President Volodymyr Zelenskyy believes that his Ukraine and Japan are in the same situation, occupied by Russia.
Zelenskii signs up Telegram to have signed a decree recognizing the southern Kuril Islands as “territory occupied by the Russians in Japan”.
– An important, just, legally irreproachable, historic decision was made today: Ukraine confirms its respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity of Japan, including its northern territories, which are still under Russian occupation.
Japan and Russia were unable to agree on an agreement that would formally end World War II. The dispute involves four disputed islands in the Pacific Ocean, which Japan believes the Soviet Union illegally annexed after the war.
The decree specifies that the decision was taken on the basis of “generally accepted rules and principles of international law, including the principle of territorial integrity”.
Kiev’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, has adopted the same.
In 2019, Ukrainian nationalists held a demonstration in Kiev, where they called for “Curils in Japan – Crimea in Ukraine”. Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014. Last week, Moscow annexed four other Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine.
In 2019, President Vladimir Putin had meetings with then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe about a possible solution – and thus a formal end to World War II – but they disagreed.
The archipelago was discovered by Dutch sailors in 1643. In 1855, Japan and Russia agreed to divide the archipelago between them, but 20 years later Japan gained sovereignty over all the islands in exchange for giving up parts of the Sakhalin Peninsula. After the Second World War, Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union occupied the entire archipelago.
In 1956, Japan and the Soviet Union decided to end World War II through Japan, taking back two of the smaller islands, in exchange for accepting a peace treaty. But the United States refused Japan to accept a deal with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. It was in the middle of the Cold War and the United States thought it would weaken them.
The Kuril Islands stretch from Russian Kamchatka in the north to Japanese Hokkaido in the south and are made up of 30 largest and countless small islands. Japan claims the four southernmost islands.
