Flashpoints | Security | East Asia

The Kuril Flashpoint: Putin’s Visit and the Future of Japan-Russia Ties

The Kuril Islands dispute is not just a territorial dispute between Russia and Japan but reflects the larger complexity of geopolitical dynamics in the Indo-Pacific Region.

Russian President Vladimir Putin visiting the Kurilsk Central District Hospital on Iturup Island, Aug. 13, 2026.

Russian President Vladimir Putin made his first visit to the Kuril Islands on August 12. He became the second Russian leader to visit the islands, after President Dmitry Medvedev’s landmark trip in 2010. More recently, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin visited the islands in 2021. 

Putin’s recent visit prompted a protest from Japan, with Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae calling the visit an offense to the sentiments of the Japanese people and unacceptable. 

The islands have been the subject of an ongoing territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, both historically and under international law, for over 80 years. Russia calls the islands the Kuril Islands, and Japan calls them the Northern Territories; the volcanic islands lie at the heart of a territorial feud that has prevented the two countries from formally ending World War II, despite signing a joint declaration for restoring diplomatic relations in 1956. 

Putin’s recent visit has made it even harder to restore relations between the countries. 

There are 56 islands in the 1,300-kilometer (810-mile) archipelago that stretches from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula to Hokkaido, separating the Sea of Okhotsk from the Pacific Ocean. Japan claims four of the islands. These include Iturup (Etorofu in Japanese), Kunashir (Kunashiri), Shikotan, and Habomai, the southernmost islands and closest to Japan, just off the coast of Hokkaido. While Russia administers the islands as part of the Sakhalin region, Japan considers the four they claim as part of Hokkaido prefecture and argues that they are “illegally occupied” by Russia.

In 1855, in the first treaty between tsarist Russia and Japan, the frontier between the two countries was drawn just north of the four islands closest to Japan. Twenty years later, a new treaty handed the entire chain to Japan, in exchange for Russia gaining full control of the island of Sakhalin. Japan seized back control of the southern half of Sakhalin during its crushing victory in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War.

In August 1945, as the Soviet Union entered the war with Japan just after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the Kuril Islands emerged as a flashpoint. Soviet troops completed their takeover of the islands after Japan surrendered. The Soviet capture of the islands has prevented Moscow and Tokyo from signing a formal treaty to end the war, despite repeated attempts over the past 80 years to reach agreement. 

In 1956, both Moscow and Tokyo signed a joint declaration that ended their state of war and restored diplomatic relations – though it was not a formal treaty ending the war. As part of the declaration, the Soviet side agreed to transfer Shikotan and the Habomai Islands to Japan. Negotiations continued after the Cold War, producing results such as the 1993 Tokyo Declaration and 2001 Irkutsk Statement, the latter of which reaffirmed the 1956 declaration as the baseline legal foundation for peace talks.

Under Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, talks intensified in 2018, including the drafting of a peace treaty based on the 1956 declaration. However, the process collapsed with the start of the Ukraine war in 2022, when Russia suspended peace-treaty negotiations due to........

© The Diplomat