The Kuril Islands

A volcanic chain

The Kurils run for about 1,200 km from the tip of Kamchatka to the northeast corner of Hokkaido, separating the Sea of Okhotsk from the Pacific. They are part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, with at least 100 volcanoes; earthquakes and tsunamis are common, and the tsunami of 1737 reached 64 m.^[1]

Winters are long, cold and snowy and summers foggy. About 20,000 people live there, mostly from fishing, especially for crab. The largest island is Iturup; the main towns are Kurilsk on Iturup, Severo-Kurilsk on Paramushir and Yuzhno-Kurilsk on Kunashir.^[1]

From Shimoda to Yalta

The islands were first home to the Ainu, and Russians and Japanese arrived in waves of exploration in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Treaty of Shimoda of 1855 gave Japan the four southernmost islands and Russia the rest. In the Treaty of Saint Petersburg of 1875, Russia gave Japan the whole chain in return for undisputed control of Sakhalin.^[1]

At Yalta the Allies agreed that the Kurils “shall be handed over to the Soviet Union”. Soviet forces took them in 1945, after Japan announced its surrender, and the Japanese population was forcibly moved out and replaced by Soviet settlers.^[1][3]

“The Kuril islands shall be handed over to the Soviet Union.”^[1]

Two islands or four

Japan still claims the four southernmost islands, and because of the dispute the two countries have never formally ended the Second World War.^[1] The 1956 Soviet–Japanese Joint Declaration mentions only two of them, Shikotan and the Habomai islets.^[3]

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, back in office from December 2012, agreed with Vladimir Putin to base a peace treaty on the 1956 declaration, which RUSI’s James Brown calls a major concession. Abe met Putin 27 times and offered an eight-point economic plan in 2016.^[3] Russia meanwhile built up its military on the islands and showed little interest in giving them back.^[1]

Talks suspended

On 21 March 2022 Russia announced it would stop peace treaty talks with Japan, in retaliation for Japanese sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine, and withdrew from joint economic projects on the islands.^[3][2] Prime Minister Fumio Kishida called the move “unjust and absolutely unacceptable”; Japan said its policy of seeking to resolve the dispute and sign a treaty had not changed.^[2]

The former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said that talks about the Kurils had always been “ritualistic” and that Russia’s 2020 constitution forbids giving up territory: “The question is closed.”^[3]