The president of Azerbaijan, host of this year’s U.N. climate summit, lashed out at Western critics of his country’s oil and gas industry on Tuesday.

In his keynote address at the COP29 climate summit, where nearly 200 nations are negotiating global action on climate change, President Ilham Aliyev described his country as a victim of a “well-orchestrated campaign of slander and blackmail.”

Within moments, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres took to the stage to say that doubling…