When it comes to claiming territory they want, modern-day Russian tacticians don't hesitate to put boots on the ground—or submarines on the ocean floor.
A handful of territorial claims being made by China in various ocean hotspots have not been lost on Russian president Dmitri Medvedev. Over the weekend, Medvedev dropped in on one of the Kuril Islands. The Kurils sit off the coast of northern Japan. Russia seized the islands from the Japanese at the end of World War II and still claim them.
Why the superpower fuss over four remote volcanic specks dotted south of the Kamchatka Peninsula, a region Russia pretty much ignores? Why else: Fisheries, significant mineral deposits (gold and silver) and potential access to rich oil and gas fields.
If a new Cold War is to center around who owns what in the world’s ocean, the Kurils could be a kind of ground zero.
The history of the conflict goes back to 1945, when Soviet forces seized the four islands, deported the Japanese people living on them and moved in Soviet settlers. In Russia, the islands—currently home to 19,000—are known as the Kurils; the Japanese call them the Northern Territories.
In 1956, trying to make peace, Russia offered the Japanese two of the islands, a deal the Japanese refused, insisting on all or nothing. Due to the continuing Kuril squabble, the two countries—which were openly at war over maritime issues from February 1904 to September 1905—have not signed a formal peace agreement in 65 years.
High diplomatic barking took place soon after photographs of Medvedev playing tourist on Kunashire Island—the first time a Russian president has visited the disputed islands—circulated around the globe. Medvedev had gone thousands of miles out of his way after a two-day state visit to Vietnam to make a four-hour Kuril stop. While there, the president took photos and tasted caviar-smeared bread at a plant that processes 110 tons of fish a day.
The president’s presence “injures the feelings of the population of Japan,” declared Japan’s foreign office; Russia’s foreign minister barked back that the reaction from Tokyo was “unacceptable.”
“It is our land,” he said. Both countries withdrew ambassadors in a huff.
The dispute overlaps with Japan and China's recent spat over territorial claims in the East China Sea's Diaoyu Islands. A Chinese scientist, Li Wen, told the Chinese-based Global Times on Monday that the international community needs to be on “high alert” given Japan’s “increasing aggressiveness in territorial issues.”
But Medvedev's presidential visit to the Kurils is hardly the most robust territorial muscle flexing the Russians have displayed in recent years.
In the summer of 2007, in an effort to claim rights to much of the Arctic Ocean, Russia sent two mini submarines, each carrying a three-man crew, more than two and a half miles below the ice to the ocean floor directly beneath the North Pole. The subs planted a Russian flag on the ocean bottom and claimed it as Russian soil.
The risky effort was made to bolster a claim that Russian territory includes the Lomonosov Ridge, an underwater shelf that runs beneath much of the Arctic Ocean.
Ownership of Arctic waters comes with rights to nearly one-quarter of the planet’s remaining untapped oil and gas reserves.
Currently, no country has exclusive jurisdiction over the Arctic. Canada, Denmark, Norway, the United States and Russia each control a 200-mile economic zone beyond their shores. Bolstering the notion of a new Cold War brewing, Russia has been trying since 2001 to claim the entire Arctic territory as its own.
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