Volodymyr Zelensky made the statement in a video address to the United Nations' COP27 climate change conference in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm-el-Sheikh on Tuesday, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
Energy crisis, food crisis, risk of radiation disaster due to Russia’s war: Zelensky
Zelensky told the event: “This Russian war has brought about an energy crisis that has forced dozens of countries to resume coal-fired power generation in order to lower energy prices for their people at least a little ... to lower prices that are shockingly rising due to deliberate Russian actions.”
He said: “The Russian war brought an acute food crisis to the world, which hit especially the countries that are suffering from the existing manifestations of climate change – catastrophic droughts, large-scale floods.”
He added: “The Russian war destroyed 5 million acres of forests in Ukraine in less than six months. Not every country in the world has such an area of forests that were burned in Ukraine by Russian shelling.”
“We have to check every day the situation at Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, if there are no radiation leaks,” Zelensky told the conference, adding that "the Russian army has turned this nuclear power plant de facto into a military training site."
He warned: "They are constantly ‘playing’ with connecting and disconnecting the plant and nuclear reactors from the power grid. This is a direct risk of a radiation disaster.”
‘There can be no effective climate policy without peace on Earth’
Zelensky went on to say: “The world needs honesty. We must tell those who do not take the climate agenda seriously that they are making a catastrophic mistake.”
He stated: “We must stop those who, with their insane and illegal war, are destroying the world's ability to work united for a common goal.”
“There can be no effective climate policy without peace on Earth because, in fact, nations are thinking only about how to protect themselves here and now from the threats created in particular by the Russian aggression," the Ukrainian president said.
He urged the international community to support Ukraine’s initiative to create “a global platform to assess the impact of military actions on climate and environment.”
He added: “We are all thinking about how to generate hundreds of billions of dollars to help developing countries protect themselves from climate change. Under these conditions, how can anyone cause additional insane damage to nature with their invasive military ambitions? Such ambitions deserve only punishment.”
Wednesday is day 259 of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
pm/gs
Source: PAP, president.gov.ua, pravda.com.ua