Moscow -
A new crisis began to emerge between Moscow and Tokyo, after the Japanese government approved 3 documents on defense and security in the country, in which it defined the main directions of foreign policy in the field of national defense.
The change in the listed documents means raising Japan's military spending to 2% of GDP by 2027, as $64.8 billion has been allocated to the defense budget until the aforementioned year, about twice the current amount, $39 billion.
This brings defense spending to about $318 billion.
This is the largest five-year plan to enhance Japan's military capabilities since World War II, thus becoming the third Japanese defense budget in the world after the United States and China.
Tokyo's initiation of an unprecedented build-up of its military power was only "inevitably raising new security challenges in the Asia-Pacific region," according to the Russian Foreign Ministry.
In a comment on the matter, the ministry indicated that Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida abandons the country's peaceful development strategy, announced by previous generations of politicians, and returns "to the bars of unbridled militarism."
The level of Russian apprehension was not mitigated by the Japanese Foreign Ministry's response that Japan will remain a peace-loving country and will not pose a threat to other countries.
old crisis
This comes at the height of tension in relations between the two countries, after Japan joined the Western sanctions imposed on Russia.
These relations are already tense for many reasons, the most prominent and oldest of which is the dispute over the Kuril Islands.
The Kuril Islands (according to the Russian designation, while Japan calls them the northern regions) has long been the subject of a long-term dispute between Russia and Japan, and a major stumbling block in the matter of concluding a peace treaty between the two countries, since the end of World War II to the present day.
The Kuril Archipelago is a chain of islands between Kamchatka, Russia and Hokkaido, Japan.
Initially, it was inhabited by the Ainu tribes, and the first information about the Kuril Islands was obtained by the Japanese during an expedition in 1635-1637.
In 1643, the islands were discovered by the Dutch, led by Martin de Vries, before the first Russian expedition reached them in 1697. By decree of Catherine II in 1786, the Kuril Archipelago was included in the Russian Empire.
In 1855, Japan and Russia signed a treaty under which Iturup, Kunashir, and the islands of the Lesser Kuril Mountain Range were ceded to Japan, and the northern part of the Kuril Islands remained under Russian control.
Sakhalin was declared joint ownership and "undivided" land.
However, "dual control" over Sakhalin led to conflicts between Russian and Japanese merchants and sailors, and it was only resolved in 1875 with the signing of the Treaty of St. Petersburg on the exchange of lands.
Accordingly, Russia transferred all the Kuril Islands to Japan, and the latter renounced its claims to Sakhalin.
legacy of war
In the final phase of the war in Europe, the leaders of the Allied Powers (anti-Nazi leader Adolf Hitler) at the Yalta Conference formulated a joint plan for war with Japan.
Then it was decided that after the defeat of the imperial army, all the islands of the Kuril Range would go to the USSR (the Crimean Agreement between the three great powers in the Far East adopted on February 11, 1945).
On April 5, 1945, the Soviet Union announced the cancellation of the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact (it was to remain in effect until April 1946).
In August of the same year, the Soviet army launched a military campaign in the Far East, part of which was the Kuril Landing Operation, which ended with the recovery of all the islands.
After losing the war and declaring surrender, Japan accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration of July 26, 1945, and Japanese sovereignty was limited to the islands of Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku, and Hokkaido, in addition to the smaller islands in the Japanese archipelago (as decided by the Allies).
All of the Kuril Islands were included in the Soviet Union and most of the Japanese population was deported to Hokkaido.
Since then, during the Cold War, Moscow has not officially recognized the existence of territorial disputes with Tokyo, while the latter adhered to the "principle of inseparability between politics and economics", which assumed that Japan would not carry out large-scale trade and economic cooperation with the Soviet Union before it obtained Concessions in the dispute over the islands.
The recognition of the existence of the problem did not come until April 1991, during a visit to Japan by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
The positions of the parties
Russia always says that the Kuril Islands became part of the Soviet Union (whose successor Russia became) after the results of World War II, and that there is no doubt about Russian sovereignty over them, which was formulated through an international agreement.
At the same time, the Russian side recognizes the joint declaration of 1956, while Japan claims all the islands and links the decision to recognize Japanese sovereignty over these lands to the signing of a peace treaty, as Tokyo relies on the Shimoda Treaty signed between the two countries in 1855.
New crisis
And with Tokyo's decision to raise military spending to an unprecedented ceiling, relations with Russia enter a dangerous turn, and the most dangerous thing in it, according to Russian experts, is that it comes in the context of Japan's transformation into a basis for forming a new military alliance against Moscow.
Political analyst Oleg Bondarenko sees the increase in the Japanese defense budget as a threat to Russia, although this country is not preparing any offensive actions against its neighbors.
And he explains, in an interview with Al-Jazeera Net, that Russia nevertheless senses a danger due to the location of Japanese lands near it.
Accordingly, the deployment of new military installations - including radar stations for missile attack warning systems near the Kuril Islands - is likely to include the coverage area of these systems for all areas of the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan, which represents a threat to the Russian fleet in the Pacific Ocean.
theoretical threat?
The Russian expert points out that the accumulation of Japan's military capabilities, and even the theoretical possibility of using any type of high-tech weapons, naturally poses a threat to Russia.
But according to Oleg Bondarenko, Japan is obliged to take into account the situation in the region in its actions, in particular with regard to the escalation over Taiwan, North Korea's missile programs, as well as its territorial disputes with its neighbors, for example with China over the issue of mining in disputed waters.
For his part, international affairs researcher Dmitry Kim rules out the existence of a relationship between Japan's decision and the Ukrainian crisis, but warns of the danger of attracting Tokyo in the future to a multilateral military alliance, even if it is not formalized.
Kim says, "The Japanese have always been telling their people for a long time that the issue of the Kuril Islands is about to be resolved, but it seems that they have realized that this is impossible," and therefore decided to change its position and tell its residents that the islands would not be returned, and at the same time, it decided to consider the Russian presence "an illegal occupation legal", although legally this very formulation is not convincing, because the regulations regarding the Kurils still exist, and Japanese diplomats know them well.
He adds that the change in discourse is important for the Japanese street, and it is also directed at the United States and the Western world in general, which requires Japan to talk about "occupation", in order to portray Russia as the aggressor.
In addition to confirming the existence of US pressure that prompted Japan to raise military spending, Kim adds to the role played by the adoption of amendments to the Russian constitution recently, which prevent any territorial concessions, which leads to questioning the possibility of discussing the Kuril file, which Japan always insists on.