‘Nothing is sacred for the authorities’

Russia is opening the forests around Lake Baikal to clearcutting. Environmentalists warn Meduza the damage could be irreversible.

In December, Russia’s State Duma passed a law allowing clear-cut logging in Lake Baikal’s Central Ecological Zone, a move swiftly approved by the Federation Council and signed by Vladimir Putin. Although the legislation — set to take effect on March 1, 2026 — permits such logging only under specific conditions, environmentalists and activists have no doubt that officials and businessmen with a stake in the region will have little trouble securing the necessary approvals. And they warn that the consequences for the lake and its unique flora and fauna could be irreversible. Meduza explains how the new law will work, who stands to benefit from it, and what could soon become of one of Russia’s most valuable natural sites.

What the law says — and what it really means

Russian lawmakers have moved to allow clear-cut sanitary logging around Lake Baikal — a practice that involves felling all or most trees in areas damaged by disease, pests, fires, or windstorms, as a way to “rehabilitate” forests and prepare land for replanting.

Clearcutting on Baikal’s forest lands and protected natural areas was fully banned in 1999. Under the existing federal law “On the Protection of Lake Baikal,” which remains in force until March 1, such logging could be authorized only as a last resort, if selective cutting had failed to stop the spread of damage.

The authors of the new amendments to the “Baikal Law” argue that bacterial diseases around the lake have led to an excessive buildup of dead and damaged wood, creating breeding grounds for insect pests. Selective logging, State Duma lawmakers say, is no longer effective; without clearcutting, they claim, the forest will not be able to recover.

The amendments lift the ban on clearcutting within Baikal’s Central Ecological Zone, provided the forested land in question is not formally classified as part of the National Forest Fund or as a specially protected natural area. They also allow Forest Fund lands to be stripped of their protected status altogether to accommodate infrastructure projects — ranging from flood-control and landslide-prevention structures to roads, power lines, and even cemeteries. In addition, through 2030, Forest Fund lands that fall within the boundaries of populated areas can be permanently rezoned as settlement territory.

“The problem is that some areas listed in the cadaster as populated settlements are, in fact, forest — the very forests where any activity was previously prohibited,” environmentalist Eugene Simonov told Meduza. “Now they’ll cease to be considered forest and become land available for construction. There’s no data showing how many thousands of hectares of forest fall within these settlement boundaries and are now being opened up for development. Until now, the ban on logging acted as a brake. That brake is being lifted.”

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Decisions about where clearcutting will be allowed, and which forest lands can be reclassified as settlement territory, will be made by a special commission. It will include State Duma deputies, Federation Council senators, representatives of the presidential administration, the government, and the Federal Security Service, as well as the heads of the Irkutsk region and the Republic of Buryatia. Before approving logging, the commission must secure backing from the Russian Academy of Sciences, and stripping forest lands of their protected status will require a state environmental review.

At first glance, the legal wording doesn’t appear especially alarming and sounds like clearcutting would be aimed solely at protecting local residents and nature. Russia’s Natural Resources Ministry has said it sees no problems with the amendments, pointing out that the law explicitly bans commercial logging. Pro-government media have gone further, portraying the authorization of clearcutting as a kind of prohibition against it. The state news agency RIA Novosti reported that “the State Duma has passed a law banning clearcutting at Lake Baikal,” while the pro-Kremlin outlet Regnum claimed that United Russia had “protected Baikal from clear-cut logging.”

According to Simonov, lawmakers and pro-Kremlin journalists “are afraid to call it a law on clearcutting and resort instead to idiotic talking points.” He and many other experts warn that the amendments pose a real risk of ecological catastrophe at Lake Baikal.

In September 2025, nearly 90 Russian academics and scientists appealed to President Vladimir Putin, urging him not to sign the amendments into law. On December 5, the independent environmental outlet Kedr Media published a guide for readers explaining how to write and send appeals to Putin and to State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin. “Even if it feels like everything has already been decided, we can still say that we are against the destruction of this unique lake,” Kedr’s editors wrote.

Four days later, on December 9, the State Duma passed the amendments in both the second and third readings in a single day. The Federation Council approved the bill the following day, and five days after that, Putin signed it into law. The legislation is set to take effect on March 1, 2026.

