Russia's ratification is vital for transforming Kyoto from a draft agreement, now gathering dust on shelves, into a working international treaty.

"Russia is on track for ratifying Kyoto and people who were banking against the protocol should change their views now," WWF's Jennifer Morgan, in charge of the environment group's Climate Change Programme, said in a press statement.

"As the impacts of global warming rise, the need for ratification has grown increasingly more urgent."

Friends of the Earth International said Russian ratification would be "a significant step" in the fight against global warming.

"It will also turn up the heat on President Bush and other world leaders who have refused to join the only international treaty that could help avoid a global catastrophe," the environmental group's climate campaign coordinator, Catherine Pearce, said in a press release.

Russian news agencies said the cabinet would be asked on Thursday whether to vote for ratification. The official RIA Novosti news agency quoted an unidentified government official as saying the cabinet would give its green light.

If the cabinet votes in favour of ratification, the bill will pass to the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, where the nation's main pro-Kremlin party holds a two-thirds majority.

"Within 90 days of the Duma endorsing the protocol, it will come into force," Swiss-based WWF International said.

Russia's ratification is vital for the future of the Kyoto protocol.

Under the agreement's highly complex rulebook, Kyoto can only come into effect if it is ratified by a sufficient number of industrialised countries to cover a substantial percentage of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions.

That threshold became much harder to cross when the United States, by far the world's biggest single polluter, walked away from Kyoto in 2001, in one of the first major decisions under President George W. Bush.

Kyoto's rulebook was completed in 2001 but Russia has dragged its feet ever since about ratification.

Informed sources in Moscow said earlier this month that aides to Russian President Vladimir Putin had been squabbling bitterly, with Putin's economic advisor, Andrei Illarionov, expressing fierce hostility to Kyoto and Economic Development Minister German Gref, leading the support for it.

Kyoto requires industrialised signatories to trim pollution by carbon dioxide and five other gases that have been blamed for stoking atmospheric temperatures, the prelude to potentially catastrophic climate change.

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