Kuril Islands dispute

• 1. Introduction

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  The Kuril Islands dispute is one of the longest-running territorial standoffs of the modern era. Four small islands at the southern tip of the Kuril chain have kept Japan and Russia from signing a formal peace treaty since the end of World War II. Nearly eight decades after the fighting stopped, no treaty exists. The state of war between Japan and the Soviet Union was technically still in effect until 1956, and even that declaration left the core question unresolved. How did a handful of islands become the sticking point that no diplomat, prime minister, or president has managed to dislodge? The answer stretches back to the mid-nineteenth century, runs through the chaos of 1945, and involves a chain of agreements that each side reads in an entirely different way.

• 2. The Islands Themselves

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  The Kuril chain stretches between the Japanese island of Hokkaido at its southern end and Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula at its northern end. It forms a natural barrier separating the Sea of Okhotsk from the Pacific Ocean. The four islands at the heart of the dispute are Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan, and the Habomai Islands. Japan administers none of them. Russia holds them under the South Kuril District and part of the Kuril District of Sakhalin Oblast. Japan refers to them collectively as its Northern Territories, or Southern Chishima, and treats them as part of Nemuro Subprefecture of Hokkaido Prefecture. The Ainu people add a third dimension to the question of belonging. Some Ainu claim the Kuril Islands on the basis that their ethnic group inhabited the archipelago and Sakhalin before Japanese and Russian settlers arrived in the nineteenth century. In 2004, the small Ainu community in Kamchatka Krai wrote to Vladimir Putin urging him to reconsider any transfer of the Southern Kuril Islands to Japan, and also asked him to recognize what they called Japanese genocide against the Ainu, a request Putin declined.

• 3. Treaty Foundations

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  The 1855 Treaty of Shimoda established the first official relations between the Russian Empire and Tokugawa Japan, and its Article 2 drew a border between Iturup and Urup. The treaty gave all of Iturup to Japan and all of Urup and the Kuril Islands to the north to Russia. Kunashiri, Shikotan, and the Habomai Islands, all lying south of Iturup, went unmentioned; at the time they were understood as an undisputed part of Japan. The island of Sakhalin was placed under a joint Russo-Japanese condominium rather than divided. Twenty years later, the 1875 Treaty of Saint Petersburg rearranged the picture: Japan gave up all rights to Sakhalin in exchange for Russia giving up all rights to the Kuril Islands in Japan's favor. A controversy still lingers over what exactly constituted the Kuril Islands, because of translation discrepancies in the French official text of that treaty. The 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth, ending the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, pushed things further by awarding the southern half of Sakhalin Island to Japan. Each treaty left behind ambiguities that the next generation of diplomats would have to fight over.

• 4. The Moment of Seizure

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  The Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact was signed in Moscow on the 13th of April 1941, and became effective on the 25th of April. The Soviet Union renounced that pact on the 5th of April 1945. Nazi Germany surrendered on the 8th of May 1945, which started a secret three-month countdown for the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan, as agreed at Yalta. Just after midnight on the 9th of August 1945, in Manchuria, Soviet forces invaded, and the Soviet Union formally declared war on Japan. The invasion of the Kuril Islands followed, running from the 18th of August to the 3rd of September 1945. Japan had announced its surrender on the 15th of August and formally signed it on the 2nd of September. Two years after the takeover, the Japanese inhabitants of the Kurils were expelled. The United States had helped prepare the Soviet invasion through Project Hula, which involved transferring naval vessels to the Soviet Union. Japan's current official position holds that the Soviet entry into the war was itself a violation of the Neutrality Pact, and that the occupation of the islands was therefore a violation of international law. Japan contends the pact remained in effect until the 25th of April 1946, the five-year anniversary of its ratification.

• 5. The Treaty That Settled Nothing

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  The Treaty of San Francisco was signed by forty-nine nations, including Japan and the United States, on the 8th of September 1951. Article 2c states that Japan renounces all right, title and claim to the Kurile Islands, and to that portion of Sakhalin acquired via the Treaty of Portsmouth. The Soviet Union refused to sign and publicly named the Kuril Islands issue as one of its reasons. The State Department later clarified that the Habomai Islands and Shikotan are properly part of Hokkaido, and that Japan is entitled to sovereignty over them. Britain and the United States agreed that territorial rights would not be granted to nations that did not sign the treaty, so the islands were never formally recognized as Soviet territory under the agreement. The October 1951 statement by Kumao Nishimura, Director of the Treaties Bureau of Japan's Foreign Ministry, told Japan's Diet that both Etorofu and Kunashiri are part of the Kuril Islands and covered by Article 2c. Japan now contests the timing of its own claim that those islands were never part of the Kurils. The U.S. Senate, ratifying the treaty on the 28th of April 1952, went further, explicitly stating that nothing in the treaty diminished Japan's right, title, and interest in the Kuril Islands, the Habomai Islands, and Shikotan.

