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| Kuril islands (Image: Wiki Commons) |
By Franz-Stefan Gady
The “environment is not suitable for a visit” at this time.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Japan has been postponed indefinitely due to Russia’s uncompromising stance over a long-running territorial dispute involving the Kuril islands, The Asahi Shimbun reports.
According to unnamed Japanese government sources, the visit would be “difficult to realize” given unbridgeable differences during bilateral negotiations at the vice foreign minister level, which took place on October 8 in Moscow.
The disputed Northern territories–known in Japanese as the Shikotan, Kunashiri, Etorofu and the Habomai islets–and located in the Sea of Okhotsk in the Northwest Pacific, were seized by the Soviet Union in 1945. By 1949 the Russians had expelled all 17,000 Japanese residents of the islands.
Under the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, Tokyo renounced “all right, title and claim to the Kuril Islands,” however, Moscow never signed the peace treaty and Tokyo refused to concede that the four disputed islands where in fact part of the Kuril chain.
Read the full story at The Diplomat