The Specialized Environmental Prosecutor's Office of the Zakarpattia Regional Prosecutor's Office, in coordination with the Office of the Prosecutor General, has documented and is establishing the circumstances of the destruction of virgin forests on the territory of the Shipot forestry of the state enterprise Forests of Ukraine.
This was reported by the Office of the Prosecutor General.
What the inspection revealed
Prosecutors, together with the State Environmental Inspectorate, inspected the site of illegal logging in the Shipot forestry for the construction of a forest road leading to the Runa valley. They opened criminal proceedings on the fact of illegal logging in protected forests (Part 3 of Article 246 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine). Priority investigative actions are underway and the amount of environmental damage is being calculated.
On a 0.5-hectare plot within the virgin forest, investigators and environmental inspectors found 114 stumps of freshly felled beech trees up to 200 years old.
They noted that the basis for the work was a logging ticket issued in February 2025.
The activists warned
It is worth noting that in their justification of the illegality of this felling, prosecutors presented the same arguments that environmental organizations and experts publicly cited when they raised the alarm about the illegality of the planned construction.
- The road passes through an area that has a virgin forest status certificate. In 2019, scientific institutions and environmental organizations surveyed a unique landscape with a total area of more than 860 hectares and officially recognized this area as virgin forests. This conclusion was approved by the director of the former state enterprise Perechyn Forestry.
- The area where the logging is being carried out is a virgin forest and is part of the projected virgin forest natural monument of national importance “Forests of the Shipot Forestry”.
“Cutting down trees there is a gross violation of the law, as any activity related to interference with the ecosystem is strictly prohibited in virgin forests,” the prosecutor's office testified.
The prosecutor's office also said that in 2024, the State Enterprise “Forests of Ukraine” unreasonably refused to approve a request to create a virgin forest natural monument.
Therefore, the Uzhhorod District Prosecutor's Office filed a lawsuit with the Kyiv District Administrative Court in the interests of the state represented by the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources of Ukraine, demanding that the State Enterprise “Forests of Ukraine” be obliged to approve the creation of the monument. The court proceedings have not even been opened yet.
Who will protect valuable Ukrainian forests when the Ministry turns a blind eye?
An ecologist from the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group (UNCG), who has been actively involved in forest protection for a long time, noted on his Facebook page that he did not remember a case when a state-owned enterprise openly destroyed virgin forests, contrary to the direct requirements of the law. According to him, this is also the first time that foresters have ignored the position of WWF-Ukraine, which opposed logging in Shipot.
According to Mr. Testov, they tried to hide the logging itself, as the status of the logging tickets is still listed as “not started”. The ecologist reminded that it should have been automatically changed when the first wood was entered into the electronic accounting system.
“This is the price of all the statements about transparency, openness, compliance with the law, and leaving illegal practices in the past. The system of “foresters controlling foresters” does not work in Ukraine at all,” he stated.
Testov called for limiting foresters' attempts to simplify logging rules as much as possible in order to preserve other virgin forests.
In his comments to the post, he also reminded Svitlana Hrynchuk and the Ministry of Ecology that at a meeting on logging rules, the UHF, together with representatives of WWF-Ukraine, had just explained that the mechanism when logging is scheduled to bypass the approval of the Ministry of Ecology will lead to the destruction of valuable forests and illegal logging.
“This is the first example. If forest road logging had been approved by the Ministry of Environment, this would not have happened, your experts would not have missed it in the virgin forests!” says Testov.
Media reports about the start of preparatory felling for the road construction in the virgin forests of the Uzhhorod Forestry branch, where virgin forests grow, appeared a month ago. Environmental organizations and ecologists also claimed that such work was illegal. On April 8, it became known that the construction affected the habitats of the Red Book snowdrops, and on April 15, it was reported that virgin forests were also being cut down.
