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Russia hinted that it may refuse to sign up to a new round of targeted carbon cuts that could see the Kyoto environmental protection treaty extended beyond its end of 2012 expiry date. "One has to admit that we never got any real commercial gain from the Kyoto Protocol," Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said at a government meeting.

"That does not mean that we have to try and drag it out any further," Medvedev added. European diplomats at the May G8 summit in France said that Russia along with Japan and Canada had confirmed plans not to join the second round of carbon cuts. Russia ratified the treaty in 2004. It has since argued that its terms harm developing nations.

Medvedev noted that he had said on repeated occasions in the past that "if the world community fails to agree on Kyoto, we would wave it goodbye." He said he was thinking of extending the treaty's terms with EU nations alone. "But considering our uneasy relations with the European Union, I am not sure how likely this scenario will be," he said.

A range of EU nations are probing Russian energy natural gas giant Gazprom for price-fixing and other unfair practices under its new Energy Charter Treaty. Medvedev did not explain his reasoning beyond the mention of Russia's failure to tap into the profits it could have earned had it sold other nations unused carbon emission credits from its domestic producers.

Let us recall that the Kyoto Protocol is a protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that set binding obligations on the industrialised countries to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases. The UNFCCC is an international environmental treaty with the goal of achieving the ‘stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system’.

The Protocol was initially adopted on 11 December 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, and entered into force on 16 February 2005. As of September 2011, 191 states have signed and ratified the protocol. The only remaining signatory not to have ratified the protocol is the United States.

On the other hand it should be noted that Armenia agrees much of its economic activities in accordance with the sprit of Kyoto agreement.

The National Assembly adopted a Law on ozone depleting substances in 2006. That same logic led to remove ozone depleting substances in the production of enterprises, for examples products having aerosol or similar features, such as refrigerators. Significant organizational work has been done to prevent the trade of ozone depleting substances. And from 2010 import of the most dangerous ozone depleting substances to the whole territory of the country was banned.