• 6. The 1956 Declaration and Its Limits

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  On the 19th of October 1956, in Moscow, Japan and the Soviet Union signed the Soviet-Japanese Joint Declaration. It ended the state of war that had technically persisted since August 1945. The declaration stipulated that the Soviet Union agreed to hand over to Japan the Habomai and Shikotan islands, but only after the conclusion of a peace treaty. The Soviet side had proposed settling on those two smaller islands after Japan, in the final round of talks, acknowledged the weakness of its claim to Iturup and Kunashiri. The declaration left the two larger islands unaddressed, and the two sides immediately fell into disagreement about what that meant. The Soviet position was that the declaration resolved the dispute, full stop. Japan maintained that negotiations toward a peace treaty necessarily implied continuing talks over Iturup and Kunashiri as well. The role of the United States in hardening Japan's position is debated. The US warned Japan that withdrawing its claim to the other islands would mean the US would keep both Okinawa and the Ryukyu Islands. However, historical analysis suggests Japan had already committed to the four-island return demand before the US formally weighed in. The declaration remains the last binding agreement between the two countries on the territory, and as of 2026, the promised peace treaty has still not been signed.

• 7. Decades of Deadlock

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  On the 7th of July 2005, the European Parliament issued an official resolution recommending the return of the disputed territories to Japan; Russia immediately protested. By 2006, Vladimir Putin's government was offering Japan the return of Shikotan and the Habomais, which amount to roughly 6% of the disputed area, in exchange for Japan dropping its claims to the other two islands. By 2007, residents of the disputed islands were starting to benefit from economic growth, particularly expansion in the fish processing industry, which made them less responsive to Japanese offers of financial aid. On the 1st of November 2010, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev visited Kunashir Island, the first such visit by a head of state. Japanese prime minister Naoto Kan called it "impermissible rudeness" and recalled his country's ambassador to Moscow. The day after the visit, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov announced that Medvedev planned further visits to the disputed islands. On the 10th of February 2011, Medvedev ordered advanced weapons deployed on the islands. By March 2016, Russian Minister of Defence Sergey Shoygu announced that Bal rocket systems in Kunashir, Bastion systems in Iturup, and Eleron-3 UAVs would be stationed on the islands that year. Russia had also deployed S-300V4 missile systems for combat duty on Iturup by December 2020. Japan pays Russia millions of dollars each year for fishing rights around the disputed islands, which Russia cites as an effective acknowledgment of Russian ownership.

• 8. Ukraine and the Collapse of Talks

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  On the 7th of March 2022, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida declared that the southern Kurils are "a territory peculiar to Japan, a territory in which Japan has sovereignty". The statement came directly in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The following day, Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi described the four islands as an "integral part" of Japan. Russia responded on the 21st of March 2022 by withdrawing from peace treaty talks and freezing joint economic projects tied to the disputed islands, citing Japan's sanctions over Ukraine. Four days later, Russia launched military drills on the islands involving over 3,000 troops and hundreds of vehicles. On the 5th of September 2022, Russia unilaterally withdrew from a visa agreement that had allowed former Japanese residents to visit the islands. Dmitry Medvedev, by then deputy Chair of Russia's Security Council, was blunt in March 2022 about what the negotiations had always amounted to: "Negotiations about the Kurils always had a ritualistic character." He added that Russia's 2020 constitutional changes barred the alienation of Russian territory, making the question, in his words, closed. A July 2009 poll by the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center had found that 89% of respondents opposed any territorial concessions to Japan, up from 76% in a comparable 1994 survey. On the 7th of February 2023, the 168th anniversary of the Treaty of Shimoda, Kishida reaffirmed that Japan considers the four islands illegally occupied, the first time that specific phrase had been used by the Japanese government in five years.