TOKYO, March 28. /TASS/. Japan has remonstrated against Russia’s military drills held in the south of the Kuril Islands, said Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono in his speech in the lower parliamentary chamber on Wednesday.
"This leads to the strengthening of the Russian army on the ‘northern territories’ (this is how Japan calls the southern part of the Kuril Islands - TASS), which is incompatible with our position on these islands," Kyodo News quoted him as saying. It notes that the protest was sent through diplomatic channels.
Pilots of the Eastern Military District fighter aviation earlier trained deployment from the Khabarovsk Region to the island of Iturup for the first time.
Moscow and Tokyo have conducted negotiations for many decades in an effort to work out a peace treaty on the results of World War II. The main obstacle to it is the southern part of the Kuril Islands: after the end of the war the archipelago was included in the Soviet Union, but Japan is claiming Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan and a group of islands which it calls Habomai. The Russian Foreign Ministry repeatedly stated that Russian sovereignty over them, which is based on corresponding international documents, is undoubtable.