Putin's First Kuril Islands Visit Draws Sharp Japanese Protest

Vladimir Putin stepped onto Iturup Island on Thursday, becoming the first sitting Russian president to set foot on territory that Japan has never stopped claiming as its own. The visit was brief and symbolic—he toured a fish-processing plant, accepted caviar from local workers, and departed—but the message was unmistakable. Within hours, Japan's government summoned Russia's ambassador to lodge what it called a "strong protest."

The four islands at the center of this dispute have been a wound in the relationship between Moscow and Tokyo for eighty years. When the Soviet Union seized them in 1945, as World War II was ending, it also deported roughly seventeen thousand Japanese residents who had lived there. Today, about twenty thousand Russian citizens inhabit the islands, which Russia calls the Kurils and Japan calls the Northern Territories. The disagreement was so fundamental that it prevented Moscow and Tokyo from ever signing a formal peace treaty after the war. Even now, three decades after the Soviet Union collapsed, talks aimed at resolving the territorial question have led nowhere.

Japan's foreign minister, Toshimitsu Motegi, responded with carefully measured language that nonetheless conveyed deep frustration. "The Northern Territories are an inherent part of Japan's territory both historically and under international law," his statement read, "and the government of Japan strongly protests this visit." Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi was more direct. She told reporters that Putin's journey to the islands "offends the sentiments of the Japanese people and is absolutely unacceptable." She also made clear that the visit would deepen wounds already opened by Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which had already strained the two countries' relationship to a breaking point.

Putin's trip was not entirely unprecedented. Dmitry Medvedev, then president, visited the islands in 2010, and returned again in 2015 as prime minister. But a sitting president making the journey carries different weight—it reads as a statement of ownership, a physical assertion of control over disputed ground. The timing was also pointed. Putin had just come from nearby Sakhalin Island, where Russia's navy was conducting military exercises, a reminder that these remote territories hold strategic value that Moscow is not willing to surrender.

The Kuril archipelago stretches in a volcanic arc from Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula down toward Japan's northern island of Hokkaido. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union maintained a substantial military presence there, viewing the islands as a buffer against American and Japanese power in the Pacific. That strategic importance has not diminished. Russia's hardening stance on territorial disputes—evident not only in its invasion of Ukraine but also in its refusal to budge on the Kurils—suggests that Moscow sees these islands as non-negotiable. For Japan, the visit was a reminder that the path to resolving this seventy-year-old grievance remains as distant as ever.