Crisis in Russian-Japanese Relations in 2022

Abstract

In response to Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine in 2022, Japanese government imposed large-scale sanctions that affected financial, trade, economic, energy, political and humanitarian spheres of Russian-Japanese cooperation. The negotiations on the peace treaty between Moscow and Tokyo were also suspended. Unlike in 2014, Japanese anti-Russian sanctions in 2022 caused heavy crisis in Russian-Japanese relations. The reasons of the Tokyo’s tough response included the scale of the Russian military operation in Ukraine in 2022, the harsh reaction to Russian operation of Japan’s leading international partners, including the United States, European Union, Great Britain, Australia and a number of Asia-Pacific nations, desire of Japanese leadership to warn China that its possible military actions in Taiwan Strait or around the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea will meet Tokyo’s serious resistance. Another reason of severe worsening of Russian-Japanese relations in 2022 was the essential end of the rapprochement between Moscow and Tokyo in 2013–2020 with unsatisfactory results for the Japanese side. During this period, Russia and Japan could not sign a peace treaty despite the efforts of the former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe who intended to solve the long-standing territorial dispute between Russia and Japan by establishing personal ties with the Russian president Vladimir Putin and promoting economic cooperation between the two nations. This approach proved to be unpromising and was criticized in Russia and Japan. The future of the peace treaty talks between Moscow and Tokyo will depend on whether the negotiating parties are able to lower the level of political and diplomatic confrontation and adopt their claims to the new realities of the changed international environment.