President Dmitry Medvedev will take part in the climate change conference in Copenhagen on December 17-18, the Kremlin said Thursday.

"The Russian president will attend the meeting of heads of state and government within the framework of the UN Climate Change Conference," the Kremlin said in a statement.

The conference, which opened Monday in Copenhagen and will run through December 18, gathered representatives from 192 countries and aims at mapping out a plan to combat climate change from 2012 to 2020.

Oleg Shamanov, head of the Foreign Ministry's department of global environmental problems, said Tuesday that Russia seeks to reach a "common, universal, international binding agreement" at the summit.

(Xinhua News Agency December 11, 2009)