The task of the International War Environmental Consequences Work Group is to assess the damage caused to nature and develop mechanisms to hold Russia accountable for crimes against it, head of the President's Office of Ukraine Andriy Yermak said at a briefing in Kyiv on Thursday.

"You know that today no one can calculate how much time and money we will need to restore everything. And here the group will develop recommendations," he said.

Yermak stressed that "we must restore everything not just the way it was, but follow the best examples in the world so that our country is an example of a friendly attitude towards nature."

"We expect that the fundamental document of our group will be the Kyiv Ecological Compact. It will consist of some documents that will provide recommendations from world experts that we have already managed to collect," Yermak said, adding that they would represent different countries, different continents.

"We are encouraging representatives of the Global South to join our group today," he also said.

In turn, the co-chair of the group, the former Vice Prime Minister and former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sweden, Margot Wallström, noted that "none of us should ignore the terrible things that are happening in Ukraine now, the crimes that Russia has committed here."

"I really hope that we will be able to collect assessments from authorities - local, central, from environmental NGOs. We must hold Russia accountable for its crimes. And the people who experienced this should be able to recover, just as Ukraine should be able to recover sustainably after this," she said.