29 (EUROPE PRESS)
The Russian authorities have rejected Japan’s request to exclude the Kuril Islands from the territories in which the Russian Armed Forces will hold the next military training, which will begin at the end of August.
The Russian Ministry of Defense announced on Wednesday the Vostok 2022 (East 2022) plan, a series of military exercises that will take place between August 30 and September 5 and whose objective will be to “guarantee military security” in the region. eastern part of the country.
Following this announcement, Tokyo stepped forward on Thursday and launched a diplomatic protest in which it expressed concern about future military maneuvers in the Kuriles, a small archipelago in dispute between the two countries and located between the Japanese island of Hokkaido and the Russian peninsula. of Kamchatka.
Now, in response to Japan’s request to exclude the archipelago from military exercises, the Russian ambassador in Tokyo, Mikhail Galuzin, has stressed the “need to strengthen the defense potential in the Kuril Islands area.”
“Of course, the appeals of the Japanese side (…) have been rejected by us as unfounded and meaningless,” Galuzin said in statements to the Russia24 television network and collected by the TASS news agency.
Later, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zajarova, also reacted to Japan’s protest, which she called “inappropriate”, considering that Tokyo “demands” Moscow to exclude the Kuriles.
In this sense, the spokeswoman for Russian diplomacy has stressed that the archipelago forms “an integral part of the territory of the Russian Federation” and that its Russian identity must be beyond any doubt, with which Moscow is within its right to act in they.
The archipelago is made up of a group of islands –Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan and Habomai–, inhabited by just a handful of Japanese citizens, which were occupied by Soviet troops in World War II.
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