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International News Title: With Visit, Russia Reinforces Its Custody of Islands, Angering Japan MOSCOW — President Dmitri A. Medvedev on Monday visited one of the southern Kurile Islands, which the Soviet Union seized from Japan at the end of World War II, making it clear that Russia had no plans to cede the mineral-rich territory despite Japanese demands. Mr. Medvedev is the first Russian or Soviet leader to visit the disputed Kuriles, part of an archipelago that stretches from the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula in eastern Russia to Hokkaido in the northernmost part of Japan. The four southernmost islands, called the Northern Territories by Japan, are home to only around 20,000 people, but grant access to prize fisheries and promising oil and gas fields. Mr. Medvedev told residents that Russia was prepared to invest heavily to raise living standards there. “We want people to remain here,” he said while visiting a family on Kunashir, one of the islands. “Development here is important. We will definitely be investing money here.” Japan, which warned in September that such a visit would “severely hurt ties,” objected immediately. Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara said Mr. Medvedev’s presence “injures the feelings of the population of Japan,” and he summoned Russia’s ambassador to deliver a note of protest. Soviet forces occupied the southern islands in 1945, deporting their Japanese inhabitants and bringing in settlers. In the 1956 declaration that re-established ties between Russia and Japan, Russia offered to return two of the islands as part of a peace treaty. But Japan rejected that compromise, maintaining that all the islands should be returned, and the issue has never been resolved. Russia growled back on Monday, with Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov calling Tokyo’s reaction “unacceptable.” “It is our land,” said Mr. Lavrov, who promised to summon Tokyo’s ambassador to a personal meeting in Moscow “to once again confirm our position with all clarity and lack of ambiguity.” Tokyo is already locked in a tense dispute with China over islands in the East China Sea. In September, its coast guard detained the captain of a Chinese fishing boat that had collided with two of its vessels. The arrest set off anti-Japanese protests in China, which is acutely sensitive about threats to its sovereignty. Mr. Medvedev’s visit to the disputed territory will convey a clear message domestically in a country increasingly focused on the 2012 presidential election. Mr. Medvedev is generally viewed as milder than his mentor, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, but he has taken a tough line on territorial disputes, and chose to go to war with Georgia over the breakaway enclave of South Ossetia. He is also signaling Russia’s intention to remain an Asian power with unshakeable eastern borders. Russia’s foothold in the Kuriles weakened in the 1990s, when Moscow drew down its military presence and many settlers left for the mainland. The Far East carries huge economic importance to Russia now because of its oil and gas reserves and transportation links to Asian markets, said Elgena V. Molodyakova, an expert on the region at the Russian Academy of Sciences. “For us, the Kurile problem is how to develop the region,” Ms. Molodyakova said. “For the Japanese, the Kurile problem is a territorial dispute that can agitate their society. If they take a hard line on this, they won’t accomplish anything.”
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#1. To: Brian S (#0)
Russia and China at the same time? LMFAO How you know the True Condition of the US EMpire. Japan needs to realign. And a BTW. The reason we dropped TWO nukes on Japan was because the USSR was about to come into Japan.
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