Russia’s claim of gas extraction from Ukraine-linked fields draws protests at COP29 By Reuters
Written by Valerie Volcovici
BAKU, Azerbaijan (Reuters) – Russia has included sites in Ukraine in its latest emissions report to the United Nations, drawing protests from Ukrainian officials and activists at the COP29 climate conference this week.
The move by Moscow comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin looks ahead to possible peace talks with incoming US President Donald Trump that could decide the fate of many territories.
“We see that Russia is using international forums to legitimize its actions, to legitimize its presence in our territory,” Ukraine’s Deputy Environment Minister Olga Yukhymchuk told Reuters.
He said Ukraine is contacting officials of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the main UN climate body, to ask them to resolve the dispute.
Officials representing the Russian Foreign Ministry and the UNFCCC did not respond to requests for comment sent Thursday.
At issue is the Russian National Inventory Report on greenhouse gas emissions for 2022, which Moscow sent to the UNFCCC on November 8. In the proposal, reviewed by Reuters, Russia said it could only provide data for 85 of its 89 “relevant” sites. The lack of basic data on land use in the regions of Donetsk People’s Republic, Luhansk People’s Republic, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson Regions, included in September 2022.”
Russia had already included emissions from Ukraine’s Crimean region, which it annexed in 2014, in its last few UNFCCC reports. It also included Crimea’s land development plans in the report to the UN Global Biodiversity Framework in 2020.
Ukraine’s Environment Minister Svitlana Grynchuk raised the issue in her speech to delegates at the COP29 conference earlier this week, saying that Russia’s reporting on Ukrainian sites undermines the integrity of global climate efforts.
Yukhymchuk told Reuters that this concern is based on the risk of double-counting emissions in areas that together exceed the size of Portugal and Azerbaijan.
“It will bring us to a point where we will not achieve any of our goals if we do not have a proper report under the Paris Agreement,” he said.
Nikki Reisch, director of the Center for International Environmental Law’s Climate & Energy Program, said the dispute shows how global unrest is diverting global attention from work to combat global warming.
“I think that’s a sign of the times,” Reisch said on the sidelines of the COP29 conference.
“We live in the middle of a lot of conflict, and that affects these discussions.”
Christina Voigt, a law professor at the University of Oslo, said Russia’s reporting of gas releases from Ukraine violates Ukraine’s sovereignty and may be illegal.
“Claiming emissions is perhaps illegal – but claiming emissions as coming from one’s territory, when in fact they are produced in another country’s territory, is a collective declaration of violation of the international legal status of that territory,” Voigt said.
He said that Russia’s claim about the emission of air produced by occupied lands could be even more problematic if Moscow ends up demanding a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from these lands and offers them carbon markets as credits.
“This would be an illegal appropriation of another state’s property,” he said.
