A “Zero Quota”

Ahead of the expiry, on November 1, 2025, of the ten-year term for species other than pine, the Cabinet, under Resolution No. 1399 of October 31, 2025, amended that year’s list of “items and quantity quotas requiring an export permit” (Resolution No. 1481 of December 24, 2024), setting the export quota for firewood and unprocessed timber other than pine at zero cubic meters. Without a permit, exports are not possible, and since the permittable quantity is zero, exports remain effectively impossible.

For 2026, Cabinet Resolution No. 1795 of December 31, 2025, sets the same arrangement.

In a January 2026 announcement, the State Forest Resources Agency’s Eastern regional forestry administration gave three reasons for the resolution: the amount of timber that can actually be harvested has fallen because of fighting and mines; domestic timber-processing plants tend to shut down for lack of logs; and firewood is the only heating option in winter for many villages.

A proposal to extend the law itself has also been put before parliament. Draft Law No. 13223, registered by members of parliament on April 29, 2025, would extend the ban period in Law No. 2860-IV. In its opinion of July 2025, parliament’s Committee on European Integration wrote that while the export ban is inconsistent with Article 35 of the Association Agreement, it could potentially be used, during martial law, as a security exception (Articles 143 and 472 of the Agreement, and Article 21 of the GATT), for which consultation with the EU and an explanation of the period after martial law ends would be required. The lead committee, the Committee on Economic Development, recommended adoption at first reading on February 23, 2026, but as of September 2026 the parliamentary database still lists the bill as “pending review.”

Consolidating the State Forestry Enterprises

The management of state forests has also changed shape during this period. In Cabinet Resolution No. 1003 of September 7, 2022, the Cabinet agreed to consolidate the state forestry enterprises around the country under the State Forest Resources Agency into a newly created state enterprise, “Forests of Ukraine” (Ліси України). The Agency established this enterprise under Order No. 804 of October 26, 2022. The Agency’s head at the time explained that 158 forestry enterprises would be merged, and the 24 regional administrations that had existed by oblast would be consolidated into nine.

Resolution No. 1003 states that this enterprise will later be converted into a joint-stock company wholly owned by the state. The forest strategy mentioned above also sets out, as policy, a legal ban on privatizing this company. According to the company itself, it manages about 6.6 million hectares of state forest land, receives no funding from the state budget, and is run on its own business revenue.

The export duty on oilseed raw materials is a similar policy aimed at processing them domestically rather than exporting them raw (our article on sunflower oil). For timber, the tool is a ban and quota rather than a duty, and the 2020 ruling with the EU on this point still stands. The overall trade relationship with the EU is covered in our article on EU tariffs.