Abe to Hold Talks with Putin to Promote Island Talks

January 21, 2019

Tokyo--Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will hold talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Tuesday to discuss their countries' territorial dispute in a bid to promote negotiations on concluding a World War II peace treaty.

With Abe hoping to hammer out a broad agreement on a peace treaty as early as June, when Putin will visit Japan for a Group of 20 summit, the coming meeting will be a key test for progress in the negotiations, which started under a new mechanism earlier this month.

The Abe-Putin meeting will be the 25th including talks held when Abe was previously in office from 2006 to 2007. The meeting will be joined by Foreign Minister Taro Kono, who is Japan's top negotiator.

When they held talks in Singapore in November, Abe and Putin agreed to speed up peace treaty negotiations on the basis of the 1956 Japan-Soviet joint declaration, which calls for the handover of Shikotan and the Habomais--the smaller two of four Russian-held northwestern Pacific islands--to Japan after the conclusion of a bilateral peace treaty.

The four islands, located off Hokkaido, northernmost Japan, were seized from the country by Soviet troops in the closing days of World War II. The dispute over the islands, known as the Northern Territories in Japan, has prevented Japan and Russia from concluding a peace treaty to put a formal end to their wartime hostilities.

At a meeting in Argentina in December, the two leaders decided to adopt the new mechanism of negotiations headed by the two countries' foreign ministers, with working-level business handled by vice foreign minister-level officials.

At a foreign ministers' meeting in Moscow last Monday, the first talks under the new mechanism, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Kono that the issue of sovereignty over the islands will not be taken up for discussions.

Lavrov urged Japan to acknowledge that the islands were legally incorporated into Soviet territories as a consequence of World War II. The meeting failed to make meaningful progress due to his hard-line stance.

Abe is believed to be aiming for a "two islands plus something extra" format of solution in which Shikotan and the Habomais will be returned to Japan and the two countries will promote joint economic activities on the other two islands--Kunashiri and Etorofu.

He hopes to reaffirm with Putin plans to accelerate negotiations and keep hard liners including Lavrov at bay. But the outcome of the bilateral summit is still uncertain and could cloud the prospect for Abe's goal.

The prime minister is traveling to Russia as part of a four-day trip also including a visit to Davos, Switzerland, where he will deliver a speech at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday.

He will attend the World Economic Forum for the first time in five years to prepare for the G-20 summit he is scheduled to chair in Osaka, western Japan, in June.

Abe has said that as G-20 chair, Japan will communicate to the world its attitudes on global challenges, including achieving sustainable growth of the world economy, promoting free trade and fighting climate change. He is also expected to call for efforts to draw up rules to deal with international data distribution and maritime plastic waste.

Japan is arranging a meeting between Abe and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on the sidelines of the Davos forum. Jiji Press