Key Points
・Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Etorofu (Iturup in Russian) on August 13, 2026, touring a fish processing plant, a hospital and a school, and Japan’s government protested that the four Northern Territories are Japanese territory both historically and under international law.
・The 1956 Japan-Soviet Joint Declaration promised the transfer of Shikotan and the Habomai group only after a peace treaty, and Moscow has treated the US-Japan alliance as an obstacle to that transfer ever since a Soviet memorandum of January 1960.
・The visit was staged as administrative routine rather than a show of force, which reads as a statement that the islands are no longer a bargaining chip in any negotiation.
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Putin Tours Etorofu After Inspecting a Large Pacific Fleet Exercise
The Kremlin announced on August 13, 2026, that President Vladimir Putin had visited the island of Etorofu, known in Russia as Iturup. Guided by Sakhalin Region Governor Valery Limarenko, Putin toured a fish processing plant and sampled salmon roe. He also visited a hospital and a school, and told residents near the school that the place felt like a resort. State television footage showed him boarding a Russian Navy missile cruiser.
When the governor highlighted the Soviet defeat of Japanese forces on Shumshu in 1945, Putin replied that this should not be forgotten. In his meeting with the governor he also said that Russians carry the genetic code of victors.
Putin took office as president in 2000. Counting his years as prime minister from 2008 to 2012, this was his first time setting foot on the Northern Territories. He is the second Russian head of state to do so, after President Dmitry Medvedev visited Kunashiri in November 2010.
Russia’s state news agency TASS described the trip as Putin’s first in-person visit to the island chain. Putin was reported in January 2024 to have said he would definitely go, so the visit itself had been signalled two and a half years in advance.
The trip came at the end of a longer itinerary. Russian forces began a large border defense exercise on August 4 involving, according to a Jiji Press report of August 12, 2026, more than 13,000 personnel, about 60 vessels and about 30 aircraft, deployed across the Sea of Japan, the Sea of Okhotsk and the northwestern Pacific. The exercise area included the Northern Territories and the wider Kuril chain.
Putin inspected that exercise in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk on August 12, his first trip to Sakhalin Region in about thirteen years. Speaking there, he said the sovereignty of the Kuril Islands was fixed by international documents as a result of the Second World War. He credited the Russia policy of the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and said that Japan had changed its position.
Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi issued a message stating that the four Northern Territories including Etorofu are Japan’s inherent territory both historically and under international law, and that Japan strongly protests the visit. Around 6 p.m. the same day he summoned Russian Ambassador Nikolai Nozdrev to the foreign ministry to protest in person, a step up from 2021, when the protest over Prime Minister Mishustin’s visit was delivered at vice minister level.
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said at a press conference recorded by the Prime Minister’s Office that the visit hurt the feelings of the Japanese people and could not be tolerated, and that it had made a medium to long term recovery of relations more difficult. She also disclosed that since January 2024, when Putin stated he would definitely visit the islands, Japan had repeatedly asked Moscow not to let a presidential visit take place. Word of the visit reached her only that afternoon.
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How the Border Was Drawn, and the Two Times a Deal Came Close
The Northern Territories, or Hoppo Ryodo in Japanese, are four island groups off northeastern Hokkaido, namely Etorofu, Kunashiri, Shikotan and the Habomai islets, which Japan claims as inherent territory and which Russia has administered since 1945 as the southern part of the Kuril chain. The dispute has kept the two countries from signing a peace treaty for eighty years.
The four islands were not taken in war
Japan’s case begins with a treaty, not a battlefield. According to the Cabinet Office Northern Territories Affairs Administration, the first border was drawn by the Treaty of Shimoda in February 1855, which placed the line between Etorofu and Urup, leaving everything from Etorofu southward on the Japanese side.
The Treaty of Saint Petersburg of 1875 then traded Sakhalin to Russia in exchange for the Kuril Islands. The islands listed in that treaty were the eighteen from Urup northward. Etorofu, Kunashiri, Shikotan and the Habomai group were not among them, which is why Tokyo argues the four were never acquired through any exchange.
The line moved in 1945.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| February 1855 | Treaty of Shimoda sets the border between Etorofu and Urup |
| 1875 | Treaty of Saint Petersburg gives Japan the eighteen islands from Urup northward |
| August 18, 1945 | Soviet forces land on Shumshu |
| August 28, 1945 | Soviet forces occupy Etorofu |
| September 1 to 5, 1945 | Kunashiri, Shikotan and the Habomai group are occupied |
| 1947 to 1948 | Remaining Japanese residents are forcibly removed |
According to the same Cabinet Office material, 17,291 Japanese residents lived on Etorofu and the islands south of it at the end of the war. About half left on their own, and those who stayed were forcibly removed in 1947 and 1948.
