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Ukrainian official calls for Russian fossil fuel boycott at UN Environment Assembly
(Climate Home News, 2 Mar 2022) Ukraine’s deputy environment minister urged leaders to choke off support to Russian fossil fuel interests, in a speech to the UN Environment Assembly on Tuesday.
Speaking from the environment ministry’s basement bomb shelter in Kyiv, Roman Shakhmatenko told the Nairobi-based meeting: “For decades, a lot of leaders… have been using limitless and unstoppable fossil fuels.”
“We’ve ignored the issue that it’s influencing climate change. We’ve ignored that it’s influencing our future, our global future,” he added.
“Moreover,” he said, “this ignorance brought [the] rise of mad, of crazy dictators with a lot of money to kill people and destroy [the] environment.”
He sighed deeply before continuing: “With this in mind, I urge you please take joint action [to] withdraw all of the assets, all of the shares from Russian fossil fuel companies… because they’re using this money to kill people.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, western oil and gas majors have announced plans to divest from Russian oil and gas interests. The strength of their commitments varies.
Shell and Equinor have said they will end their joint ventures with Gazprom, BP has said it will exit its 20% stake in Rosneft, ExxonMobil has started to wind down operations and exit its far-eastern Russian oil and gas field and Eni has said it intends to sell its 50% stake in a gas pipeline linking Russia to Turkey.
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