Timber harvesting across Belarus must be stepped up without delay, with Aleksandr Lukashenko warning that a period this “difficult, hard, but at the same time profitable” will not come again in the country’s history for the foreseeable future. The Belarusian leader made the demands on Friday during a visit to Amkodor-Lesmash, a maker of harvesters and forwarders in the Logoysk district of the Minsk region.
“Talking about sanctions is forbidden. No talk! This is a time of opportunities,” Lukashenko said, with the president telling officials that “if we had not been squeezed, we would not have this.” Officials told him the plant now makes its own harvester heads, the costliest and most technical part of the machine, which they said match the best components made abroad.
As it stands, Amkodor machines make up 52 per cent of Belarus’s harvesting fleet, officials told the president, who said that without its harvesters and forwarders “we won’t be able to do anything” in the forest. Amkodor is ready to meet all of the country’s harvesting needs, its management assured him, including by providing more machines so that mature forests can be harvested on time, a point Lukashenko has pressed.
Production at Logoysk has also reached its design capacity of 120 machines a year, against the 100 a year Belarus is expected to need until 2030, which officials said leaves room to export. Aleksandr Yefimov, the former industry minister who took over the Amkodor holding last summer, said the plant cannot build more in its current halls but has room to expand, with plans to lift output to 250 a year.
Amkodor forest machines line up behind Aleksandr Lukashenko at Amkodor-Lesmash on Friday. “Nobody works with an axe or a Druzhba-2 saw anymore,” the president said. (Photo Credit: Press Service of the President of the Republic of Belarus)
Now, Lukashenko wants those machines sold abroad, telling the plant to hurry and take “the markets that are being freed up” and saying “we need to help the Russians in the forest.” Yefimov told him that work was already underway, with Arkhangelsk among the Russian regions interested in the machines.
Officials also told the president that revenue and exports are growing across the Amkodor group, after he asked whether earlier financial decisions to back it had delivered results. Lukashenko said he is pressing the National Bank and the government to find money for such projects, telling the room that “whoever runs today will win.”
Asian buyers want Belarus’s forest products too, with Lukashenko saying talks with Asian countries, Oman among them, turn straight away to “furniture, timber, paper.” Belarus and Oman have already agreed to build a pulp and board mill in Belarus, with the president saying “we need to move faster.”
However, large volumes of industrial wood have already piled up, with Vasily Gerasimov, who chairs the State Control Committee, telling the president there is room to process more of it. Lukashenko wants that done mainly by working existing mills harder rather than building new ones, saying people should “work five hours a week more” instead of adding capacity that could go the way of “Mercedes in Germany.”
A crane loads roundwood into rail wagons at Bobruisk in Belarus’s Mogilev region. “Land and forest are everything to us,” Lukashenko said during Friday’s visit. (Photo Credit: ID 310434070 © Dzmitry Skazau | Dreamstime.com)
It comes as organisations under Belarus’s Forestry Ministry export more than 1 million cubic metres of timber a year, with China now the largest buyer of Belarusian lumber. Belarusian wood has been barred from the EU since 2022, with the bloc also rating Belarus high risk under its deforestation regulation alongside Russia, Myanmar, and North Korea.
Asked what he did not like about the machines, Forestry Minister Sergei Uldinovich told the president most of their problems had been solved, with the plant now working alongside ministry organisations to build up servicing. Lukashenko replied that “if you are satisfied, you will answer for all the blunders in the forest that I see.”
