By Franz-Stefan Gady
Moscow is stepping up its military presence on the disputed Kuril Islands.
Russia plans to massively invest in military and civilian infrastructure projects on the Kuril islands, TASS reports quoting Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.
“We’re restoring both the civilian and defense infrastructure of the Kurils,” he said this Thursday at a news conference where he also announced a visit to the islands located in the Sea of Okhotsk in the Northwest Pacific.
“I am planning to go there and have a look how matters stand there. And I invite the others,” Medvedev told members of his cabinet. He already visited the disputed islands – known in Japanese as the Shikotan, Kunashiri, Etorofu and the Habomai islets – once before in 2010 becoming the first incumbent Russian president to do so.
The Soviet Union seized the islands at the end of the Second World War and by 1949 had expelled all 17,000 Japanese residents. Under the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty Tokyo renounced “all right, title and claim to the Kuril Islands,” however, the Soviet Union never signed the peace treaty and Japan refused to concede that the four disputed islands where in fact part of the Kuril chain.
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