How environmentalists tried to stop the law

Between 2023 and 2025, activists collected roughly 113,000 online signatures opposing the amendments through petitions and open letters addressed to President Putin and federal lawmakers. In July 2024, more than 100 Russian scientists and activists wrote directly to Speaker Volodin, urging him to block the bill. In October 2025, activists launched a social media campaign, encouraging people to post photos with messages opposing the legalization of clear-cut logging. Environmentalists and other scientists organized collective appeals and public statements, sending letters to government officials.

After the amendments were adopted, activists secured official permission to hold a rally in Irkutsk called “Save Baikal from the Axe.” The protest took place on December 27, drawing about 300 participants.

One of the most significant forces in the movement against clearcutting was Greenpeace’s Russian branch. As early as November 2022, its experts had laid out in detail the likely consequences of clear-cut logging for Baikal’s ecosystem — including a sharp increase in soil erosion, a higher risk of wildfires, and disruption to animal migration.

That activism angered State Duma deputy Alexander Yakubovsky, one of the authors of the amendments. In November 2022, together with what he described as “colleagues from the cross-factional Baikal working group,” Yakubovsky sent a formal request to the Prosecutor General’s Office calling for Greenpeace to be designated an “undesirable organization.” The following May, Russia’s Greenpeace office was officially outlawed and subsequently shut down.

Opposition to the new “Baikal law” amendments came not only from scientists and environmental advocates, but also from some politicians. The bill didn’t pass unanimously in the State Duma: United Russia, the LDPR, and the New People party supported it, while the Communist Party and A Just Russia voted against. During the two-hour debate on December 9, A Just Russia lawmaker Anatoly Greshnevikov delivered an emotional speech. “Why have you all gone quiet?” he asked. “Can’t you hear Baikal crying? It doesn’t want loggers with axes to come to it.”

Even within United Russia, two lawmakers broke ranks and voted against the bill. One was Viacheslav Fetisov, first deputy chair of the Duma committee on ecology and natural resources and head of the All-Russian Society for Nature Conservation, who had long been an outspoken opponent of the proposed changes. The second United Russia dissenter was Nikolai Buduyev, a deputy from Buryatia. As he put it, “This bill weakens environmental protections in Baikal’s Central Ecological Zone below the federal standards that apply to other protected sites.”

According to Simonov, the law was held at bay for so long largely thanks to scientists and activists who have remained in Russia and continued to fight for Baikal, despite open threats from lawmakers to label them “foreign agents.” The amendments also stalled for a time because, as Simonov puts it, their motives were “obviously corrupt.” Too many parties — from construction firms to the tourism industry — stood to benefit from easier access to Baikal’s land and timber. But in the end, that same corruption helped carry the bill through the State Duma, the Federation Council, and ultimately to Putin’s signature.

“Everyone has a stake in this law — local residents, local businesses, major tourism operators. The list goes on,” Simonov told Meduza. “It allows for far more extensive and far freer destruction of natural landscapes along Lake Baikal’s shores through the construction of hotels, private homes, roads, hydraulic structures — the list is enormous.”

Simonov acknowledges that in some limited ways, the law could make everyday life easier for local residents. One example is the expansion of cemeteries, which was impossible under the previous rules. “But that’s about one percent of the natural territory the law opens up for destruction,” he said. Even there, the potential for corruption remains. According to Buduyev and Greshnevikov, authorities in several settlements with only a few dozen residents are planning cemetery expansions large enough to accommodate thousands of graves.

Another Russian environmental expert, who spoke to Meduza on condition of anonymity, believes Buryatia’s governor, Alexey Tsydenov, played a decisive role in pushing the amendments through by leveraging his lobbying power. In January 2025, when it appeared that public pressure had delayed discussion of the initiative indefinitely, Tsydenov wrote to Putin, warning that the situation around Baikal posed “social and technogenic risks.”

He complained that existing regulations made it impossible to repair roads and bridges, build infrastructure, or transfer land near the lake into private ownership for “large families, orphans, and participants in the special military operation.” He also cited the inability to expand cemeteries. Tsydenov urged the president to authorize clear-cut logging at Baikal as soon as possible — and Putin agreed.

