Return to the Kuril Islands

On September 1, Vladimir Putin, on the eve of a meeting in Vladivostok with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, made a loud statement: Moscow allows compromise with Japan in the territorial dispute over the Kuriles

“We are not talking about some kind of exchange, about some kind of sales. We are talking about finding a solution in which none of the parties will feel either defeated or lost, ”Putin specified.

Back in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev really wanted to negotiate with Tokyo - there were high hopes that Japan, after the end of the occupation, would become a neutral state like Austria or Finland. Legend has it that he asked his diplomats how many islands the neighbors wanted. Upon learning that there were four, he instructed - settle for two.

The text of the Soviet-Japanese Declaration included a clause stating that the USSR was ready to transfer to its neighbor the island of Shikotan and the now uninhabited Habomai ridge, which for convenience is considered one island. True, they promised to give them only after the signing of a peace treaty. However, Tokyo resisted and demanded much larger Kunashir and Iturup. His intransigence was fueled by the Americans: they did not smile at the prospect of the Finnishization of Japan. Tokyo entered into an alliance with Washington, which, even after the end of the occupation, retained military bases in Japan. Khrushchev flared up, and the promise about Shikotan and Habomai was disavowed, although the document had already been ratified by the parliaments of the two countries.

By the way, back in 2000, Putin moved away from Khrushchev's position and fully recognized the declaration. But Tokyo still wants more, and the current Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, is convinced that, unlike his predecessors, he can solve the problem of the "northern territories."

On May 6, 2016, at the end of a long European tour, the prime minister drove to Sochi, where he had a lengthy conversation with President Putin. After this conversation, Abe continuously radiated optimism. He stated that he now believed in the possibility of bringing the negotiations out of the stalemate and making a "real breakthrough." In Tokyo, they pointedly repeat: in Sochi, the leaders of the two countries "agreed on a new approach and will no longer cling to old ideas."

What “new approach” means is unknown: there is complete silence on this matter. Secrecy is generally a special feature of the current contacts between Tokyo and Moscow, which were largely prepared through the Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Nikolai Patrushev and his Japanese colleague, Secretary General of the National Security Council Shotaro Yachi. Yati is directly related to the problem of the South Kuriles - in 2009, in a newspaper interview, he spoke in favor of dividing these islands between Russia and Japan in half by area. This caused a scandal, and the current adviser to the prime minister was then forced to resign from his post as first deputy foreign minister.

Vladimir Putin was supposed to come to Japan back in 2014, but this was prevented by the events in Ukraine and the accession of the Abe government to the sanctions against Moscow. The whole of the next year, cold reigned in relations between the two countries: Russia extremely toughened its position on the South Kuriles. Now the tone has changed: Moscow is again ready to negotiate and look for a "mutually acceptable solution." And on September 2, 2016, Moscow even started talking about the exact date for Vladimir Putin's visit to Japan - December 15. For his part, Prime Minister Abe is clearly hoping for more than a mere agreement to look again for a "mutually acceptable solution."

However, one of Japan's leading experts on Russia, Akihiro Iwashita, professor at the Center for Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Hokkaido, said back in May that there would be nothing new. “In the words about some kind of “new approach,” the expert said then, “I don’t see the real content. Perhaps the Japanese government is only trying to convince the public of its diplomatic success.” The skeptical professor recalled that in 2009, during negotiations with the then President Dmitry Medvedev, the Japanese side also talked about some kind of “creative unconventional approach”, which did not give any result. Now, if Japan agreed to the provisions of the Joint Declaration on resolving the issue by transferring two islands to it, there would be a different conversation, the expert believes. If, however, the continuation of negotiations on Iturup and Kunashir is demanded, then progress, according to the expert, is difficult to achieve.