By Valerie Volcovici
BAKU, Azerbaijan (Reuters) - Russia 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.
The move by Moscow comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin eyes potential peace deal negotiations with incoming U.S. President Donald Trump that could decide the fate of vast swathes of territory.
"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 Nov. 8. 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 U.N. 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.
Yukhymchuk told Reuters this concern is based on the risk of double-counting of emissions over territories that together exceed the size of Portugal and Azerbaijan.
"It will bring us to a point that we do not achieve any of our goals if we don't have proper reporting under the Paris Agreement," she said.
Nikki Reisch, director of the Center for International Environmental Law's Climate & Energy Program, said the dispute reflected how geopolitical turmoil was diverting the world's attention from the work of fighting global warming.
"I think that is a sign of the times," said Reisch on the sidelines of the COP29 summit.
"We're living amidst rampant conflicts, and that is certainly infecting these talks."
Christina Voigt, a law professor at the University of Oslo, said Russia's reporting on Ukraine emissions violated Ukraine's sovereignty and could be illegal.
"Claiming emissions is perhaps not illegal - but claiming emissions as if they were from their own territory, while they are in fact generated on another country's territory, is a unilateral declaration in violation of the international legal status of that territory," Voigt said.
She said Russia's claim of the annexed lands' emissions could become even more problematic if Moscow eventually claims emissions reductions on these lands and offers them as offset credits to carbon markets.
"This would indeed be an illegal appropriation of a good belonging to the other state," she said.