The Kurils and the Cost of Conflict Over History

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Iturup Island on Thursday, his first as head of state, has reignited one of the Pacific’s oldest unresolved territorial disputes. Japan summoned Russia’s ambassador in protest, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi called the visit deeply hurtful to the Japanese public, and Moscow answered with open defiance rather than conciliation. Neither side blinked. That, more than the visit itself, is what should concern anyone watching the North Pacific.

The dispute is old enough to predate both modern states as we know them. Russia and Japan first drew a border through the Kuril chain in the 1855 Treaty of Shimoda, placing Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan, and the Habomai islets under Japanese control. That settlement held for nine decades. In the final days of the Second World War, Soviet forces seized the entire chain, expelled its Japanese population, and resettled it with Russian citizens — a rupture from which the two countries have never fully recovered, and over which they have still not signed a formal peace treaty.

Tokyo’s position deserves to be stated on its own terms before it is argued with. Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs holds that the four islands were never legitimately part of the “Kuril Islands” it renounced under the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, that the Soviet Union was not even a signatory to that treaty, and that the islands’ seizure amounted to wartime annexation rather than a settlement Japan ever accepted. For Tokyo, this is not a historical grievance but a live legal claim to what it calls its Northern Territories.

Russia’s position rests on a fundamentally different interpretation of the postwar settlement. Moscow holds that the islands passed to Soviet, and later Russian, sovereignty under wartime and postwar agreements among the Allied powers, and that this transfer was confirmed by the Russian Foreign Ministry as having a firm international-legal basis. Japan disputes that this basis was ever settled at all, since the Soviet Union declined to sign the 1951 treaty and the underlying wartime agreements were never ratified as a territorial settlement between Moscow and Tokyo directly. Eighty-one years of Russian administration have not resolved which reading is correct; they have simply made the dispute harder to unwind.

But there is a question underneath the legal one that Tokyo and Moscow’s dueling statements this week did not touch: what does more than eight decades of Russian administration mean for the people who actually live on these islands today?

The present-day reality on Iturup is hard to ignore. The island functions as an ordinary part of Russia’s Sakhalin Oblast: Russian is the dominant language of daily life, the Russian ruble is the currency used in everyday economic life, and Russian schools, hospitals, and courts are the only institutions most residents have ever known. Multiple generations have now been born, educated, and buried there under a system with no living memory of any other one. Even a Japanese government fully persuaded of its own legal claim would face the practical task of unwinding an entire society, not just redrawing a line on a map.

This is where a purely territorial solution runs into trouble. If sovereignty transferred to Japan tomorrow, would Iturup’s residents retain Russian citizenship, acquire Japanese citizenship, or be offered some special transitional status? Would Russian-language schools and Orthodox institutions survive under Japanese administration? What happens to property, pensions, businesses built over three generations? Would Moscow ever accept such a transfer without a fight, and would the people actually living there welcome it — or resist it as forcibly as their grandparents once resisted deportation the other way? A map can be redrawn in an afternoon. A society cannot.

None of this means population alone can settle sovereignty — that logic runs the wrong direction. The people are Russian therefore Russia owns the islands is not an argument The AWB News is prepared to make, not least because that population is itself the product of a wartime expulsion, and demographic facts created by displacement cannot be allowed to simply legitimize the displacement that created them. But the wishes and welfare of the people living there now are not nothing either. In our view, any durable settlement has to weigh both: Japan’s legal claim, and the plain reality of who lives on these islands and how they got there.

Territory has changed hands throughout history without war, and the precedents are worth remembering precisely because they are so rarely followed. Sweden let Norway secede peacefully in 1905 rather than fight to hold a union its people no longer wanted. South Sudan separated from Sudan by referendum rather than permanent war. East Timor’s independence from Indonesia, though it began in bloodshed, was ultimately settled by a vote, not by force of arms alone. The lesson of these cases is not that Russia should hold a referendum on the Kurils tomorrow. It is that borders have moved, repeatedly, through negotiation rather than confrontation — and that this is always the harder but cheaper path.

The danger is that this particular dispute is no longer purely bilateral. The islands host Russia’s 18th Machine Gun Artillery Division, coastal missile batteries, and an airfield that has hosted fighter jets since 2018, guarding the approach to the Sea of Okhotsk and Russia’s Pacific submarine fleet. Japan’s alignment with Western sanctions since the Ukraine war has already frozen relations with Moscow. A local territorial quarrel, layered onto that broader confrontation and Japan’s alliance with Washington, is exactly the kind of dispute that turns a diplomatic insult into a military miscalculation neither side actually wants.

The AWB News believes neither government needs to abandon its position to avoid that outcome. Japan can preserve its legal claim to the Northern Territories indefinitely while still accepting that removing or displacing the Russian population that lives there today is not a realistic near-term policy, and pursuing engagement rather than confrontation over it. Russia, for its part, loses nothing by restoring diplomatic channels, dropping the language of “monstrous consequences,” and guaranteeing that whatever the islands’ ultimate legal status, the people living on them will not be used as pawns in a wider standoff with the West.

Eighty-one years after the Kurils changed hands in the closing days of one war, the real question facing Tokyo and Moscow is not simply who is legally right. It is whether pursuing competing claims over four islands is worth creating the conditions for another war.