FACTBOX: Putin personally visits Kuril Islands for first time

YUZHNO-SAKHALINSK, August 13. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin, during a trip to the Sakhalin region, visited the Kuril island of Iturup.

TASS has compiled the key information available at this time.

About the visit

Putin, during a trip to the Sakhalin region, visited the Kuril island of Iturup.
The president personally visited the Kuril Islands for the first time, TASS reported.
Prior to this, the heads of the Russian state and government had visited the Kurils five times altogether.
Dmitry Medvedev made four trips: in 2010 as president, and in 2012, 2015 and 2019 as prime minister.
In 2021, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin visited Iturup.
As seen in video footage from the Kremlin press service, Putin visited the Yasny fish processing plant.
The head of state, during his working trip to Iturup, also visited the secondary school named after Hero of Russia Eduard Norpolov.
He inspected the gymnasium and classrooms, the school museum, and spoke with students.
In addition, Putin spontaneously spoke with residents of Iturup.
People gathered near the school named after Hero of Russia Eduard Norpolov, which the head of state had visited.
The president also held a working meeting with Sakhalin Region Governor Valery Limarenko.

Japan has expressed a "decisive protest" to Russia over Putin's visit to the Kuril island of Iturup, according to a statement from the head of the Japanese Foreign Ministry.
The ministry also asserted that all the "northern territories," as Tokyo refers to the southern part of the Kuril Islands, including Iturup, are "inherently [Japanese] territory from both historical and legal points of view."
Information about Putin's visit to Iturup quickly became one of the top trends in the Japanese segment of social network X, which is extremely popular in Japan, within just a few minutes.
As a TASS correspondent calculated, in the first half hour, users of this social network posted more than 2,000 messages on this topic, making it a trending leader.

Moscow and Tokyo have been conducting negotiations since the middle of the last century with the aim of concluding a peace agreement following World War II.
The main obstacle to this remains disagreements over rights to the southern part of the Kurils.
After the end of the war, the entire archipelago was incorporated into the Soviet Union, but Japan disputes the ownership of Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan and a group of small uninhabited islands.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has repeatedly emphasized that Russia's sovereignty over these territories, which has the appropriate international legal basis, is beyond doubt.