Abe, Putin hold second meeting with little to show on isles row

PanARMENIAN.Net - Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a second day of talks on Friday, December 16 after Abe made little headway a day earlier in his quest to resolve a territorial row that has festered since World War Two, Reuters says.

Putin looked set to come away with promises of economic cooperation and achieve what experts said was a key goal - easing his international isolation when Moscow is under fire over the destruction of eastern Aleppo in Syria, where Russia is backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

Putin said the economic cooperation would help set the stage for closer ties.

"I believe that joint work in economic areas will help to establish the basis needed to move to a relationship of true partnership," Putin said at the start of talks in Tokyo.

Japan and Russia agreed on day one of the summit, held at a hot spring resort in southwest Japan, on the importance of continuing security dialogue, a Japanese official said.

Ministerial level security talks were halted after the crisis in Crimea in 2014, when the United States and other Western nations imposed sanctions on Moscow.

They also agreed to start discussing economic cooperation on the disputed islands, a row over which has kept them from signing a peace treaty formally ending World War Two, a Russian official said.

The islands in the Western Pacific, called the Northern Territories in Japan and the Southern Kuriles in Russia, were seized by Soviet forces at the end of World War Two.

The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) and Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to establish a $1 billion investment fund to promote economic cooperation between the two countries.

Novatek NVTK.MM Chief Executive Leonid Mikhelson said on Friday his company had signed agreements with Japan's Mitsui & Co (8031.T), Mitsubishi Corp (8058.T) and Marubeni Corp (8002.T) on the Arctic LNG-2 project.