Ukraine plans $44 billion claim against Russia for wartime emissions

Belem (Brazil): Ukraine plans to seek nearly $44 billion from Russia for the damage linked to an increase in climate-warming emissions from the ongoing war, a government minister told Reuters.

The move marks the first time a country is claiming damages for such an increase in emissions, including from the fossil fuels, cement and steel used in fighting the war, and from the destruction of trees through resultant fires.

"A lot of damage was caused to water, to land, to forests," said Pavlo Kartashov, the country's deputy minister for economy, environment, and agriculture.

"We have huge amounts of additional CO2 emissions and greenhouse gases," Kartashov told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of the COP30 climate summit in Brazil.

A member of the Russian delegation at COP30 declined to comment. Dutch carbon accounting expert Lennard de Klerk estimated the war had generated about 237 million tons of additional CO2-equivalent emissions since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, nearly equal to the annual emissions for Ireland, Belgium and Austria combined.

De Klerk told Reuters he had helped Ukraine to calculate the damage figure based on a 2022 study in Nature estimating the so-called social cost of carbon, an estimate of damages to society from CO2, at about $185 a ton.

He said Ukraine was preparing to submit a claim through a new compensation process being set up by the Council of Europe that has already received some 70,000 claims by Ukrainian individuals for wartime damages.

All the claims, including any filed by other legal entities such as companies, will then be decided by a claims commission.

It remains unclear where the compensation will come from. De Klerk suggested that the billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets could be used in covering the claims.