Two legal arguments that never met
Both sides have a legal case. They simply start from different documents.
Japan’s position is that the Kuril Islands it renounced under the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty do not include the four islands, that the renunciation covered only Urup and points north, and that the Soviet Union never signed the treaty and therefore cannot claim rights under it.
Russia starts from the Yalta Agreement of February 1945, in which the American, British and Soviet leaders promised the Kuril Islands to the Soviet Union in return for entering the war against Japan. On this reading, ownership of the four islands was settled as a result of the Second World War, and Japan’s renunciation under the San Francisco treaty reinforces the point.
Japan replies that it was not a party to Yalta, that an agreement among leaders cannot transfer territory as a matter of law, and that the San Francisco treaty never named a recipient for the islands Japan gave up.
The result is not a head to head contest inside one legal framework. Russia’s case rests mainly on a political claim about the outcome of a war, while Japan’s rests on treaty text and negotiating records. That mismatch is one reason the two sides have talked past each other for eighty years.
Twice close, twice closed
Postwar talks came near a settlement twice. The US-Japan alliance stopped the first attempt and the invasion of Ukraine stopped the second.
The first was the Japan-Soviet Joint Declaration of October 1956, in which Moscow agreed to hand over Shikotan and the Habomai group after a peace treaty was concluded. In January 1960, angered by the revision of the US-Japan security treaty, the Soviet Union issued a memorandum adding a new condition, namely the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Japanese territory. The two island promise was effectively shelved from that point.
The second opening came after the Cold War. Russia acknowledged that a territorial issue existed, and the Tokyo Declaration of 1993 confirmed a framework for resolving the status of all four islands and concluding a peace treaty. In November 2018 Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and President Putin agreed to accelerate talks on the basis of the 1956 declaration, a shift from a four island package toward a settlement centred on Shikotan and the Habomai group.
That opening closed as well. A 2020 constitutional amendment banned activities aimed at ceding Russian territory, with border delimitation as an exception, and after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 Russia refused to continue peace treaty talks at all.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| October 1956 | Japan-Soviet Joint Declaration promises Shikotan and the Habomai group after a peace treaty |
| January 1960 | Soviet memorandum demands withdrawal of all foreign troops from Japan |
| October 1993 | Tokyo Declaration commits both sides to resolve the status of the four islands |
| November 2018 | Singapore meeting agrees to accelerate talks on the basis of the 1956 declaration |
| July 2020 | Russian constitutional amendment bans activity aimed at ceding territory |
| March 2022 | Russia refuses to continue peace treaty talks and halts exchange programmes |
The material published by the Cabinet Secretariat’s Office of Policy Planning and Coordination on Territory and Sovereignty records these steps. Senior Russian visits increased as the talks thinned. Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin visited Etorofu in July 2021, toured a hospital and a fish processing facility, and floated a duty free special zone to attract foreign investment to the islands. Japan’s vice minister for foreign affairs summoned the Russian ambassador to protest on that occasion.
Is the Northern Territories Card Dead?
Why the visit came now
A small opening for dialogue appeared in July, and Russia answered it in August in the strongest available form.
On July 21, 2026, Foreign Minister Motegi and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov exchanged words at ASEAN related meetings in the Philippines, the first face to face contact between the two since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. At a press conference on July 24, Motegi said Japan’s Russia policy was unchanged, while adding that Russia is a neighbour and that communication is needed to resolve outstanding issues.
Three weeks later came the exercise and the presidential visit. Read one way, Moscow set its price on the territorial question before any talks could begin.
There is a competing reading of equal weight. Putin had signalled the visit back in January 2024, and there is no evidence that the itinerary was assembled in response to a brief July encounter. The trip may simply have been a long standing plan that happened to land at that moment. Russia’s own messaging toward Japan in the coming months is what will separate the two readings.
Japan’s dialogue track has value of its own. Fisheries, air routes, and the humanitarian files of detainees and grave visits all run through thin channels that matter in a crisis. Losing the ability to check an adversary’s intent carries a cost.
At the same time, maintaining sanctions while foreign ministers meet does erode the appearance of G7 unity. What Russia is cashing in here is that appearance rather than any material gain. The working channels stay open, the image of a single bloc frays, and this visit made the fraying visible.
Why administrative routine is a stronger claim than a military parade
Showing the ordinary business of government is a stronger assertion than showing an exercise. A hospital, a school and a fish plant amount to a declaration that this is not disputed ground but an ordinary Russian province.
Planting a flag at a military site would concede that the place is special. Tasting salmon roe and telling residents the island feels like a resort carries the opposite message. Where daily life accumulates, the vocabulary of negotiation recedes.
