MOSCOW, October 5 – Novosti. It is impossible to discuss a comprehensive treaty on relations, including peace, with Japan, which has a clearly unfriendly position, Nikolay Nozdrev, director of the third Asian department of the Russian Foreign Ministry, said in an interview with Novosti.
He noted that the Russian side had previously negotiated with Tokyo on a comprehensive document that would meet modern realities and would define the main directions for the accelerated development of the entire range of Russian-Japanese relations.
“As it was emphasized in the statement of the Russian Foreign Ministry dated March 21, 2022, it is absolutely impossible to discuss such an agreement with a state that takes openly unfriendly positions and seeks to harm the interests of our country,” the diplomat said.
Earlier, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said that despite difficult relations with Russia over Ukraine , Japan is firmly committed to solving the territorial problem and concluding a peace treaty.
Relations between Russia and Japan have been overshadowed by the absence of a peace treaty for many years. In 1956, the USSR and Japan signed a Joint Declaration in which Moscow agreed to consider the possibility of transferring Habomai and Shikotan to Japan after the conclusion of a peace treaty, and the fate of Kunashir and Iturup was not affected. The USSR hoped that the Joint Declaration would put an end to the dispute, while Japan considered the document only part of the solution to the problem, not renouncing claims to all the islands.
Subsequent negotiations led nowhere, and the peace treaty at the end of World War II was never signed. Serious opposition arose from the United States , which threatened that if Japan agreed to the transfer of only two of the four islands to it, this would affect the process of returning Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty. Moscow’s position is that the islands became part of the USSR following World War II, and the sovereignty of the Russian Federation over them is beyond doubt.
