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The Not-So-Wild East

Dmitry Kosyrev

Most Border Issues Have Been Settled

From east to west, Russia shares its southeast border with Japan, North Korea, China and Mongolia; an assortment of countries that pretty much guarantees that the border issues that arise with each will differ significantly from those with the others.

At the same time Russia's eastern borders are perhaps the calmest part of its external frontiers and the area with the fewest problems. This is promising for closer ties between Moscow and the countries of East Asia.

Japan: Dispute Over the Kurile Islands

While visiting Japan at the beginning of June to prepare for a visit by President Vladimir Putin to Tokyo at the end of the year, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a press conference that Russia and Japan are "diametrically opposed." on the problem of the southern Kurile Islands.

This means that Moscow is ready to fulfill its obligations under the 1956 treaty between the two countries and hand back, as a gesture of goodwill, two of the four disputed islands, and then conclude a peace treaty with Japan, thereby closing this last chapter of World War II. President Putin has made several statements to this effect. Tokyo, however, has said since the early 1960s that it will not honor the treaty, which was ratified by both the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union and Japan's parliament. The Japanese government is calling for the return of the two islands already agreed upon, and then the immediate commencement of negotiations that would start the process of Japan receiving the other two islands - Iturup and Kunashir.

Public opinion in the two countries further complicates the situation, while Moscow has insisted that the attitudes in both countries should be taken into account.

Soviet troops occupied the four disputed islands shortly after Japan's surrender in August 1945. Tokyo understands that the Soviet Union retook territory that had been taken from it earlier by Japan. However, the Japanese state that the South Kuriles are a separate archipelago that has always belonged to Japan and was settled exclusively by Japanese fishermen, who were deported to Japan in 1945, and the islands have since been settled by Russians. Russia, in the words of President Vladimir Putin's, "has considered the islands its territory since the end of World War II."

However, two factors significantly decrease the importance of this territorial dispute in the relations between the two countries. The first is the economic factor. This is evident from the announcement by Japanese car manufacturer Toyota in May this year that it intends to build a huge assembly plant near St. Petersburg, or the fact that trade between the two countries grew by a record 40 percent in 2004, reaching a figure of almost $9 billion.

Of central economic importance is the oil and gas sector, where Japan wants Russia to build an oil pipeline from its Siberian oil fields through to the Pacific port of Nakhodka, which Japan has promised to invest in. At this stage, however, the talk is only of investment in oil exploration because it is still not clear if Siberia's oil resources are sufficient to cover exports to Japan. A final decision has yet to be made on the project.

The Sakhalin-2 project is a different story. Sakhalin Energy, whose main shareholder is Shell, recently signed a 20-year agreement with Japan's Toho gas company calling for the sale of 200,000 tons of gas per year, bringing the total of all contracts to the country to 800,000 tons per year - a total that will generate revenue of $3 billion per year.

The second factor is the territorial disputes between Japan, China and Korea that also have their roots in World War II. The sudden flare up of these disputes only serves to draw public opinion in Japan away from a dispute with Russia that appears to have reached a dead end.
It is likely that no solution to the Russian-Japanese territorial dispute will be found over the next few decades, but this will not lead to any complications for Moscow in pursuing its foreign and economic policy in relation to the country.

North Korea: Untapped Potential

Russia's land border with North Korea is just 17 kilometers long and, according to Alexander Timonin, deputy head of the Asia Department at the Russian Foreign Ministry, has no unresolved issues. The border is tightly controlled on both sides and there are no illegal crossings or contact of any sort between the people living on each side. The border was demarcated in accordance with an agreement signed on Sept. 3, 1990.

One point on this border that does deserve some attention is the station at Tumangan, which is crossed by the railway line that links the two countries. Moscow has thrown its support behind a highly ambitious project for a railway line that would link South Korea to Europe, passing through this point. This is a key project for the economic development of the Korean Peninsula, and would involve transporting Korean goods to Europe via the Trans-Siberian Railway. It is estimated that this would reduce costs from those on existing transportation routes by as much as 30 percent.

Negotiations for the project have been complicated by North Korea's attempts to develop nuclear weapons.

