ST. PETERSBURG (Sputnik) — He added that Russia's interdepartmental delegation is expected to take part in the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Paris Agreement (APA).
"Russia plans to ratify the Paris Agreement by 2020, although we will not make a final decision whether to ratify it or not until January 2019," Donskoi said as quoted by the ministry's press service.
He added that Russia values the ratification of the Paris climate agreement by its major trading partners over that of the United States, which pulled out of the deal on Thursday.
"For us, it does not matter more that the US ratifies the Paris agreement but our main trading partners," Donskoi said.
Trump announced the decision to quit the agreement on Thursday. The president expressed the readiness to renegotiate the deal under terms that would be "fair to the United States," but EU leaders subsequently rejected the proposal in a joint communique.
During the election campaign, Trump has repeatedly voiced intention to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. The participation in the international agreement was discussed during the G7 summit held in Italy on May 26-27, during which the United States failed to reach the consensus with other counties.
The Paris Agreement, created within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and championed by former US President Barack Obama, was ratified by 147 countries out of 197 parties to the convention. The deal aims at keeping the increase in average global temperature at below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
