TOKYO: Japan's foreign minister urged Moscow to release a detained journalist in his first formal face-to-face meeting with his Russian counterpart in five years, Tokyo said Saturday (Oct 31).
Russian authorities said this month that Japanese journalist Yuki Imai had been arrested on Sakhalin, an island in Russia's Far East, on spying accusations.
The Japanese foreign ministry said that Toshimitsu Motegi "strongly demanded the immediate release" of the reporter, who is currently detained in Moscow, at a meeting with Sergey Lavrov at the Group of 20 (G20) summit in the United States.
The diplomats "will maintain communication, even amid the severe situation in Japan-Russia relations," the ministry said.
The countries have a decades-old dispute over the status of a string of islands in the Pacific Ocean, but their relations has soured further since Tokyo joined global sanctions against Moscow over the Ukraine war.
The last time their foreign ministers officially held talks was in September 2021 in New York, according to the Japanese foreign ministry.
Tokyo said this week that officials had met Yuki Imai for the first time since his arrest.
In August, Japan protested Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to the far-eastern Kuril islands - a disputed territory known in Japan as the Northern Territories and seized by the Soviet Union in 1945.
It was the first visit to the islands by a Russian president since Dmitry Medvedev in 2010.
Tokyo also protested in August against Russia's announcement that Moscow would conduct missile tests off one of the disputed islands visited by Putin. - AFP