There is a domestic payoff too. A leader travelling to the far edge of the Russian Far East is useful material for consolidating support, and these islands attach easily to the story of victory in the Second World War.
None of this strengthens the legal title. Journalist Masami Ono, a former Moscow bureau chief of the Asahi Shimbun, argued at a January 2026 symposium of the Japan Forum on International Relations that under international law, strengthening effective control after a dispute has arisen does not reinforce legal title, and he tied that point to the meaning of the return movement.
So what is advancing is political fact rather than legal position. That distinction supports both resignation and hope. Nothing has moved in law, and the political weight grows every year.
Even the naming diverges. TASS writes Kuril Islands, Japanese outlets write Northern Territories, and the same islands carry different words from the start.
Why Russia cannot easily return Etorofu and Kunashiri
The reason Etorofu and Kunashiri are treated differently from the other two is visible in Cold War era force deployments. The Sea of Okhotsk is where the Russian Pacific Fleet operates its strategic ballistic missile submarines, and the Kuril chain forms the outer wall around that water.
The US Department of Defense uses the term bastion for the practice of defending a near home sea with land, sea and air forces so that strategic submarines can operate inside it, and the Russian Pacific Fleet is understood to run such a posture centred on the Sea of Okhotsk. It was Putin’s government that rejected a post Cold War proposal to shut the submarine base, a decision tied directly to maintaining the nuclear force.
The asymmetry inside that wall has a documented history. According to the National Institute for Defense Studies East Asian Strategic Review 2017, once the Soviet Union began deploying ballistic missile submarines into the Sea of Okhotsk in the 1970s, it had to defend the entire line running from Kamchatka along the Kuril chain. The same report records that the US Navy and Japan’s Maritime Self Defense Force exercised for scenarios in which they would strike Soviet submarines from the Kuril side, and that the Soviet Union stationed ground troops on Kunashiri and Etorofu to keep American forces from seizing the islands as forward attack bases. Comparable forces were never placed on the northern islands of the chain.
Shikotan and the Habomai group sit just off the Nemuro Peninsula and form no part of that wall. The fact that Moscow could agree in 1956 to hand over exactly those two is consistent with the deployment pattern. Some islands can be given up without breaching the wall, and some cannot.
The posture continues. The same 2017 report notes that Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu presented a coastal defense concept in 2016 that included securing sea lanes passing through the Kuril chain.
Deployments have accumulated. Japan’s Ministry of Defense, in its June 2026 assessment of Russian military activity, records a division of roughly 3,500 personnel on Etorofu and Kunashiri whose main task is defense against amphibious landing, the assignment of the Bastion and Bal coastal missile units to Etorofu and Kunashiri respectively in 2016, the deployment of Su-35S fighters to the Etorofu airport in 2018, and the arrival of the long range S-300V4 air defense system in 2020. The same document notes that coastal missile deployments later extended north to Matua and Paramushir.
Why the concern from 1960 costs more in 2026
Russia’s stated worry has been consistent for sixty six years. As the 1960 memorandum showed, the object of concern was never Japan itself but what would be stationed on the islands after a transfer. Russia has repeatedly voiced concern about American missile defense assets in Japan, and the shape of the problem has barely changed.
What has changed is the weight. China and Russia held a joint exercise in July 2026, and a joint patrol involving Chinese aircraft was conducted at Etorofu. Japan for its part decided in its three security documents of late 2022 to acquire counterstrike capability and has shifted the centre of gravity of its defense posture toward the southwest. The question of whether American forces would come to a returned island has become a question of whether a returned island would become part of the infrastructure of the alliance.
Russia’s own logic constrains it as well. Having treated the annexation of four Ukrainian regions as irreversible in the same way as the outcome of the Second World War, Moscow would struggle to explain handling the four islands by a different standard. The 2020 constitutional amendment fixed that difficulty in legal text.
One fact cuts against the security explanation. According to the Ministry of Defense assessment of June 2026, the S-300V4 systems deployed in 2020 were reported to have disappeared from both islands in August 2023, apparently diverted toward Ukraine. If the islands were too important to give up, why strip the air defense? The coastal missiles that cover the straits were not withdrawn, which suggests priorities were set and the core function of the wall was preserved.
The strongest counterargument comes from Yu Koizumi of the University of Tokyo, who argues that the islands are not held because they are militarily important, but that their military importance is emphasised because Russia has no intention of returning them. The causation, on this reading, runs the other way.
Either reading leads to the same present tense conclusion, namely that the current leadership shows no intention of using the islands as a negotiating card. What differs is the forecast. If security is the driver, nothing moves until the strategic value of the Sea of Okhotsk falls. If domestic politics is the driver, a change in the character of the government leaves room.
