Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that he will do ‘whatever it takes’ to settle the territorial dispute with Russia.
“My mission as a politician, as a prime minister is to achieve it [a peace treaty] whatever it takes,” Abe said at a meeting with Shunsuke Hasegawa, the mayor of the city of Nemuro in the Hokkaido prefecture.
At the end of May 2014, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said that Russia is ready to continue negotiations with Japan concerning the disputed islands. “Both Russia and Japan are sincerely interested in resolving this problem”, he said. At the same time, Putin stressed that the decision should not hurt the interests of the parties, but acknowledged that it is unclear how to come to a compromise on this issue, Tass reported.
Russia and Japan failed to sign a permanent peace treaty following the end of the World War II. The treaty signed in 1855 gave Japan ownership of the Habomai archipelago and three Kuril Islands including Iturup, Kunashir and Shikotan. However, after the World War II they became Russian. The status of these islands is declared in the Crimea (Yalta) Agreement signed on February 11, 1945, the Potsdam Declaration (1945), the San Francisco Peace Treaty signed on September 8, 1951, and article 107 of the UN Charter.
