YUZHNO-SAKHALINSK, August 13. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin, during a trip to the Sakhalin region, visited the Kuril island of Iturup.

TASS has compiled the key information available at this time.

About the visit

- Putin, during a trip to the Sakhalin region, visited the Kuril island of Iturup.

- The president personally visited the Kuril Islands for the first time, TASS reported.

- Prior to this, the heads of the Russian state and government had visited the Kurils five times altogether.

- Dmitry Medvedev made four trips: in 2010 as president, and in 2012, 2015 and 2019 as prime minister.

- In 2021, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin visited Iturup.

- As seen in video footage from the Kremlin press service, Putin visited the Yasny fish processing plant.

- The head of state, during his working trip to Iturup, also visited the secondary school named after Hero of Russia Eduard Norpolov.

- He inspected the gymnasium and classrooms, the school museum, and spoke with students.

- In addition, Putin spontaneously spoke with residents of Iturup.

- People gathered near the school named after Hero of Russia Eduard Norpolov, which the head of state had visited.

- The president also held a working meeting with Sakhalin Region Governor Valery Limarenko.

Japan's reaction

- Japan has expressed a "decisive protest" to Russia over Putin's visit to the Kuril island of Iturup, according to a statement from the head of the Japanese Foreign Ministry.

- The ministry also asserted that all the "northern territories," as Tokyo refers to the southern part of the Kuril Islands, including Iturup, are "inherently [Japanese] territory from both historical and legal points of view."

- Information about Putin's visit to Iturup quickly became one of the top trends in the Japanese segment of social network X, which is extremely popular in Japan, within just a few minutes.

- As a TASS correspondent calculated, in the first half hour, users of this social network posted more than 2,000 messages on this topic, making it a trending leader.

About the Kurils

- Moscow and Tokyo have been conducting negotiations since the middle of the last century with the aim of concluding a peace agreement following World War II.

- The main obstacle to this remains disagreements over rights to the southern part of the Kurils.

- After the end of the war, the entire archipelago was incorporated into the Soviet Union, but Japan disputes the ownership of Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan and a group of small uninhabited islands.

- The Russian Foreign Ministry has repeatedly emphasized that Russia's sovereignty over these territories, which has the appropriate international legal basis, is beyond doubt.