The Russian invasion of Ukraine that began in February 2022 has been met with the same sense of shock and alarm in Japan as in the rest of the world. The way that the West has stood up against a change in the status quo using military force has also changed, particularly compared to the relatively low level of general concern at the time of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in March 2019 or at the outbreak of the conflict in the eastern regions of Ukraine in the summer of that year. As Europe underwent a tectonic shift in the decades after the Cold War, Japan started to build cooperative relationships, first with the countries in Central and Eastern Europe that had newly joined the European Union (EU) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) before gradually starting to strengthen relations with Ukraine and other former members of the Soviet Union in later years. As discussed in this article, although these efforts were not without their success, Russia continued to be the main pivot of Japan’s diplomacy. This tendency remained fundamentally unchanged even after the occupation of Crimea in 2014 and the outbreak of fighting in the Donbas region. However, the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 dramatically undermined the “Russia-first” Japanese diplomacy, forcing various revisions and changes.
This paper first provides an overview of a number of previous Japanese diplomatic policies, including “Eurasian Diplomacy” and the “Arc of Freedom and Prosperity,” before analyzing the main characteristics of Japanese diplomacy since 2014. Then we will examine the changes that the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought to Japanese foreign policy in the region. In keeping with the conventional EU practice, I will refer to EU member states such as Poland and the Czech Republic as “Central and Eastern European countries” and to non-EU states such as Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia as “Eastern European countries,” following the definition by the European Union.
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