Japan vows to respond to Russian missile deployment to disputed islands
By Marc Bennetts
Telegraph.co.uk
23 NOVEMBER 2016
Japan has vowed to respond to Russia’s “significant” deployment of anti-ship missiles to disputed islands in the Pacific Ocean.
It comes as it emerged Russia is also planning to relaunch “nuclear trains,” a railroad-based weapons system that was used by the Soviet Union during the late 1980s.
Russia’s armed forces said this week that its state-of-the-art Bastion and Bal anti-ship missile systems had been put into operation on the Kuril islands, a desolate archipelago which was seized by the Soviet military at the end of the Second World War.
The seven-decade dispute over ownership of the islands has prevented Moscow and Tokyo from signing a peace treaty to formally end wartime hostilities.
“We consider this [development] to have serious significance, and will respond in an appropriate manner, after studying the details,” Fumio Kishida, the Japanese foreign minister, said on Wednesday.
But Mr Kishida also said that he hoped to make progress on concluding a peace deal with Moscow during a visit by Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader, to Japan in December.
Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, said this year that the lack of a peace treaty was “abnormal.”
Formidable obstacles remain in the path of any peace deal to the long-running dispute. Tokyo insists that sovereignty of the islands, known as the Northern Territories in Japan, must be resolved before a peace treaty can be concluded, while Moscow says the two issues are separate and that it occupied the islands legitimately in 1945.
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