Prime Minister Shinzo Abe vehemently denied Friday his diplomacy to resolve the territorial dispute with Russia had ended in failure, saying Russian President Vladimir Putin's abrupt call to conclude a peace treaty without preconditions only underlines his eagerness to sign what would, in principle, be a peace treaty to formally end the two nations' wartime hostilities.
Abe made the remark during a policy debate session for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's presidential election, following Putin's off-the-cuff proposal earlier this week that the two countries should first sign a peace treaty and thereafter keep discussing the territorial dispute over the four Russia-controlled islands off Hokkaido, known as the Northern Territories in Japan and Southern Kurils in Russia.
Putin's proposal apparently ignored Tokyo's long-held position that the decades-long dispute over the islands must be resolved before concluding a peace treaty and, thereby, normalizing bilateral ties.