Russia Declares 'Ice Age' in Ties with Japan

(MENAFN) Russia's diplomatic relations with Japan have plunged to their lowest point in the entire post-war period, the Kremlin's top envoy in Tokyo warned Monday, blaming Japanese foreign policy for dismantling decades of hard-won bilateral progress.

Russian Ambassador to Japan Nikolai Nozdrev delivered the stark assessment in remarks carried by a state news agency, warning that the relationship had crossed into historically unprecedented territory.

"We are witnessing a decline unprecedented in the entire post-war era -- if I may call it that, a deep 'ice age' in bilateral relations," he said in an interview with the news agency.

Nozdrev placed full responsibility on Tokyo, accusing it of aligning with Western powers over the conflict in Ukraine and thereby squandering years of diplomatic goodwill. The positive groundwork accumulated over the past decades "has been almost completely destroyed" by Tokyo in joining "the anti-Russian line of the collective West in the context of the Ukrainian crisis," he said.

The ambassador went further, setting out explicit conditions Moscow expects Japan to meet before any normalization of state-to-state contacts can begin. Those prerequisites include Tokyo abandoning what he described as a hostile posture — specifically halting revisionist policies and pulling back from its accelerating push toward remilitarization.

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