Original — Yalta Agreement, 11 February 1945
Public domain (Russian MFA Foreign Policy Archive; official state document, not copyrightable under Art. 1259 of the Russian Civil Code) · full text
The documentary evidence behind both official narratives, with the accessibility of each original noted. Every source carries the other side's rebuttal. This document endorses neither claim.
VOTE Which story do you find more convincing? Naming rule This edition carries both names and leads with Southern Kuril Islands — the form most English-language reference works use, and also the English rendering of Russia’s name, which already places the islands inside the chain Japan renounced at San Francisco. Northern Territories asserts the opposite. There is no neutral name for this ground in any of the three languages: Южные Курилы leads in the Russian edition and 北方領土 in the Japanese, and each of those, like this one, is a rule about the edition’s language rather than a finding on title · The order of the two narrative sections below is randomized on every visitRussia conducted a missile test near the islands.
Moscow summoned Japan's ambassador over Tokyo's protests; Deputy Foreign Minister Galuzin said Russian sovereignty was "not in question."
US Ambassador George Glass restated American recognition of Japanese sovereignty over the Northern Territories. China's foreign ministry urged Japan not to dispute the outcomes of the Second World War.
Putin visited Iturup — the first visit by a Russian or Soviet head of state to the disputed islands. Japan summoned the Russian ambassador and Foreign Minister Motegi lodged a formal protest.
Peskov: "There is no dialogue, and it is impossible to discuss the issue of a peace treaty without dialogue."
Prime Minister Takaichi attended the Northern Territories Day rally in person, 80 years on, and pressed again for the resumption of grave visits.
Takaichi told parliament that resolving the territorial issue and concluding a peace treaty remains Japanese policy; the Kremlin responded that it too supports a treaty but that dialogue is "reduced virtually to zero."
Russia suspended the right of innocent passage around all four islands for a week; Japan protested.
Citing Japan's participation in sanctions over Ukraine, Russia terminated peace treaty negotiations and the visa-free exchange and grave-visit programmes. Japan called the step "completely unacceptable." Grave visits remain suspended.
⇄ The order of the two narrative sections below is randomized on every visit — this dossier takes no side, not even in sequence.
Priority of survey, then the wartime settlement: the Allies promised the chain at Yalta, Japan accepted whatever the Allies determined, the occupying authority severed the islands from Japan by name, and Japan renounced them by treaty without reservation — as its own Foreign Ministry told the Diet at the time.
Russian expeditions under Martyn Spanberg and Walton surveyed and charted the chain in 1738–39, and successive Russian charts from 1755 onward mapped it. Russia holds that its presence in the islands predates any Japanese administration of them.
Signed by Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill as the price of Soviet entry into the Pacific war within two to three months of Germany's surrender. The text uses "handed over" for the Kurils and "returned" for southern Sakhalin, which Russia had held until the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905. It names no islands individually.
Japan accepted the Potsdam terms in the Instrument of Surrender signed aboard the USS Missouri. Russia reads "such minor islands as we determine" as a grant of authority to the Allies collectively — authority they had already exercised at Yalta.
The Allied directive "Governmental and Administrative Separation of Certain Outlying Areas from Japan" defined Japan so as to exclude all four by name. Four days later the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet created Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk Oblast covering southern Sakhalin and the Kurils, and nationalised all land, minerals, forests and waters there retroactive to 20 September 1945.
Japan renounced the Kurils without reservation and without naming an exception. Russia's decisive supporting evidence is Japanese, not Russian: on 19 October 1951, during ratification hearings, Nishimura Kumao — Director of the Treaties Bureau of Japan's own Foreign Ministry — told the Special Diet Committee that the treaty's "Chishima Rettō" comprised both the Northern and the Southern Chishima, that is, it included Kunashiri and Etorofu.
Art. 9 records that the USSR, "desiring to meet the wishes of Japan and taking into consideration the interests of the Japanese State, agrees to transfer to Japan the Habomai Islands and the island of Shikotan, the actual transfer of these islands to Japan to take place after the conclusion of a Peace Treaty." The Russian verb is передать, never возвратить. Etorofu and Kunashiri are not mentioned. The USSR expressly refused Japanese wording about a "territorial issue" precisely to foreclose reading in further claims.
Two peaceful nineteenth-century treaties fixed the border and defined what "Kuril Islands" meant; the Allies disclaimed territorial gain; the islands were taken after the surrender in breach of a pact still running; and the instrument Russia relies on is one the USSR refused to sign.
