Once, back in the days when UK/Russia relations were excellent and purposeful (ie 1994), I had to fly from Moscow to Murmansk to help set up a meeting there between British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd and Russian Foreign Minister Andrey Kozyrev.

Murmansk was chosen because it was Kozyrev’s Duma constituency – the largest city north of the Arctic Circle.

I boarded the internal Aeroflot aircraft in Moscow with a certain trepidation. Not long previously an Aeroflot Airbus had crashed in Siberia after the pilot let his teenage son have a go at the controls.

A Russian sidled up to me (I was obviously not a Russian) and whispered "Do you want to buy some wood?" I politely declined. He was probably trying to sell me a forest the size of Belgium.

Years later the race is on to exploit – or simply steal – Russian wood. There is a lot of it. Keeping track of logging across this huge space is not easy – carefully monitored satellite imagery helps. 

Any ruler in the Kremlin, liberal-minded or otherwise, faces a real problem. How to make sure that some sort of reasonable government processes survive in those parts of Russia which are many time-zones away from Moscow?

The natural resources in these remote areas are massive. The population is small. The temptations of corruption are enormous. And the demand from Japan/China/Korea is soaring.

Thus as this BBC report describes, China’s surging demand for wood is causing a lot of damage in Russia. Including murder…