China: No Longer a Bone of Contention

Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, during which its former Central Asian Republics gained independence, the Russian-Chinese border remains one of the longest in the world (its eastern section alone is 4,300 kilometers in length). This year, however, has seen the final resolution of a number of issues that have made the border a point of contention and concern for decades.

The Treaty of Good-Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation signed between the two countries on July 16, 2001, stated that there were no outstanding territorial claims on either side. But it was only in mid-October in Beijing that Putin and Chinese President Hu Jintao agreed on delimiting the last, most complicated section of the border, located near the city of Khabarovsk.

An agreement was signed in 1991 that regulated 98 percent of the border's length. The only sections still to be determined were a set of islands in the middle of the Amur River, opposite Khabarovsk, and an island in the upper reaches of the Arguni River. The October agreement divides these two spots, which cover an area of just over 370 square kilometers, roughly evenly between the two countries. Now, for the first time in 300 years, the Russian-Chinese border has been completely delimited. Demarcating the remaining sections, i.e., putting border posts in place, is now a purely technical procedure, as the agreement itself was ratified by the State Duma on May 20.

The islands in the river flowing along the borders have created an unusual situation. According to Vitaly Vorobyov, the special ambassador in charge of the negotiations, the Peking agreement of 1860 did not mention the islands. The two countries' respective borders were measured from the riverbanks. The islands near Khabarovsk were still considered "no man's land" in the early 1900s. During the chaotic period in China in the 1920s and 1930s, however, the islands came under Soviet control, although this was not formalized by any treaty or agreement. The de jure border followed one line, while the de facto border followed another.

The recent agreement settling the question of the islands does not create any economic or other problems for the people in the area. Russia gets to keep the Orthodox church that was built in the 1990s at the mouth of the Ussuri River and almost all the economic facilities and land cultivated by Russians on Bolshoi Ussuriisk. Even so, the debates over the agreement's ratification in the Duma were stormy, with concerns from some deputies that the move would serve as a precedent for claims from other countries with border issues being answered by the foreign minister with assurances that this was a special case and was only putting in writing a border that already, for all intents and purposes, did exist.

With bilateral trade of more than $20 billion (some put the figure at $30 billion, if figures for petty trade between bordering regions are included), China trails only Germany and Ukraine in terms of trade with Russia.

If there is a negative aspect to the border between the two countries, it is in the form of illegal immigration from China. Estimates put the number of Chinese who have settled illegally in Russia's Far East at anywhere from 30,000 to 300,000.

People in the Far East have a complex attitude toward the situation. Local people worry that Chinese business will come to dominate in the region, but at the same time, people in the three border regions of Primorye, Amur and Khabarovsk depend on business with China for jobs, business opportunities and the supply of many different goods. Illegal immigrants also help in a labor situation where there are shortfalls, particularly in construction.

The idea of Chinese demographic expansion - that the Chinese were following a deliberate policy to expand into Russian territory - was very popular in the 1990s. The issue is no longer so acute, and those who supported this interpretation have been politically marginalized. But echoes of these ideas were still very much apparent during the debates on the border agreement in the Duma. Lavrov countered these criticisms with promises that labor migration would be more closely monitored in the future and that a re-admission agreement would be signed with the Chinese.

Mongolia: 3,500 Kilometers of Peaceful Borders

The 3,500-kilometer Russian-Mongolian border crosses empty, barren land where control is minimal, at best. The biggest, yet little-known difficulty in managing the border relationship here has been cattle - cows just don't seem to recognize international borders. Just before President Putin's visit to Ulaanbaatar in 2000, an agreement was signed on the repatriation of cattle. The agreement regulates a great many technical details on, for example, how to verify a cow's origins (through branding) and the procedures governing the return to the other side of the border.

Moscow and Ulaanbaatar have yet to sign an agreement on visa-free travel that had been in the pipelines (for people, not cows this time). There is, however, a simplified visa procedure for youth exchanges, students and cross-border cooperation.

Economic relations between Russia and Mongolia are increasingly locally based. Around 70 percent of bilateral trade is between the regions.

Beitrag veröffentlicht mit freundlicher Genehmigung von Russia Profile.