Russia warns Japan to stay out of Ukraine crisis

The Russian foreign minister's team warned Japan to stay out of the brewing Ukraine crisis after U.S. officials touted a “close alignment” with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in the lead-up to a potential eruption of violence in Eastern Europe.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's office expressed "puzzlement" at the "inadmissibility and senselessness" of Japan's warning that it was poised to take "strong actions" in light of the Eastern European power's recent actions in Ukraine.

"We reviewed with puzzlement the reports that at the Japan-US summit yesterday, the Japanese side attempted to threaten Russia with some ‘strong actions,’ ‘in close coordination with the US and other allies’ at that, in the Ukrainian context,” Lavrov’s subordinates at the Russian Embassy in Tokyo wrote Saturday in a Facebook post translated by state media. “The inadmissibility and senselessness of such statements, as well as their counterproductiveness for the atmosphere of Russian-Japanese relations and dialogue, are obvious.”

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Russia’s mobilization of military forces around Ukraine in recent months has stoked widespread misgivings about an expanded war in the former Soviet satellite state, particularly as Russian officials have signaled that the crisis can be averted only through a practical contraction of NATO. The growing tensions have global diplomatic ramifications, most recently evidenced by President Joe Biden’s virtual meeting with his Japanese counterpart.

“They were in very close alignment on the challenges that Russia is presenting to Ukraine,” a senior Biden administration official told reporters Friday. “I think Japan — the prime minister complimented the president on his handling and made clear that Japan would be fully behind the United States in the challenging days ahead.”

Biden and Kishida’s virtual meeting coincided with Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s face-to-face conversation with Lavrov in Geneva. That dialogue produced a commitment to continue discussing possible diplomatic resolutions, but Russian officials also reiterated the demand most intolerable to the trans-Atlantic alliance: their insistence that the United States and Western Europe cut their security ties to Eastern European members of NATO, who joined the bloc to seek protection from potential Russian threats.

“NATO will not renounce our ability to protect and defend each other, including with the presence of troops in the eastern part of the Alliance,” NATO Spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said Friday after Russian officials singled out her home country of Romania as one of the allies that must lose the benefit of Western military partners.

Before issuing that demand in December, Russian President Vladimir Putin sought the support of Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping. Kremlin officials announced that Xi “fully supports our initiative to work out these security guarantees for Russia” just prior to unveiling a so-called “draft treaty” that demanded the Western abandonment of NATO’s Eastern European members.

“We are talking about the withdrawal of foreign forces, equipment, and weapons, as well as taking other steps to return to the set-up we had in 1997 in non-NATO countries,” Lavrov’s team said in a Friday bulletin. “This includes Bulgaria and Romania.”

Lungescu, who like NATO Deputy Secretary-General Mircea Geoana is a Romanian national, reiterated that the allies would not acquiesce on that point.

“Russia’s demands would create first- and second-class NATO members, which we cannot accept,” she said. “We will always respond to any deterioration of our security environment, including through strengthening our collective defense.”

The renewal of that impasse after Blinken and Lavrov’s meeting contributed to the trans-Atlantic unease that Putin will send the mobilized Russian forces into Ukraine. Biden’s team, following the conversation with Kishida, demurred when asked whether the Japanese leader had agreed to join the U.S. in retaliating against such an invasion by imposing severe economic sanctions.

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“Japan indicated that it — that the United States and Japan are closely aligned on concerns about Russian threats,” the senior administration official said. “Prime Minister Kishida welcomed and thanked President Biden's leadership in sending such a clear message, deterrent message, with respect to Russia's potential actions in Ukraine, indicated that Japan would be with the United States going forward. We did not get into the specifics about possible, you know, steps that would be taken in the event that we see these actions transpire.”