Other particularly active lobbyists for the law included senators Sergey Brilka and Andrey Chernyshev, as well as Duma deputies Alexander Yakubovsky, Sergey Ten, Anton Krasnoshtanov, and Viktor Pinsky. Two years ago, an investigation by the Yabloko party found that these lawmakers had clear business interests tied to construction and development around Lake Baikal.

Clear-cut logging at Baikal also aligns with the interests of many of Russia’s billionaires. Among them are Oleg Deripaska, whose holdings include a ski resort near the lake (though his firm has insisted that the land in question “has nothing to do with the resort”), and Vladimir Yevtushenkov, whose company has already planned the construction of a wellness complex in Baikal’s forests.

Who decides the ‘science’

Under the new law, clear-cut logging is formally prohibited unless it’s approved by the Russian Academy of Sciences. As State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin put it, responsibility for Lake Baikal will rest with “the scientific community — the best of the best, the most highly qualified professionals, from specialized institutes.”

Lawmakers have also insisted that they wouldn’t have passed the amendments without expert backing. In practice, however, only one person officially endorsed the bill on behalf of the Academy: its vice president, Stepan Kalmykov. At a December 4 meeting of the Duma’s ecology committee, Viacheslav Fetisov — who would vote against the amendments five days later — asked Kalmykov why the Academy had never issued an official position on the law. Kalmykov replied that the final version of the amendments now explicitly states that logging is permitted only with a “positive” assessment from the Academy — language that did not appear in earlier drafts — and that this, he claimed, had eased scientists’ objections.

That claim appears exaggerated. Three of the five Academy scientific councils involved in reviewing the amendments opposed their adoption. And after the Federation Council approved the law, Viktor Danilov-Danilyan, scientific director of the Academy’s Institute of Water Problems, publicly criticized the changes. He warned that there were “two clans” in the country that “very much want Transbaikal to be not forest, but landscaped territory.” One group, he said, hopes to profit from timber sales; the other aims to build hotels and make “very large sums of money.” He didn’t specify whom he had in mind.

For environmentalists, the fact that a senior Academy official endorsed clearcutting even as its scientific councils and many of its own researchers rejected it is especially concerning. The law offers no guidance on how the Academy’s “position” is to be formed or who will be responsible for articulating it. That creates a risk, critics say, that the commission tasked with removing land’s protected status will simply select academics willing to deliver the desired assessment. As Simonov told Meduza, “sanitary clearcutting has long been used in Russian forestry as a way to legalize commercial logging where it is otherwise banned.”

Simonov notes that selective sanitary logging is already permitted in protected forests around Baikal. Diseased trees can be cut down and left in the forest; they have no commercial value. Clearcutting, however, serves a commercial purpose. “A significant share of the timber produced is healthy and marketable,” he explained. According to him, this has long been exploited through various corrupt schemes across Siberia. “Clearcutting isn’t necessary to ecosystem health,” he added. “Forestry experts made this point repeatedly during hearings on the bill.”

More fires, more pollution

According to the environmentalists who spoke with Meduza, the new law will likely have two main consequences: an increase in forest fire risk and further pollution of Lake Baikal. Many of their colleagues, speaking to various media outlets, share that assessment.

One expert, who spoke to Meduza on condition of anonymity, fears that after the law takes effect on March 1, Baikal could see a rise in arson — fires set to justify clear-cut logging. Danilov-Danilyan has voiced the same concern publicly. “This law encourages crooks to set forest fires in the Baikal region,” he told Novye Izvestia. “Once a forest burns, it can be logged. And forests burn in a way that leaves the timber intact — it’s singed on the outside but perfectly usable inside, fully suitable for sale.”

Simonov agrees. “In Buryatia, forest fires were once commonly set to obtain permits for sanitary clearcutting,” he told Meduza. He explains that from the late 1990s through the 2010s, fires were frequently used to keep timber flowing to China and to supply the Selenginsk Pulp and Cardboard Mill. “Logging sites are always more fire-prone,” Simonov continued. “A healthy, natural forest doesn’t burn easily. Fires typically spread in areas already affected by human activity.”

That conclusion is supported by data from The Earth Touches Everyone, a conservation project launched by former staff of Greenpeace’s Russian office after it was shut down in 2022. Fires, the group found, occur more often in areas with roads and settlements. And clearcutting would require building a new network of logging roads.

