The Kuril Islands are a volcanic island chain running from Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula to Japan's Hokkaido. Moscow controls the chain, including the four southernmost islands that Japan refers to as the Northern Territories.
A day prior, aboard a warship taking part in military drills, the Russian president stated that the Kuril Islands' status "is enshrined in international documents as a reality stemming from the outcomes of World War II (WWII)."
The timing of the visit is clearly not accidental; it links historical context to present-day military-political realities. On the historical side, the presidential trip to Iturup came just ahead of August 15, the date Japan surrendered to the Allied powers in 1945.
In contemporary terms, Putin's trip to Iturup followed a string of Japanese military activities. Nine days before the event, Tokyo released its new National Defense White Paper, which framed Russia-China-Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) interactions as a factor reshaping the regional security environment. The Russian president criticized the white paper for denoting Moscow as one of Tokyo's main threats.
Two weeks prior to the visit, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force carried out its first live-fire test of the American Tomahawk cruise missile in the Pacific Ocean, a move that was strongly condemned by its Northeast Asian neighbors.
In other words, reducing Putin's journey to the islands merely to a head-of-state tour of a remote outpost, or just another episode in the Russian-Japanese territorial dispute, would be an over-simplification. The disputed islands bring together a long-running territorial quarrel, clashing interpretations of WWII outcomes, competing economic interests, geopolitical frictions and the fast-transforming security architecture of the Asia Pacific at large.
More than just islands
Iturup is the biggest of the Southern Kuril Islands claimed by Japan. The disputed group also includes Kunashir, Shikotan and the Habomai islets. Yet the disputed islands represent far more than mere land territory: They embody economic stakes, geopolitical leverage and military strategic security.
The economic weight of the islands can hardly be overstated. Adjacent waters host one of the Russian Far East's most productive fishing grounds. In 2023, the allowable catch of Japanese sardine, Alaska Pollock and cod within the southern Kuril fishing zone exceeded 1 million tons. To put this in perspective: Spain's entire fishing fleet landed only 700,000 tons that same year. The Southern Kurils also hold substantial natural resource reserves. Gold-silver deposits have been prospected on Kunashir; Iturup hosts a unique rhenium deposit—a rare metal critical for aircraft manufacturing.
Nevertheless, the islands derive greater value from their military strategic position. The island chain separates the Sea of Okhotsk from the Pacific Ocean, forming an outer defensive perimeter. It is no coincidence that Japan's Ministry of Defense treats the Southern Kurils as a component of Russia's "bastion strategy," a set of measures meant to restrict foreign military force access into the Sea of Okhotsk.
Compromise to deterrence
The dispute over the islands stretches back decades. In the second half of the 2010s, Moscow and Tokyo sought compromise over the contested territories. In 2016, the two governments discussed a "special regime" for joint economic activity on the islands; in 2018, they explored prospects for concluding a peace treaty. From 2022 onward, however, dispute settlement suffered a sharp reversal. Tokyo joined sanctions against Russia, prompting Moscow to suspend peace treaty talks and joint island economy consultations. That same year Japan enshrined legal capacity for retaliatory long-range strikes against adversary territory. By 2025, Tokyo had doubled its defense spending, breaching the symbolic 2-percent-of-GDP threshold.
Japan's rearmament fits within a much broader Asia-Pacific military cooperation framework. In 2023, the U.S., Japan and the Republic of Korea launched a realtime DPRK missile warning data sharing mechanism and adopted multi-year joint maneuver plans. In 2024, the three states signed the Memorandum on Trilateral Security Cooperation. Though short of a full-fledged military alliance, this framework far surpasses the scope of cooperation seen a decade ago. The landmark Tomahawk missile launch from a Japanese destroyer in late July epitomized this military rapprochement, marking Tokyo's practical operational adoption of American-built offensive armaments.
For its part, Moscow has consistently strengthened its military footprint across the Kurils. On the Japan-disputed islands, Russia has deployed missile complexes, fighter jets, tanks and other armored hardware. Notably, Putin's Iturup visit, first announced back in 2024, materialized precisely at this juncture: amid Japan's defense policy overhaul, accelerated rearmament and that historic first Tomahawk live-fire test.
Russian moves do not unfold in an international vacuum. Since 2024, Russia holds a treaty-bound mutual military assistance obligation with the DPRK. Pyongyang, around whose posture Tokyo builds much of its own defense strategy, has been sticking to comparable mutual aid commitments with Beijing dating back to 1961. Russia and China, while not forming a military alliance, maintain their regular military cooperation. Barely one month before Putin's Kuril trip, Russian and Chinese warships transited Friz Strait near Iturup. The Japanese military factor figures openly within Moscow-Beijing political dialogue. In late July, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told his Russian counterpart that China and Russia must "uphold the outcomes of WWII and never allow Japan's remilitarization."
As a result, the Asia Pacific is seeing the formation, if not of formal military blocs, then of two increasingly distinct security systems built around mutual deterrence.
The Southern Kurils emerge as one of the key contact points between these two systems. Iturup today means far more than just another island contested by Japan. Old-standing history directly intersects with the Asia Pacific's new security order realities.
The harder sanctions grow, the louder mutual recriminations ring out. And the more tightly deterrence-oriented military systems consolidate, the higher the cost of miscalculation in a conflict that for decades played out mostly in the diplomatic realm. BR
