Kuril Islands dispute

This disagreement between the two-island offer made by the Soviet Union and Japan's demand of regaining two bigger islands as well became the cornerstone for continuation of the dispute into the present day.

[6] The first Russo-Japanese agreement to deal with the status of Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands was the 1855 Treaty of Shimoda, which first established official relations between the Russian Empire and Tokugawa Japan.

The modern Kuril Islands dispute arose in the aftermath of World War II and results from the ambiguities in and disagreements about the meaning of the Yalta agreement (February 1945), the Potsdam Declaration (July 1945), and the Treaty of San Francisco (September 1951).

In a 1998 article in the journal Pacific Affairs, Bruce Elleman, Michael Nichols and Matthew Ouimet argue that the US never accepted the cession of all the Kuril Islands to the Soviet Union and has maintained from Yalta onward that it simply agreed at Yalta that Moscow could negotiate directly with Tokyo to come to a mutually acceptable solution, and that the US would support in such a peace agreement the Soviet acquisition of the Kurils.

[citation needed] A substantial dispute regarding the status of the Kuril Islands arose between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the preparation of the Treaty of San Francisco in 1951.

[19][20] In a 2005 article in The Japan Times, journalist Gregory Clark writes that official Japanese statements, maps and other documents from 1951, and the statements by the head of the U.S. delegation to the San Francisco conference—John Foster Dulles—make it clear that at the time the San Francisco Treaty was concluded in October 1951, both Japan and the United States considered the islands of Kunashiri and Etorofu to be a part of the Kuril Islands and to be covered by Article (2c) of the Treaty.

[12] According to the Russian Embassy in Japan, "A peace treaty has not yet been concluded between the two countries, due to Tokyo's groundless territorial claims to the southern Kuril Islands.

In the final round of the talks, the Japanese side accepted the weakness of its claim to Iturup and Kunashiri and agreed to settle on the return of Shikotan and the Habomai Islands, in exchange for a peace treaty.

The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced on July 18, "[these actions] contribute neither to the development of positive cooperation between the two countries, nor to the settlement of the dispute" and reaffirmed its sovereignty over the islands.

[38] Japanese Prime Minister Tarō Asō and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev met in Sakhalin on February 18, 2009, to discuss the Kuril Islands issue.

[43] Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was quoted by Reuters on September 29, 2010, as saying he planned a visit to the disputed islands soon and calling the South Kurils "an important region of our country".

Many analysts also viewed that the announcement of the visit is correlated with the recent joint declaration regarding World War II between China and Russia, and linked to the Senkaku Islands dispute between Japan and Taiwan.

[citation needed] According to a military source interviewed by Russia Today, as part of the reinforcements, the 18th Machine Gun Artillery Division may be upgraded to a modern motorized infantry brigade.

On March 25, 2016, Russian Minister of Defence Sergey Shoygu announced that Bal rocket systems in Kunashir, Bastion in Iturup and Eleron-3 UAVs are going to be stationed on the Kuril Islands within that year.

[52][53] After winning the 2012 Japanese election, Prime Minister Shinzō Abe made good on promises to restart talks on the disputed nature of the islands.

Putin said, "We agreed to hold the third Japanese–Russian business mission to the South Kuril Islands by the end of this year, after which the fourth round of negotiations on joint activities will take place.

"[citation needed] On September 12, 2018, Russian president Vladimir Putin offered Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe a peace treaty "before the end of the year, without any preconditions".

Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said "there is absolutely no change to our country's perspective of resolving the problem of rights over the Northern Territories before sealing a peace treaty".

The declaration gave Japan the Habomai islet group and Shikotan while the Soviet Union claimed the remaining islands, but the United States did not allow the 1956 treaty.

[62] On December 1, 2020, Russian Defence Ministry's Zvezda TV station reported that Russia deployed several S-300V4 versions of the S-300VM missile system for combat duty on the disputed island Iturup.

In a statement, Fumio Kishida stated that "It is completely unacceptable that the Northern Territories have yet to be returned since the Soviet Union's illegal occupation of them 77 years ago".

Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said it was to bolster Russian security around the Kuril Islands and partly in response to the United States efforts to "contain" Russia and China.

In 2018, Russia started to allow visits to the smaller islands in the archipelago, under a new system involving checks of tour ships as they approached from the sea.

A common view is that the Soviet Union won the Kuril Islands during World War II and is entitled to keep them regardless of the prior history of the disputed territories.

[89] Some Ainu also claim the Kuril Islands, on the basis that their ethnic group inhabited the archipelago and Sakhalin prior to the arrival of Japanese and Russian settlers in the 19th century.

[90] In 2004, the small Ainu community living in Kamchatka Krai wrote a letter to Vladimir Putin, urging him to reconsider any move to award the Southern Kuril Islands to Japan.

After the Sino-Soviet border conflict in 1969, maps published in China began to mark the islands as Japanese territory with a note "Occupied by Russia".

[98] Ukraine's national parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, voted on October 7, 2022, to recognize the Kuril Islands as integral Japanese territories, illegally occupied by the Russian Federation.

However, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe and Russian president Vladimir Putin focused on the "current state and the prospects of development of bilateral cooperation in trade and economy as well as in the humanitarian field".

[105] On November 19, 2018, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated that upcoming talks about resolving a dispute with Japan over a group of islands claimed by Tokyo would not necessarily result in Russia relinquishing them.