Exclusive: Putin, Macron will not attend COP29 in Azerbaijan

Russian President Vladimir Putin and French President Emmanuel Macron will not attend the landmark UN climate summit in Baku later this month, sources close to the UN have told Euronews.

More than 100 heads of state and government have already confirmed their attendance in Azerbaijan, the sources said.

From Europe leaders from Czechia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland and Spain have said they will attend.

Next week world leaders gather in the Azeri capital Baku to review the climate goal set nine years ago in Paris, where almost 200 countries agreed they would “strive” towards limiting global average temperature rise to within 1.5°C of where it stood in the last half of the nineteenth century.

The COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan has been dubbed the ‘finance COP’ – the central issue up for debate is who pays the trillions of dollars developing countries need to cope with increasingly extreme weather, and to avoid relying on fossil fuels as a motor for growth by jumping straight to clean energy. China, to name the elephant in the room, does not contribute to the existing $100bn annual pot, which will be replaced with a new system from 2025.

This story is developing and will be updated.