Vladimir Putin has done what no Russian president did before him in the one place Japan still refuses to give up: he set foot on the islands. On Thursday the Russian president visited Iturup, the largest of the four Kuril islands Japan calls the Northern Territories, in his first-ever trip to the chain the Soviet Union seized in the final days of World War II. Japanese television showed him at a fish-processing plant, sampling caviar, the Kremlin’s cameras recording a visit Tokyo had asked him not to make.
The protest came within hours, and it was loud. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi called the trip absolutely unacceptable, said it wounds the feelings of the Japanese people, and reminded Moscow that Japan regards the islands as a unique territory of Japan historically and under international law. Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi issued a formal statement saying the islands are inherently Japanese territory and that the government strongly protests the visit. Japan had repeatedly urged Putin not to go. He went anyway, and the visit landed the same week Russian and Chinese warships completed a joint patrol through a strait in the same island chain.
A war that never ended
The dispute is one of the oldest unresolved arguments in international politics. The Soviet Union occupied the four islands in August and September 1945, declared war on Japan only after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and deported roughly 17,000 Japanese residents. The islands sit between Hokkaido and Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, they are administered by Russia, about 20,000 Russians live there, and the islands are why the two capitals have never signed a peace treaty to close the war. Eighty-one years later, the two countries are still technically at war’s end without an end.
Putin’s predecessors kept the argument at the level of words. In 2010 Dmitry Medvedev was the first Russian leader to make the trip, and prime ministers Mikhail Mishustin and Medvedev again have visited since. The difference this time is not the person but the position: a wartime president of Russia, fighting a fifth year of war in Ukraine, choosing the disputed islands for a photo opportunity while the Russian navy conducts drills on nearby Sakhalin. The Kremlin said Putin held a meeting on ensuring the security of Russia’s eastern borders. The eastern borders are not under any threat that Russia’s own propaganda can name. The visit was not about security. It was about permanence.
The message in the timing
Russia’s message is aimed at two audiences. To Japan: these islands are Russian, they have been Russian since 1945, and the new warmth between Moscow and Beijing means the Pacific is no longer a place where Japan’s claims carry weight. Last month’s China-Russia naval patrol through the Kuril strait was the first such passage, and it was a pointed one: it showed Tokyo that the alliance of convenience now extends to the waters Japan considers its own. To the Russian domestic audience: while the war in the west grinds on, the president is out inspecting the empire’s eastern edge, calm, at ease, eating caviar. The image is the message.
Japan’s options are narrow, and it knows it. Sanctions on Russia, imposed after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, are already in place and have not changed Moscow’s behavior anywhere. Japan has rearmed at a pace unseen since the war, deepened its alliance with the United States, and drawn closer to NATO. None of that moves a Russian soldier off an island, and none of it stopped Thursday’s visit. The protest is the only lever that reliably works, and it works by definition: it records the position, for the record, for history, for the day when the argument might be settled. Takaichi said the visit has worsened Japanese sentiment towards Russia. It was hard to see how it could have improved it.
The deeper fact is that both sides are playing a long game with different clocks. Russia’s clock is the fact of possession: it holds the islands, it has held them for eighty-one years, and every visit, every drill, every Chinese warship in the strait makes the possession feel older and more settled. Japan’s clock is the treaty that was never signed: the argument stays legally alive precisely because Japan refuses to close it. Putin’s first landing does not change the legal position. It changes the atmosphere around it, which is what visits are for. The peace treaty that never came after 1945 is no closer tonight than it was on Wednesday, and Putin has now added his own photograph to the pile of evidence that it never will be.
Sources: Al Jazeera, BBC, France 24 (AFP), Reuters, Bloomberg