Lavrov Tells Japan to Drop “Unfriendly Course” at Atlanta G20 Talks
The ministry said the encounter took place on the sidelines of a G20 foreign ministers’ meeting at the request of the Japanese side.
Moscow made clear that restoring full interstate dialogue hinges on Tokyo abandoning its “unfriendly course,” the statement said.
The meeting follows remarks on Oct. 19 by Japanese government spokesperson Minoru Kihara, who said Tokyo vowed to pursue “necessary communication” with Russia despite a “difficult state” of bilateral relations over a group of disputed islets.
Ties between the two countries have deteriorated sharply since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, as Japan joined its Western allies in imposing sanctions on Moscow.
The rift runs deeper than the current war. The two nations normalized relations under a 1956 accord after World War II, but they remain locked in a decades-old territorial dispute over a cluster of islands off Japan’s Hokkaido Island, including Shikotan and the Habomai group. Tokyo calls them the Northern Territories, while Moscow knows them as the Southern Kurils.
Japan maintains that the then-USSR illegally seized the islands soon after Tokyo’s surrender in 1945. Russia counters that the seizure was legitimate.
The standoff has blocked a peace treaty since the end of World War II, and tensions have intensified in recent years as Japan’s sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine war have taken hold.
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