Does protesting still accomplish anything?
Protest does not change the situation, and silence would be used as material to strengthen the other side’s claim. That asymmetry is why Japan’s foreign ministry issues nearly identical language every time.
In territorial disputes, one party’s silence can be presented as acquiescence. Stopping the protest would not extinguish a claim overnight, but maintaining the claim and putting it on the record narrows the space in which acquiescence can be argued. A measure that produces no visible effect is not the same as a measure without meaning.
The constraint that does bite is human. At the January 2026 symposium of the Japan Forum on International Relations, Masami Ono reported that 4,830 former islanders remain with an average age of 90. Grave visits to the islands have not taken place since 2019, and in 2026 the memorial was conducted for the first time by combining a service at sea with a service from the air. That combination reduces the physical burden and also records a generation ageing out without ever setting foot on the islands again.
There is a further obstacle to any return. Russian settlers have built lives on the islands across several generations, and any political opening would still leave the question of what happens to them. The return movement itself has been aware of this for a long time.
Nor is the freeze necessarily permanent. How the war in Ukraine ends, and how the order afterward is rebuilt, could reopen a door. The view that a change of government in Moscow would change the claim runs into the counterexample that neither Mikhail Gorbachev nor Boris Yeltsin returned the islands. Even so, the range of possibility has not narrowed to zero.
From When Will They Return to What Will Be Preserved
Over eighty postwar years, the Japanese question has quietly changed shape. When will the islands come back became when can talks resume, and the talks themselves have been frozen since 2022.
This visit gave that reality a set of images. A leader sampling salmon roe and describing the island as a resort exerts a different kind of pressure from a display of force. It presents the claim that this is not contested ground in the form of ordinary life.
Something has not moved. Years of effective control do not by themselves settle a legal position. The line drawn in 1855 and the condition attached in 1956 remain on the record. The near identical wording of each protest is the work of keeping that record from lapsing.
Preserving is not the same as recovering. When recovery recedes, how far should a country maintain the record, the claim, and the humanitarian contacts? With the average age of former islanders now past 90, that choice runs against a clock.
What do we pass on about a place that may or may not return? Holding an unanswered question while continuing to keep the record is one of the tasks this dispute sets.
Frequently Asked Questions
Has any Russian leader visited the disputed islands before?
Yes. President Dmitry Medvedev visited Kunashiri in November 2010, making him the first Russian head of state to do so, and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin visited Etorofu in July 2021. Putin’s August 13, 2026 trip was his own first, counting his years as prime minister from 2008 to 2012, and made him the second sitting Russian head of state to set foot on the islands.
Why have Japan and Russia never signed a peace treaty after the Second World War?
Because the two sides have never agreed on who owns the four islands. The 1956 Japan-Soviet Joint Declaration restored diplomatic relations and promised Shikotan and the Habomai group after a peace treaty, but a Soviet memorandum of January 1960 added the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Japan as a further condition, and according to the Cabinet Secretariat’s territorial affairs materials the transfer has been shelved ever since. Russia refused to continue peace treaty talks in March 2022.
What is the strategic value of the Kuril Islands to Russia?
They form the outer wall of the Sea of Okhotsk, where the Russian Pacific Fleet operates strategic ballistic missile submarines. The National Institute for Defense Studies East Asian Strategic Review 2017 records that after the Soviet Union began deploying ballistic missile submarines there in the 1970s it stationed ground troops on Kunashiri and Etorofu specifically to prevent American forces from seizing the islands as forward attack bases, while comparable forces were never placed on the northern islands of the chain.
Reference Links
- Russia’s Putin visits disputed Kuril islands, angering Japan | Reuters (via Yahoo News)
- History of the Northern Territories | Cabinet Office, Northern Territories Affairs Administration
- Japan’s response on the Northern Territories issue, 1956 to 1998 | Cabinet Secretariat, Office of Policy Planning and Coordination on Territory and Sovereignty
- Japan’s response on the Northern Territories issue, 2001 to 2019 | Cabinet Secretariat, Office of Policy Planning and Coordination on Territory and Sovereignty
- Russian Military Activity Around Japan, June 2026 | Ministry of Defense of Japan (PDF, Japanese)
- East Asian Strategic Review 2017, Chapter 6: Russia | National Institute for Defense Studies (PDF)
- Russian military modernization in the Northern Territories and its implications for Japanese diplomacy, by Yu Koizumi | Sasakawa Peace Foundation IINA
- Eighty years after the war, reconsidering the Northern Territories issue | Japan Forum on International Relations
