Clinching a peace deal between Japan and Russia will contribute to achieving an unprecedented breakthrough in bilateral relations and this step will open new horizons for both countries’ citizens, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in an exclusive interview with TASS First Deputy Director General Mikhail Gusman on Thursday.

"Japan and Russia are nations, whose relations have very promising opportunities. We would like to fully employ this potential, and fulfilling this potential in Japanese-Russian relations would benefit both our countries, along with the region and the world in general. We will continue seeking to fulfill the current prospects for cooperation between our countries and to ensure an extraordinary breakthrough in our bilateral relations, there is a need to sign a peace treaty. This will take our ties to an absolutely new level and produce completely new yields for our nations," Abe said.

According to Abe, together with Russian President Vladimir Putin he shares a "firm determination based on growing confidence to solve the territorial problem and sign a peace treaty, and bring this issue to a close, in order not to place it on the shoulders of future generations." "Together with President Putin we agreed to step up talks on a peace treaty based on the 1956 Joint Declaration," Abe elaborated.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe highly values his personal relations with President Vladimir Putin and regards the Russian leader as a crucial partner.

"I’ve met with President Putin 23 times already. I always feel that I can have a heart-to-heart talk with him. He is dear to me as a partner, and we can discuss any issues, including the most complicated and urgent ones, like for example, conclusion of the peace treaty," the Japanese PM pointed out.

Abe added that he expects to meet with Putin during the G20 summit in Argentina, which is scheduled for late November-early December. According to the Japanese Prime Minister, he also plans to visit Russia early next year to hold talks with Putin, after which, as Abe said, the Russian leader will be expected to come to Japan for the G20 summit in June.

At a meeting in Singapore on November 14, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had agreed to beef up Russian-Japanese peace treaty talks based on the 1956 Joint Declaration, in which Moscow had expressed readiness to hand Shikotan Island and a group of small uninhabited islands of the Lesser Kuril Chain (called Habomai in Japan) over to Tokyo as a gesture of goodwill.

The Soviet-Japanese Joint Declaration on ending the state of war between the two countries and restoring diplomatic and consular relations was signed in Moscow on October 19, 1956. Article 9 of the document says that the Soviet government agreed to hand over Shikotan Island and several small uninhabited islands of the Lesser Kuril Chain (which Japan calls Habomai) to Japan provided that their actual transfer to Tokyo’s control would happen after a peace treaty was concluded. The two states ratified the Declaration on December 8, 1956.

However, after Japan and the United States had signed the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security in 1960, the Soviet Union withdrew its obligation to hand over the islands. A Soviet government’s memorandum dated January 27, 1960, said that those islands would only be handed over to Japan if all foreign troops were pulled out of the country.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the combination of Russia’s power with Japan’s technology and expertise under an eight-point cooperation plan that had been proposed by Tokyo will bring huge results.

"If we combine Russia’s strength with Japanese technologies and expertise, it will definitely yield great rewards. We wish that these rewards would be understandable for the people of both countries. We wish that the results of our cooperation would extend to the economy and daily life of Russian people. I proposed the eight-point cooperation plan, proceeding from those assumptions," the Japanese PM stressed.

Under the plan, Moscow and Tokyo have developed roughly 150 joint projects in various areas in the last two and a half years, Abe added, citing bilateral collaboration in greenhouse business, rehabilitation medicine, and easing traffic jams.

Russian-Japanese ties entered a significantly new era of active development in 2016, when Abe had come up with the eight-point cooperation plan between the two countries. Since then the leaders of both states have met over 20 times, including President Putin’s visit to Japan and Abe’s numerous trips to Russia.

The plan envisages efforts to foster relations between Japan and Russia in the energy sector, small and medium-sized businesses, promotion of industrialization of the Far East, expansion of the export base and tourism, as well as the proposal to strengthen cooperation in the cutting-edge technologies, including nuclear energy, and the sphere of humanitarian exchanges. There were previous reports that more than 60 out of the 150 projects that had been developed under the plan are already at an active stage of implementation.