日露和親条約 / Симодский трактат, signed by Putyatin for Russia. Art. 2: "Henceforth the boundary between Russia and Japan shall pass between the islands of Iturup and Urup. The whole island of Iturup belongs to Japan, and the whole island of Urup and the other Kuril Islands to the north constitute a possession of Russia." The first Russo-Japanese border, drawn in peacetime with no war and no coercion. All four islands fall on the Japanese side by the treaty's own terms.
樺太・千島交換条約, signed by Gorchakov and Enomoto Takeaki. Japan ceded all of Sakhalin; Russia ceded the Kurils. The treaty then enumerates the eighteen islands transferred — from Shumshu in the north down to Urup, and no further. The authentic text is French; the Japanese text renders the ceded group as クリル群島 (Kuriru guntō), not 千島列島 (Chishima rettō).
Cairo, which Potsdam Art. 8 expressly incorporates, disclaims any Allied territorial ambition and limits Japan's expulsion to territories "taken by violence and greed." Japan argues that formula cannot describe islands acquired by the peaceful negotiated treaties of 1855 and 1875.
The USSR denounced the 1941 Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact on 5 April 1945 while telling Tokyo it would remain in force a further twelve months, then declared war in August. The Kuril landing operation began 18 August, after Japan's capitulation broadcast. Kunashir and Shikotan were assaulted on 1 September. The five Habomai islets were taken on 4 September — two days after the Instrument of Surrender was signed. Japan's official figure is that 17,291 residents were expelled between 1945 and 1949.
Signed by Prime Minister Hosokawa and President Yeltsin. The Declaration names all four islands as the subject of the negotiations and commits both governments to conclude a peace treaty by resolving their attribution, on the basis of historical and legal facts and of the principle of law and justice. It followed Gorbachev’s April 1991 communiqué, which had first listed the four in a joint document.
Prime Minister Yoshida said this to the San Francisco conference the day before signing the treaty. It states Japan’s separate and stronger track on two of the four islands: Habomai and Shikotan are not Kurils on any reading — they are an extension of Hokkaidō — so Art. 2(c) never reached them whatever “Kurile Islands” means.
Where the two sides read the very same document in opposite ways — pick a reading and watch the highlighter move. The initial selection is random.
Japan renounces all right, title and claim to the Kurile Islands, and to that portion of Sakhalin and the islands adjacent to it over which Japan acquired sovereignty as a consequence of the Treaty of Portsmouth of 5 September 1905.
Unqualified. No exception, no carve-out, no islands named. If the drafters had meant to exclude four inhabited islands they would have said so — they knew how to qualify, because they qualified the Sakhalin clause in the very same sentence. And Japan's own Treaties Bureau chief told the Diet six weeks later that it included the south.
The whole article is about undoing the gains of the 1904–05 war — and the four islands were not such gains; they were Japanese from 1855, before Portsmouth existed. No transferee is named anywhere in the article, and the USSR never signed the treaty at all.
The existence and wording of Art. 2(c) are entirely undisputed. Everything turns on a five-word noun phrase, and on whether a renunciation without a transferee can vest title in an occupant.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, desiring to meet the wishes of Japan and taking into consideration the interests of the Japanese State, agrees to transfer to Japan the Habomai Islands and the island of Shikotan, the actual transfer of these islands to Japan to take place after the conclusion of a Peace Treaty. … The USSR and Japan agree to continue negotiations for the conclusion of a Peace Treaty.
A ceiling. The verb is передать — to hand over — never возвратить, to return. "Desiring to meet the wishes of Japan" marks a voluntary concession by a sovereign owner, conditioned on a treaty that was never concluded. Two islands named; two not. And since 2020 even that is constitutionally difficult.
A floor. Read together with the same article's obligation to continue negotiating a peace treaty, the clause presupposes unfinished business: it settles two islands and leaves the rest to the negotiation it mandates. Russia then breached it in January 1960 by adding a condition to a ratified treaty.
This is the four-versus-two gap, and each side frames it as the other's bad faith. Japan's account: the text is silent on Etorofu and Kunashiri because they were left to the negotiation, not conceded. Russia's account: two was the offer, and Japan escalated to four under American pressure after Moscow had already agreed. Both accounts are internally coherent — two readings of one silence.
le groupe des Îles dites Kouriles qu’Elle possède actuellement … 1. Shumshu · 2. Alaid · 3. Paramushir … 16. Ketoi · 17. Simushir · 18. Urup
"Which she presently possesses" is a restrictive clause about what Russia happened to hold in 1875 — not a definition of the geographic extent of the Kuril chain. An 1875 bilateral exchange cannot fix the meaning of a word in an unrelated 1951 multilateral treaty drafted in English by American lawyers.
The enumeration settles it. The parties wrote down the eighteen islands being transferred, from Shumshu to Urup — and stopped. Etorofu and Kunashiri are absent because Russia could not cede what it had not held since 1855. That is the parties' own definition of "Kuril Islands," recorded in the authentic French text.
