Vladimir Putin has never, in more than a quarter-century in power, set foot on the four islands that have kept Russia and Japan from formally ending the Second World War. On Thursday, he changed that — and in doing so, opened what one Kyiv-based analysis this week called the first chapter of “a Pacific cold war.”
The Russian president landed on Iturup, the largest of the Kuril Islands, touring a fish-processing plant, a hospital and a school, tasting caviar and chatting with residents of Kurilsk before meeting Sakhalin regional governor Valery Limarenko. Russian state media framed it as a routine domestic visit, part of a Far East swing that began with Pacific Fleet exercises off Sakhalin. Tokyo did not see it that way.
“It hurts the feelings of the Japanese people and is absolutely unacceptable,” Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi told reporters, adding that the trip had “made it more difficult to restore relations” with Moscow “over the medium to long term.” Japan’s Foreign Ministry summoned Russian ambassador Nikolai Nozdrev to lodge a formal protest, and by Friday a senior ministry official told Kyodo News that Tokyo was actively weighing new sanctions on Russia in response.
A Dispute Rooted in 1945
The islands — Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan and the Habomai islets, known collectively in Tokyo as the Northern Territories — sit at the southern tip of the 1,300-kilometer Kuril chain running from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula to Japan’s Hokkaido. Soviet troops seized them in the final days of the war, after the USSR declared war on Japan on August 8, 1945, just two days after the Hiroshima bombing and days before Tokyo’s surrender. Roughly 17,000 Japanese residents were deported in the takeover.
The dispute has outlived every attempt to resolve it. Japan renounced its claim to the wider Kuril chain in the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco but never recognized Soviet sovereignty over the four southernmost islands specifically. A 1956 joint declaration formally ended the state of war between Moscow and Tokyo and dangled the return of Shikotan and the Habomai islets in exchange for a peace treaty — an offer Nikita Khrushchev shelved once Japan struck its security alliance with Washington. Decades later, under Shinzo Abe, Tokyo tried again: the former prime minister met Putin 27 times in pursuit of a treaty, and in 2018 the two sides agreed to accelerate talks built around the 1956 framework. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine froze that effort in 2022, when Japan joined Western sanctions and, for the first time, named Russia a principal security threat in its defense planning.
Putin’s message on the eve of his trip was that none of this is up for renegotiation. Speaking aboard a warship during the Pacific Fleet drills, he said the islands’ status “is enshrined in international documents as a reality that arose following the outcome of World War II,” while accusing Japan of imposing “unprovoked sanctions.” His deputy Security Council chairman, Dmitry Medvedev — the only other sitting Russian president to have visited the islands, in 2010 — was blunter on social media, writing that the territory “were, are, and will remain Russian land” and warning that Tokyo would face “monstrous consequences” for failing to accept that.
Reading the Kremlin’s Signal
The timing was not incidental. Japan published its 2026 Defense White Paper earlier this month, describing the country’s security environment as the most severe since World War II, naming Russia — alongside China and North Korea — as a primary threat, and citing the frequent Russian air incursions that force Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force to scramble fighters. Defense spending has climbed to roughly 2 percent of GDP, and Tokyo has stood up its first centralized intelligence service since 1945, answerable directly to Takaichi.
The Institute for the Study of War assessed this week that Putin’s trip was “likely part of the Kremlin’s response” to that white paper, designed to undercut Takaichi’s push to harden Japan’s defense posture. But the Washington-based think tank also drew a second, less obvious thread: it linked the visit to Moscow’s broader campaign to blunt European Union efforts to seize Russian “shadow fleet” tankers used to evade the Ukraine-war oil price cap. In this reading, a symbolic gesture on a remote Pacific island functions as leverage in an entirely different theater — an attempt to signal that pressure on Russia anywhere carries a cost everywhere, at a moment when Tokyo has explicitly argued that European and Indo-Pacific security are now interconnected.
That interconnection cut both ways this week. A day before Putin’s landing, North Korea fired a missile into the sea separating it from Japan, ahead of joint US-South Korean military exercises — a reminder that Tokyo’s threat perception now spans three capitals simultaneously. And on the day of the visit, Russia’s ambassador to Japan and his Chinese counterpart, Wu Jianghao, issued a joint statement pledging to oppose any revision of the postwar settlement and warning against remilitarization in the Asia-Pacific — language that dovetails with Moscow’s rejection of Tokyo’s claim and underscores the emerging alignment between Russia, China and North Korea against Japan’s rearmament.
Washington Weighs In
The United States moved quickly to back Tokyo’s position. Ambassador George Glass said Washington remained “unwavering” in recognizing Japanese sovereignty over the islands and “strongly” opposed “any action that undermines” peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific — a pointed statement, if a familiar one; the US has recognized Japan’s claim since the immediate postwar period without it ever moving Moscow. At the United Nations, a spokesperson for Secretary-General António Guterres declined to take a position, calling it “a bilateral issue between member states.”
Russia’s embassy in Tokyo, for its part, insisted the islands had become Russian territory “on legitimate international grounds” and that Putin’s domestic travel was “entirely a matter for the Russian leadership to decide” — language echoed by Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who accused Japanese officials of trying to “dictate” where Russia’s president could travel.
What the Islands Are Worth
Beyond the symbolism, the Kurils carry real strategic weight. The strait between Kunashir and Iturup is the only one in the chain that does not freeze in winter, giving Russia’s Vladivostok-based Pacific Fleet year-round access to open water — a fact that helps explain why Moscow has steadily built up missile systems and military infrastructure on the islands even as the population, around 20,000, remains sparse. The archipelago also holds mineral deposits, including gold, silver and rhenium — a metal used in components for supersonic aircraft — along with rich fishing grounds that anchor the local economy Putin toured on Thursday.
What to Watch
Tokyo’s sanctions deliberation, still described by officials as an open question of “what steps to take going forward,” is the most immediate marker to track: any new measures would be Japan’s first significant Russia sanctions expansion since the initial post-2022 package, and Moscow has already shown a willingness to retaliate in kind, having imposed an indefinite entry ban on 30 Japanese citizens, including journalists and academics, over the earlier sanctions round. Whether Takaichi’s government follows through — and whether it moves in step with the EU’s shadow-fleet enforcement push that ISW believes partly motivated the visit — will indicate how far the Ukraine-war sanctions architecture and Pacific security politics have actually merged.
Longer term, the visit effectively closes the door on the Abe-era peace-treaty framework for the foreseeable future; with Moscow declaring the territorial question settled and Tokyo hardening its defense posture in response, neither side has an obvious incentive to reopen talks. The more consequential story may be the one ISW and Kyiv-based analysts are already flagging: a deepening alignment of interest, if not formal coordination, among Russia, China and North Korea against Japan’s rearmament — a dynamic that will shape how Tokyo, Washington and Seoul calibrate their own responses in the months ahead.
