"Vicious Circle" of Russian-Japanese Relations: Constraining Factors and Prospects for Improvement

In the mid to late 2010s, Russian-Japanese relations underwent a period of rapid growth. This was largely based on the fact that S. Abe, Prime Minister of Japan at the time, was intent on making the development of ties with Moscow one of his key political priorities, thereby hoping to solve the problems of territorial delimitation and the lack of a peace treaty between the two countries on conditions acceptable both for Moscow and Tokyo. Time has shown that his calculations were mistaken: in the early 2020s it was not possible to get closer to the conclusion of a peace treaty, as well as to maintain the pace of development of relations at the same level. Due to this, S. Abe’s successors, Y. Suga and F. Kishida, showed much less interest in developing ties with Moscow. The reasons for this failure were not limited to the incompatibility of the parties’ positions on the territorial delimitation issue, but rather included structural factors of economic and international-political nature. In this sense, the Ukrainian crisis of 2022, which, at the time this article is being finalized, seems to have caused a collapse of Russia’s relations with the countries of the collective West and with Japan and has become the final stage of a long process of deterioration of bilateral relation