By KYIV. Nov 8 (Interfax-Ukraine) – President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has called on the participants of the UN Climate Change Conference to support the idea of creating a global platform for assessing the losses caused to the climate and the environment by military actions.
"There are still many of those who do not take the climate agenda seriously and not only in politics, but also in big business. There are quite a lot of those for whom climate change is not only rhetoric, but also marketing. They are the ones that slow down the achievement of climate goals," the president said.
According to him, Russia’s war in Ukraine has brought an energy crisis, because of which countries are forced to put coal-fired generation back to work in order to lower energy prices for their people, reduce prices, which are shockingly rising due to deliberate Russian actions.
"The Russian war has brought an acute food crisis to the world, which has most affected those countries where people are suffering from climate change – catastrophic droughts, large-scale floods. The Russian war destroyed 2 million hectares of forest in Ukraine. Not every country in the world has such an area of forests that was burned in Ukraine," the president said.
He noted that "the Russian army has turned the Zaporizhia NPP into a military training ground and is constantly playing with connecting and disconnecting nuclear reactors to the power system."
"We must firmly stop those who are destroying the possibility of peace in unity for the sake of a common goal with a crazy and illegal war. There can be no effective climate policy without peace on earth," Zelensky said.
"Russia should make its guns to keep silent and hide its missiles so that the world can finally hear what we can actually do together to save ourselves from a climate catastrophe," Zelensky said.
