Russia canceled trade talks with Finland
Russian Industry and Trade Minister Viktor Khristenko has canceled a planned meeting with Finnish officials this weekend. The meeting was intended to help ease tensions over Russian timber duties and cross-border transportation problems, the Moscow Times reports.
The canceled meeting must be seen as a blow to Finnish authorities’ struggle to make Russia drop its planned boost in export tariffs on round timber. Russia will by next summer increase export tariffs on its timber to 50 EUR per cubic meter, a measure which will threaten the wellbeing of the powerful Finnish pulp industry highly dependent on Russian raw materials. Russia argues that the tariff increase is meant to strengthen its domestic wood processing industry. The canceled Russian visit come just a day after the World Wildlife Fund wrote in a report that Russia constituted the world’s largest source of illegal timber. The country is also in the lead in terms of the quantity of illegal wood being sent to the EU, said Anke Shulmeister, WWF’s forest policy officer to the Moscow Times.
