Ukraine says it will seek almost $44 billion from Russia to cover the climate damage caused by wartime emissions, marking the first attempt by any nation to bill an aggressor for its carbon footprint during conflict.
Speaking on the sidelines of COP30 in Belém, Brazil, Deputy Minister for Economy, Environment and Agriculture Pavlo Kartashov said the war has turned Ukraine’s ecosystems into a “silent victim”, with severe harm to land, forests and water, alongside a surge in greenhouse gases released by fighting and destruction.
Ukraine argues that Russia’s invasion has generated around 237 million tonnes of extra CO₂-equivalent emissions since 2022 — roughly the annual output of Ireland, Belgium and Austria combined — according to Dutch carbon-accounting specialist Lennard de Klerk, who assisted in calculating the figure.
The claim is based on the social cost of carbon, valued at about $185 per tonne in a 2022 Nature study. Ukraine plans to file the demand through a new compensation mechanism being set up by the Council of Europe, which has already logged roughly 70,000 individual claims for war-related losses.
If the claim proceeds, it would be the first case in which a state is held financially liable for emissions produced as a result of an act of aggression.
De Klerk said the eventual source of compensation remains uncertain, though frozen Russian assets held abroad are seen as a potential avenue - a move Russia said would elicit a "painful response".
A member of Russia’s delegation at COP30 declined to comment.
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Australian counterterrorism authorities are examining the links of the co-pilot accused of attacking the captain and attempting to take control of a flydubai flight bound for Israel. Authorities in New Zealand have also said they are investigating reports the suspect had spent time in that country.
Russia's health watchdog said on Tuesday that no cases of plague had been detected among anyone who had come into contact with a Siberian plague institute laboratory worker who died last week, and locals said their lives had barely been disrupted.
A large Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow and the surrounding region has killed two people, damaged homes and sparked a major fire at a key fuel facility, according to Russian officials and military bloggers.
An Azerbaijani citizen died and another is missing after a cargo ship was attacked by a drone in the Black Sea, near the coast of Romania on Monday, 5 October, Baku's Foreign Ministry has said.
The German-Azerbaijani Connectivity Conference 2026 commenced on 6 October in Baku under the title “Mobilising Finance for Infrastructure, Transport, Logistics, Green Energy, and Digitalisation along the Middle Corridor.”
Russian strikes killed at least eight people across Ukraine early on Wednesday, Ukrainian officials have said. Flats, industrial plants and infrastructure were damaged in the incidents.
Kenya has confirmed its first case of Ebola after a Kenyan citizen who had travelled from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) died in Nairobi, prompting health authorities to launch an urgent contact-tracing operation.
Kosovo's parliament has elected economist and academic Justina Shiroka Pula as the country's new president, concluding a dramatic political process just hours before a constitutional deadline that threatened to dissolve the legislature.
The U.S. military has tightened restrictions on its personnel in Okinawa following the arrest of a Marine on suspicion of murder, a case that has reignited long-standing tensions over the American military presence on the southern Japanese island.
The arrest of former German intelligence chief August Hanning on espionage-related charges has drawn renewed attention to his past connections with Israeli security figures and a controversial cross-border child custody case generating significant public scrutiny.
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