By Sergiy Korsunsky / Special to The Japan News

7:00 JST, April 12, 2025

Sergiy Korsunsky, the Ukrainian ambassador to Japan 2020-2025, has worked tirelessly since the start of Russia’s aggression against his country in February 2022 to convey the historic importance of Kyiv’s resistance and to call on Japanese public opinion to stand with Ukraine. As he completed his intense five-year mission in Japan, the ambassador made the following contribution to The Japan News.

We live in an era of revisionism. Amazingly, these efforts come simultaneously from Washington, Beijing and Moscow, although in different forms. These three nuclear powers, permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, could use all the regular ways and means to change the existing rules. But they have chosen approaches that destroy those rules.

This confronts Europe and East Asia with many challenges. Connected by history and strong economic ties, European nations, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand should unite to protect and develop the principles of peaceful coexistence based on law, mutual respect and diplomacy rather than on numbers of nuclear warheads, warships and military airplanes.

This does not necessarily mean that these principles must be preserved unchanged. There is nothing wrong with attempting to change the way things are. But such attempts must be made in the spirit of completely rejecting the use of force, as expressed in Article 9 of Japan’s Constitution. Force must not again be made the ultimate instrument of........

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