Moscow has not been negotiating a peace treaty with Japan on Tokyo’s terms, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Sunday in an interview to Vietnam’s national broadcaster Vietnam Television (VTV), China’s CCTV and Phoenix TV, TASS reports.
According to Russia’s top diplomat, solving such complicated tasks requires not only creating a proper atmosphere, but also filling economic, political and diplomatic relations with practical contents.
"If we take a look at the real situation, [Japanese Prime Minister] Shinzo Abe, tells the parliament that he plans to solve the peace treaty issue on Japan’s terms. Frankly, I have no idea of where this opinion of his comes from," he said.
"Neither Russian President Vladimir Putin, nor me, nor anyone else taking part in Russian-Japanese consultations has ever given our Japanese colleagues grounds for such statements," Lavrov continued. "The fact that on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Singapore Putin and Abe spoke of the need to speed up the work on a peace treaty on the basis of the 1956 declaration, testifies to the opposite: we are negotiating not on Japan’s terms, but on terms of this document."
Lavrov said that in order for the peace treaty to be signed, Japan must recognize the results of World War II in their entirety, including Russia’s sovereignty over all islands of the Kuril Archipelago including the four islands of the Lesser Kuril Chain.
"It is weird enough that our Japanese colleagues are not willing to accept the results of World War II the way they are sealed by the UN Charter. It says that everything done by the victorious powers is out of discussion," he said. "Even if the Japanese have their own interpretation of the San Francisco Peace Treaty and other documents related to this region, they had nevertheless ratified the UN charter, and it would be incorrect to withdraw their ratification now."
