The United States has pledged it would help Tokyo return four islands of the Kuriles belonging to Russia
The United States has pledged it would help Tokyo return four islands of the Kuriles belonging to Russia, the Kyodo Tsusin agency reports.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed during his meeting with Japanese Minister of Environment Yuriko Koike in Washington on Tuesday that "he understood Japan's position" on the four disputed islands. He promised that in the perspective, when an opportunity offers, the U.S. would throw its weight behind Japan during Russian-U.S. talks.
Yuriko Koike is in charge of the issue of delimitation with Russia.
In accordance with the USSR-Japanese declaration of 1956, the Soviet party gave its consent to hand over the islands of Habomai (standing for a group of small islands) and Shikotan of the South-Kurile string to Japan only after a peace treaty was signed. Japan demands that two other islands, Kunashir and Iturup, which were under Japan's jurisdiction since the Japanese-Russian treaty of 1875, be returned.
Russian-Japanese peace talks have been held since 1955. The stumbling block in the way of a peace treaty was the territorial dispute over the four Kurile Islands, called Northern territories in Japan, which the USSR seized after Japan's defeat in World War II in 1946. The islands along with the island of Sakhalin constitute the Sakhalin region.
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