Environmentalists also warn that fires spread faster across the open land left behind after logging, and that grasslands and young conifer growth are among the hardest types of terrain in which to stop a blaze. Areas that have been clear-cut, the project argues, are likely to become “hotspots of high fire danger for at least several decades.”

Simonov also warns that logging and fires will accelerate soil erosion and lead to “a greater influx of nutrients into Baikal, triggering even more eutrophication.” Eutrophication occurs when excess nutrients accumulate in the water, fueling algal blooms and the growth of cyanobacteria.

He stresses that eutrophication is already Baikal’s most serious environmental problem — and has been for more than a decade. “This is an ecological crisis in the lake’s shallow zones,” Simonov said. “[In the 2010s] we began seeing outbreaks of atypical algae, the spread of toxic microorganisms, and the accumulation of enormous masses of rotting algae along the shoreline. Now, this will only intensify. Baikal naturally has very few nutrients, and now far more are flowing into the lake than it can handle. As a result, ecosystems are being reshaped.”

What worries Simonov even more, however, are the consequences of commercial development. “Wastewater treatment facilities around Baikal already function poorly,” he said. “If active construction of recreational facilities begins in every settlement, all sewage and other waste will end up in Lake Baikal — just as it does now, but in much larger volumes.”

Pollution poses a direct threat to Baikal’s biodiversity, which Simonov describes as the lake’s greatest value: “a unique assemblage of endemic plants and animals.” According to the Great Russian Encyclopedia, up to 75 percent of Baikal’s flora and fauna are endemic — found nowhere else on Earth. Among them are the Baikal seal, the world’s only fully freshwater seal, which evolved in isolation over millions of years; the golomyanka, a transparent viviparous fish; and Rhododendron adamsii, a shrub used to make an herbal tea known for its medicinal properties.

Development along Baikal’s shores has already triggered what Simonov calls a “crisis of coastal ecosystems.” Many endemic species — mainly invertebrates such as crustaceans, flatworms, and mollusks — have declined, either in number or in range. They’ve been replaced by organisms not typical of Baikal but common in other Siberian lakes richer in nutrients. With clear-cut logging and further pollution, Simonov says, the situation is almost certain to worsen.

Losing a World Heritage site

Lake Baikal is currently a UNESCO World Heritage site. But in 2026, a UNESCO mission will come to assess its condition, after which Baikal might be added to the organization’s World Heritage in Danger list. UNESCO had already been discussing such a move before the new amendments passed.

Until now, Moscow has generally tried to avoid confrontations with UNESCO and to prevent any Russian sites from receiving that designation. Experts say the new law on clear-cut logging may mark a shift in that approach.

However, Simonov believes World Heritage in Danger status could ultimately work in Baikal’s favor. If the lake were formally recognized as being under threat, he argues, Russia would be required to work with UNESCO to develop a concrete plan to address the lake’s problems — and neighboring countries would be expected to help save the site. “The government will resist, of course,” Simonov says, but the designation would impose obligations and oversight.

One environmentalist who spoke to Meduza anonymously says such a designation would show that Russia is “knowingly damaging a site of global importance.” World Heritage status carries prestige, helps attract investment, and opens the door to international assistance for sustainable development. Having a site placed on the “in danger” list is a reputational blow, and in some cases, prolonged inaction has led to sites losing their World Heritage status altogether.

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Until March 1, 2026, the law “On the Protection of Lake Baikal” remains the only piece of legislation in Russia that strictly limits economic activity within a specific territory. But to Simonov, the amendments send a far broader signal. “It’s a serious warning bell,” he says. “It shows that nothing is sacred for the authorities — and it sets a clear precedent for further corruption-driven changes to the law.”

That concern was reinforced almost immediately. On December 12, the Russian government submitted new amendments to the State Duma — this time to the law governing specially protected natural areas. The proposed changes would allow land to be carved out of protected territories for what are described as “state needs,” including facilities deemed necessary for “national defense and state security.” Decisions about such lands would again be placed in the hands of a special commission — one strikingly similar in composition to the body that will make decisions about Baikal.

Story by Alexey Martov