Japan-Russia Ties Erode as Tokyo Demands Access to Journalist Held in Moscow's Lefortovo Prison

On October 14, officers of Russia's FSB security service walked into a hotel room in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, on Sakhalin Island, where a Japanese journalist was asleep. Russian television broadcast footage of the arrest. The man taken was Yuki Imai, 34, a correspondent for the Hokkaido Shimbun newspaper.

The accusation is that Imai tried to obtain information about soldiers stationed in the region, which lies near the Kuril Islands, a long-running sore spot between Moscow and Tokyo. Russian authorities moved him quickly to Lefortovo Prison in Moscow. A court there ordered him held in pretrial detention until at least December 12. According to the International Federation of Journalists, which has demanded his immediate release, he faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

Japan has so far been unable to reach him. Japanese Foreign Ministry officials traveled to Moscow this week to try to make contact, and staff from the Japanese embassy have been denied access. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has condemned the arrest and rejected the claim that Imai is a spy.

Russia's ambassador to Japan, Nikolay Nozdrev, said, as reported by the state news agency TASS, that Imai was caught "red-handed." He also asserted that Japanese intelligence services use journalists to gather classified information in order to undermine Russia's security and defense capability.

Yoji Gomi, a veteran journalist and author who has reported across Asia, told DW that Japanese reporters may sometimes meet diplomats and exchange thoughts and impressions, but that this does not make them paid spies. He said one-party states often view foreign correspondents as spies because that is how they use their own journalists, and he could see how Russian officials reached that conclusion about Imai. He added that Sakhalin is a sensitive area with many North Korean laborers whom Moscow wants kept out of view.

Stephen Nagy, an international relations professor at Tokyo's International Christian University, offered a different reading. He said Russia may regard Imai as a bargaining chip to swap for Russian nationals detained abroad, though he doubts Tokyo will agree. Giving in, he argued, would let any country seize a Japanese national, try them for espionage and demand a release in return, which would set a dangerous precedent. The arrest also follows the detention in Japan of a member of the Russia-linked hacking group Qilin, who was extradited to Germany to face charges over a 2024 cyberattack on a logistics center.

There are precedents of differing severity. Interfax reported that the last journalist arrested in Russia on a similar charge, in 2019, was accused of trying to obtain classified information about Russia's military potential in the Far East, but was released quickly. Imai's case may be the most serious since 2023, when Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested, sentenced to 16 years in a penal colony, and freed in 2024 in a prisoner exchange with Western countries.

Nagy sees the arrest as pressure on Tokyo, part of coordination with China to isolate Japan while the United States is preoccupied with domestic matters and the conflict in the Middle East. In his view Moscow and Beijing want to portray Japan as still the military state of the 1930s, a threat to Indo-Pacific stability, and it matters little to them whether that is true.

The backdrop is a territorial dispute over islands off Japan's far north, seized by Soviet forces after Japan's surrender in World War II. Japan calls them the Northern Territories; Russia calls them the Southern Kurils. Hopes in Tokyo that diplomacy could win their return have faded in recent years, and took another blow this spring when Japan said it would join the NATO initiative providing nonlethal assistance to Kyiv. In August, President Vladimir Putin visited the islands, only the second Russian leader to do so, and earlier this month Chinese business representatives were welcomed on one of them, with talks underway on economic cooperation. Tadashi Anno, a politics professor at Sophia University, said Japan had worked hard to keep relations stable even after condemning the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and he found Russia's timing in pushing back now puzzling.

The next marker is December 12, when Imai's pretrial detention runs to at least, and the question of whether Japanese officials get to see him remains open.