In his address to the 8^th International Forum Ecology on March 20, Vladimir Chuprov, the head of the Greenpeace Russia energy department, said oil companies should be economically encouraged to look after the environment and quickly eliminate any environmental damage they cause.

He said the current measures in this respect were inadequate.

"Our studies suggest that government oversight agencies currently submit about 10 billion rubles worth of claims to energy companies annually," Chuprov said. "But, official environmental damage calculation methods suggest that sum should be more like 200-300 billion rubles."

According to Greenpeace Russia estimates, Russia's seven leading companies had a net profit of about 2-2.5 trillion rubles in 2016. "So this issue could be resolved easily based on these companies' net profits […] We just need to change the regulations and improve enforcement," he said.