The vast forests of the Russian Far East and Siberia represent one of the last great forest wildernesses in the world, containing large expanses of boreal and northern temperate forest types. However, despite the seeming vastness of the forests in these regions, research has shown that they are becoming increasingly fragmented, particularly in the accessible southern areas, and much of this fragmentation is as a result of industrial forestry. While officially recorded timber production has declined over the past decade, this masks the unregulated and unrecorded production that has characterized much of the industry during this period. During the 1990s, the shift from domestic processing and consumption to the export of raw logs, the proliferation of operations as a result of privatization and liberalization, and the lack of regulatory capacity facilitated the increased criminalization of logging operations and cross-border trade.