Russia-Ukraine war live: Moscow claims advance in Ukraine’s east has ‘accelerated’ | Ukraine | The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/nov/23/russia-ukraine-war-live-latest-news-updatesRussia has included the territories it occupies in Ukraine in its recent greenhouse gas inventory report to the United Nations, drawing protests from Ukrainian officials and activists at the Cop29 climate summit this week.
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“We see that Russia is using international platforms to legalise their actions, to legalise their occupation of our territory,” Ukraine’s deputy environment minister Olga Yukhymchuk told Reuters.
She said Ukraine is in touch with officials from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the U.N.’s main climate body, to ask it to resolve the dispute.
Officials representing the Russian foreign ministry and the UNFCCC did not respond to requests for comment sent on Thursday.
At issue is Russia’s National Inventory Report of greenhouse gas emissions for 2022, which Moscow submitted to the UNFCCC on 8 November. In the submission, reviewed by Reuters, Russia said it could only provide data for 85 out of 89 of its territories “due to the absence of baseline data on land use for the territories of the Donetsk People’s Republic, Luhansk People’s Republic, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, annexed in September 2022.”
Russia had already included emissions from Ukraine’s Crimea region, annexed in 2014, in its last few reporting submissions to the UNFCCC. It also included Crimea’s land development plans in a report to the UN Global Biodiverity Framework in 2020.
Ukrainian environment minister Svitlana Grynchuk raised the issue in a speech to delegates at the Cop29 summit earlier this week, saying Russia’s reporting on Ukraine territories undermines the integrity of global climate efforts.