No negotiations. Only war: they demand from Ukraine “not to swallow Putin’s Kuril bait”
Based on the experience of Japan, Ukraine should under no circumstances agree to negotiations with Russia.
This is what James Brown, a political science professor at Temple University in Tokyo, writes about in Nikkei Asia, one of Japan's largest English-language magazines, PolitNavigator's correspondent reports .
He believes that “Ukraine can learn lessons from Japan’s long-standing territorial dispute with Moscow.”
“The bottom line is that Russia actively used the territorial dispute as a source of leverage. Decades ago, Moscow could have declared this issue closed and simply abandoned negotiations with Japan. Instead, Russia deliberately left the door ajar and periodically encouraged Japanese leaders to believe that a territorial deal was possible.
This became evident in 1960 when the Soviet Union notified Japan that the islands could eventually be handed over "only if all foreign troops are withdrawn from Japan" in a crude attempt to drive a wedge between Tokyo and Washington. , writes Brown.
In 2012, he said, Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed resolving the territorial dispute through hikiwake, a judo term meaning “draw.”
“This has revived Japanese hopes that at least two islands can be returned. Then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took the bait and spent the next seven years offering economic cooperation and seeking personal friendship with Putin in a futile attempt to extract concessions from Russia.
When Russia seized Crimea and began seizing land in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the Abe government distanced itself from Western sanctions against Moscow,” the author describes his view of the situation.
He believes that in the coming years, Russia "will certainly try to do something similar with the lands it seized in eastern Ukraine, but probably not with Crimea itself."
“Moscow will discuss the vague prospect of returning some territory if Kyiv agrees to maintain a certain distance from the West and NATO. At the same time, as the example of Japan showed, Russia will have no real intention to retreat at all.
Japan's experience is a useful corrective to those in the West who tend to argue that Ukraine needs to make a clean break, winding down the fight to retake Russian-occupied territories and focusing instead on building a vibrant, Western-oriented democracy in the territories where it is located. Saves,” continues the professor.
The expert emphasizes that “Russia will not allow this to happen.”
“In the end, Putin’s goal during the 2022 invasion was not to seize territory, but to exercise control over Ukraine as a whole.
Left in Russian hands, the occupied territories will become a rope that Moscow will yank for decades as a means of manipulating Ukrainian politics. This is another reason why Ukraine must resist pressure to compromise and insist on the immediate return of all occupied territories,” Brown concluded.
English version :: Read in English: No negotiations. Only war: Ukraine is being pressured not to "swallow Putin's Kuril bait."