Both sides accept the treaty and its enumeration. The dispute is whether a definition agreed between two states in 1875 travels into a multilateral treaty seventy-six years later.
Finding: the neutral legal literature on this dispute is unusually hard to reach — the Max Planck Encyclopedia entry, the Durham IBRU briefing and the main Russian scholarly review are all paywalled or blocked. What follows is what could be verified, with each source's limits stated.
Washington has explicitly backed the Japanese claim since 1956. Ambassador George Glass restated it on 14 August 2026, the day after Putin's visit to Iturup: "The United States remains unwavering in its support of its most important ally and in its recognition of Japanese sovereignty over the Northern Territories." The Russian Foreign Ministry called the statement encouragement of "Japanese revanchism and revisionism."
The JCP rejects its own government's central argument — it accepts that Kunashiri and Etorofu are Kuril Islands, and cites the 1951 Nishimura testimony against the Foreign Ministry. It simultaneously calls Yalta "a gross injustice and a flagrant violation of the non-expansion principle," holds that Art. 2(c) itself violated that principle and should be abrogated, and proposes a two-stage settlement: Habomai and Shikotan by a friendship treaty, then the whole Chishima chain by a peace treaty.
Clark argues that the Nishimura testimony was not an error, that Japan escalated from two islands to four in 1955–56 under American pressure, and reports a warning from Dulles that if Japan dropped its claim to Etorofu and Kunashiri the United States might retain Okinawa permanently. He also notes that Tokyo has withheld the Yoshida-era protest documents from release.
Amendments approved by nationwide vote prohibit actions "directed towards the alienation of part of the territory of the Russian Federation, and also calls for such actions," with a carve-out for delimitation, demarcation and redemarcation. Criminal Code Art. 280.2, introduced by Federal Law No. 425-FZ of 8 December 2020, attaches six to ten years' imprisonment. RUSI's assessment is that the delimitation carve-out — which Japan initially read as a route permitting a "border demarcation" framing — is not usable in the present political climate.
🇯🇵 The Japanese Cabinet Office runs hoppou.go.jp, the source of the official occupation chronology and the 17,291 expulsion figure, alongside the Cabinet Secretariat's territorial-affairs site. 🇷🇺 Russia publishes no equivalent dedicated portal; its position is stated through Foreign Ministry statements and the standing formula that the islands' status is settled by the outcomes of the Second World War and "enshrined in international documents."
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Method and limits. Compiled 2026-08-24 from a three-track research pass (Russian grounds / Japanese grounds / third parties), with every URL verified live. Two structural cautions specific to this dispute. First, the neutral legal literature is largely unreachable: the Max Planck Encyclopedia entry, Durham's IBRU Boundary & Territory Briefing and the main Russian scholarly review all returned paywalls or blocks, so this dossier leans on primary instruments and on partisan sources read against each other. Second, Japan's four islands and Russia's two ridges are different partitions of the same rocks — "Habomai" and Малая Курильская гряда are not a translation pair, since the Russian Lesser Kuril Ridge includes Shikotan while the Japanese 歯舞群島 excludes it. Any bilingual map must choose, and the choice is already an argument. Badges follow the two grades defined in the editorial principles: original published = images or full text publicly available; copies published / diplomatic record = transmitted otherwise. Where a fact could not be verified it is labelled as such rather than omitted.
Editorial principles. ① Name order follows the language edition: Южные Курилы leads in Russian, 北方領土 in Japanese; this English edition leads with the form reference works use, which is also the English of Russia’s name — there is no neutral name here. ② The order of the two narrative sections is randomized on every visit. ③ Every dispute is labelled with its de facto controller, and every source carries the other side's rebuttal.
Original — Yalta Agreement, 11 February 1945
Public domain (Russian MFA Foreign Policy Archive; official state document, not copyrightable under Art. 1259 of the Russian Civil Code) · full text
SCAPIN 677, 29 January 1946 — the directive map
Public domain (SCAP, 1946) · Art. 6 of the same directive states it is not an expression of Allied policy on ultimate determination
Yoshida signs the San Francisco Peace Treaty, 8 September 1951
Public domain (published before 1958, not URAA-restored) · Nishimura Kumao's Diet testimony on the meaning of "Chishima" followed six weeks later
Treaty of Shimoda, 7 February 1855 — Russian title page
Public domain (PD-old-70) · the manuscript copy at the National Diet Library is at DOI 10.11501/11125297
Etorofu, 1933 — residents before the deportations
Public domain · Japan’s official figure is that 17,291 residents were expelled between 1945 and 1949