What 1945 left unfinished
Russia summoned Japan's ambassador in Moscow on Tuesday to protest what it called Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's 'anti-Russian' comments; the ambassador left the foreign ministry after 25 minutes without a word. Days earlier Japan had summoned Russia's ambassador, after Vladimir Putin visited Iturup last Thursday, the first time a Russian president had set foot on the disputed Kuril Islands. Takaichi called the visit 'grave' and 'absolutely unacceptable' and said the Northern Territories are 'inherently part of Japan's territory, both historically and under international law'.[1]
The islands at issue are Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan and the Habomai group, seized in 1945 by the Soviet Union, which expelled the Japanese population living there. What matters for the present is what did not happen next: the dispute kept the two countries from signing a post-war peace treaty at all. A war that ended in 1945 was closed on the ground and left open on paper, and the two states have spent more than eight decades running a relationship with no founding text to fall back on.[1], [2]
Why is protest the only channel now?
Relations have worsened since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Japan joined the other G7 countries in sanctioning Russia and gives Ukraine financial and non-lethal defence aid, and Ukraine in turn recognises Japan's claim to the islands. Tokyo has relaxed its pacifist rules enough to lift the ban on lethal weapons exports, yet it still cannot send lethal equipment directly to a country at war, so it supports Ukrainian air defence indirectly, exporting domestically produced Patriot interceptors to the United States to replenish stockpiles drawn down by aid to Kyiv. Analysts read Putin's trip to the Kurils as a warning against closing that distance.[1]
A day before the summons, Lavrov carried the same quarrel into a news conference whose announced subjects were trade, investment and crises in Africa, standing in Moscow beside Ghana's foreign minister; there he said Japan had 'crossed the bounds of decency' by objecting to the visit. That is how a dispute behaves once it has no channel of its own: it surfaces wherever a microphone is open. With no treaty to interpret and no negotiating text to amend, the summons and the counter-summons carry the whole relationship on this file. The other reading is that quieter contacts continue out of sight and the public protests are ordinary signalling; the reporting available today shows only the signalling.[2], [1]
Where the arc could bend
A day earlier this column argued that because the treaty meant to end the Korean war was never written in 1953, a firing rule runs the line and an annual exercise calendar runs the alliance. On the Russia-Japan file the same absence produces a different consequence, and the difference is the point. On the peninsula the substitutes kept working: a firing rule on the line and an exercise calendar Washington can enlarge or trim. Between Tokyo and Moscow the substitute was a negotiation, and a negotiation stops the moment either side walks away from the table. That is why the same missing treaty yields a managed line in one place and an ambassador leaving a room after 25 minutes in the other.[3], [1]
The question worth watching is whether either government restores a channel that can be written down. Before the end of the year that would show up in a specific, public form: an announcement from the foreign ministry in Tokyo or Moscow that peace-treaty talks have resumed, or a date set for them. Without such a step, 2026 will have added only visits and summonses to this dispute, the same instruments in use since the islands changed hands and the same ones that have yet to produce a text.[1]