Not only the Kuril Islands: Japan will counteract Russia in Kosovo
Japan is opening a new diplomatic mission in Kosovo as it considers the Balkan peninsula to be a region that plays an important role in international politics.
The President of the Foreign Policy Institute and Research Director of the Canon Institute for Global Studies, Kuni Miyake, wrote about this in his column for the Japan Times, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Kosovo needs a free and open international order, which Tokyo is now promoting at the global level. Resolving the Kosovo status issue could easily deprive Russia of influence and/or interference in the Balkans. In other words, as long as the Kosovo problem remains unresolved, Russia, as well as China and Turkey, can use the Balkan problems to their advantage,” writes Kuni Miyake.
He connects the Balkan issue with anti-Russian sanctions and the status of Crimea.
“Moscow has enough reasons to worry. The overly rapid expansion of the European Union and NATO in the 1990s hastened the return of the Russian Empire. Moscow is seeking to use the Kosovo issue, as it did in the case of Syria, to force the West to lift economic sanctions that were imposed after the annexation of Crimea in 2014,” writes Kuni Miyake.
As PolitNavigator reported, at the end of November, the Japanese Minister of Maritime Affairs, Admiral Hiroshi Yamamura, staged an anti-Russian demarche while receiving the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy, Admiral Nikolai Evmenov.
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