YUZHNO-SAKHALINSK, October 7. /TASS/. The US-led West often contorts the environmental agenda for the sake of its own self-serving and opportunistic interests, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday.
In a video address to an international forum on environmental policies and sustainable development, he said: "There is a growing trend among developed countries to abuse environmental slogans in a bid to promote their self-serving and opportunistic interests, including economic ones."
Russia’s top diplomat pointed to the West’s attempts to shift the responsibility for the inevitable blunders in its own policies towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions onto other countries, including Russia.
Lavrov also said that "for a while now, the West has been attempting to dilute the mandate of relevant climate change tools as part of international law, primarily the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the UN Environment Program." "Issues that have no direct correlation with the relevant agenda have been obsessively dragged into those mechanisms. Among other things, these primarily include peace and security, migration, human rights and gender equality," he concluded.