On August 13, 2026, Vladimir Putin traveled for the first time in his presidency to the Kuril Islands archipelago, landing on Iturup (Etorofu in Japanese), the largest of the four southern islands claimed by Tokyo. It is only the second visit by a Russian leader to this contested territory, after that of Dmitry Medvedev in 2010, when he was president.
Putin’s trip was part of a broader tour of the Russian Far East: he had previously overseen, aboard the missile cruiser Varyag, the final phase of Pacific Fleet naval exercises off Sakhalin, mobilizing several dozen warships and aircraft, along with more than 13,000 servicemen. On Iturup, he visited a fish-processing plant, a hospital, and a school — a choice to open the visit with civilian rather than military sites, no doubt intended to underscore the normality of the Russian presence there. He also met with the governor of Sakhalin region, Valery Limarenko, and reiterated that the current status of the Kuril Islands “is enshrined in international documents as a reality stemming from the outcome of the Second World War.”
The Japanese reaction was immediate. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi called the visit “absolutely unacceptable,” stating that it “offends the feelings of the Japanese people,” and asserting, questionably, that the “Northern Territories are an inherent part of Japanese territory, both historically and under international law.” Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi summoned the Russian ambassador in Tokyo to lodge an official protest. The Kremlin rejected these protests: the Russian embassy in Japan called them “baseless,” recalling that the president’s travels “are sovereign decisions of the Russian leadership that cannot be the subject of any discussion with foreign states.”
An old territorial dispute
The Kuril Islands — a volcanic archipelago roughly 1,300 km long, arcing between Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula to the north and Japan’s Hokkaido island to the south — were invaded by the Soviet Union at the very end of the Second World War, in August 1945, expelling their Japanese inhabitants. The 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, signed by Japan, compelled it to renounce “all right, title, and claim to the Kuril Islands.” Nevertheless, Tokyo maintains that the four southern islands, which are today in fact Russian, never actually formed part of the “Kurils” in the strict sense, but instead constitute the “Northern Territories,” and that they are therefore rightfully Japanese in their entirety.
This underlying disagreement has, to this day, prevented the signing of a formal peace treaty between the two countries since the end of the war — even though a 1956 joint declaration ended the state of war between them. That 1956 text provided that the USSR would return Shikotan and the Habomai islands to Japan once a peace treaty was concluded; but Moscow suspended this process as early as 1960, after the renewal of the US-Japan security treaty, which the Soviets deemed contrary to the spirit of the joint declaration. The territorial dispute remains, to this day, the central obstacle to the full normalization of Russo-Japanese relations.
The Abe moment
Between 2012 and 2020, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made this issue a personal priority, meeting Vladimir Putin twenty-seven times over the course of his tenure — an unprecedented frequency between leaders of the two countries. This relationship produced the most promising diplomatic sequence since 1956, though it did not start from nothing on the economic front: as early as 1994 and 1995, Russia and a consortium of Japanese companies (Mitsui, Mitsubishi, then the SODECO grouping) had signed the founding agreements for the Sakhalin-2 and Sakhalin-1 gas and oil projects — well before Abe came to power. It was on this pre-existing, already firmly established economic foundation that Abe sought to build a more ambitious political rapprochement.
In May 2016, at a summit in Sochi, Abe presented Putin with an eight-point economic cooperation plan — infrastructure, energy, industry, medical technologies, human exchanges — conceived as a confidence-building gesture meant to create the political conditions for a territorial settlement. In December of that same year, the two leaders announced their intention to launch “joint economic activities” on the disputed islands themselves — fishing, tourism, culture, the medical sector — without prejudging the question of sovereignty. In September 2018, at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin went further, proposing the signing of a peace treaty with no preconditions before the end of the year — a surprise proposal that caught the Japanese side itself off guard.
The two countries then explored a two-stage scenario based on the 1956 declaration: the return of Shikotan and the Habomai islands first, followed by a second phase concerning the two larger islands, Iturup and Kunashir — Tokyo hoping, ultimately, to recover all four islands. But at the November 2018 summit in Singapore, Putin pointed out that the 1956 declaration contained no Russian commitment to return more than the two islands of Shikotan and Habomai — and matters rested there. Despite this ultimate failure, Abe’s personal investment remained unmatched: no Japanese leader before or since has devoted such diplomatic energy to this issue. Although Abe left power in 2020 without a signed treaty, Putin took care, on the day of his visit, to salute from the deck of the Varyag the memory of “very constructive” Russo-Japanese relations under the former prime minister — a way of implicitly underscoring the extent of the current deterioration.
A deterioration set within a broader rivalry
Russo-Japanese relations have indeed deteriorated sharply since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, with Tokyo joining Western sanctions against Moscow. But it is Sanae Takaichi’s rise to power that has driven the sharpest deterioration — a shift that Sergei Lavrov summed up bluntly in an interview given to the Vesti news agency on the very day of the trip: “Shinzo Abe was a thoroughly proper politician, who understood that [Japan’s] national interests could not be secured without cooperation with Russia. Those who succeeded him believe these interests must be secured with the United States, through the militarization of Japan.” Takaichi’s Japan’s increasingly strong alignment with Washington’s positions would, in Lavrov’s view, justify Russia’s ceasing to show goodwill.
This bilateral deterioration is in fact part of a broader polarization, in which two camps now stand opposed: one formed by Russia and China, the other by Japan and the United States. On the Russo-Chinese side, coordination has become explicit: on the very day of Putin’s visit, the Russian and Chinese ambassadors in Tokyo jointly warned against any attempt to “revise the outcomes of the Second World War” and cautioned against remilitarization of the Asia-Pacific region. Japan’s new defense white paper, published a few days earlier, itself increasingly links Russia and North Korea with China in its threat assessment, citing their growing military cooperation. On the Japanese-American side, it was Ms. Takaichi’s statement of November 7, 2025 that acted as the trigger: the prime minister asserted that Chinese action against Taiwan — a naval blockade, use of force, disinformation — could “undoubtedly constitute a situation threatening the survival” of Japan, without reference to any attack on American forces themselves. This doctrinal shift, which even some American analysts, such as researcher Michael Swaine of the Quincy Institute, consider disproportionate relative to Japan’s actual security interests, immediately triggered the worst crisis in Sino-Japanese relations in over a decade.
This picture of opposing blocs nonetheless runs up against an economic reality that considerably blurs its contours: Japan remains, despite everything, one of the few Western partners still importing Russian energy on a large scale, via the Sakhalin-2 gas project, which still supplies nearly 10% of its LNG. This dependency has even deepened in 2026, as the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz during the war with Iran weakened Japan’s access to Gulf oil and gas. Washington, which has nonetheless repeatedly demanded that Tokyo halt its Russian purchases, has extended its own sanctions waiver to allow this flow to continue — a sign that the Japanese-American camp remains, on this particular point, more ambiguous than it appears. Tokyo’s protests are loud, but not much more than that, since Japan cannot forgo its energy relationship with Russia, a relationship on which it depends today more than ever. The strategic polarization now reshaping alliances in the Asia-Pacific does not erase the economic interdependencies inherited from another era — precisely the era in which Abe sought to turn them into a lever for rapprochement rather than a source of contradiction.