Ghosts of Sarajevo: What Putin’s Kuril Islands Visit Tells Us About the New World Order

On the surface, it was a short trip to a fish-processing plant. Vladimir Putin, seventy-three years old, was shown on state media tasting caviar on one of the four main islands of the Kuril archipelago, a chain of volcanic islands that Japan calls its Northern Territories and has never stopped claiming since the Soviet Union seized them in the final days of the Second World War.

It was, by any ordinary measure, a small news item: a first visit, by a leader in power for a quarter of a century, to a territory he already controls.

Read only as a travel itinerary, the visit means little. Read as a signal, in the language great powers use when they want to be heard without quite declaring anything, it means considerably more.

Japan understood it that way immediately. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi called the visit an offence to the sentiments of the Japanese people and said it had made restoring relations with Moscow more difficult “in the medium to long term.” That is the sound of a door being quietly shut, not slammed, but shut all the same.

A quarrel with roots older than either man

The Kuril dispute is not new, and it deserves to be understood on its own terms before it is folded into anything larger.

The islands, known in Japanese as Kunashiri, Habomai, Shikotan and Etorofu, and in Russian as Kunashir, Habomai, Shikotan and Iturup, were occupied by Soviet forces after the USSR declared war on Japan on August 8, 1945, two days after Hiroshima and six days before Japan’s surrender.

Around 17,000 Japanese residents were subsequently deported from the islands. Roughly 20,000 Russian citizens live there today, in a harsh climate softened somewhat by rich fishing grounds and mineral deposits including gold and silver.

Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian President, in 2010, became the first Russian leader to visit; Putin’s Thursday trip was, remarkably, his first in twenty-five years of dominating Russian politics.

None of this, by itself, threatens global order. Territorial disputes simmering for eight decades are, unfortunately, not rare. What makes this particular visit worth a longer look is its timing and its company.

The company Russia now keeps

Putin travelled to the Kurils immediately after a stop in Sakhalin, where Russia’s navy was conducting drills and where he held a meeting explicitly framed around “ensuring the security of Russia’s eastern borders.”

Japanese-Russian relations, already strained by a war fought between the two countries in 1904-5, have deteriorated sharply since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Japan has joined its G7 partners in sanctioning Moscow and has sent Kyiv money and non-lethal defence assistance. Putin, for his part, has called those sanctions “unprovoked,” insisting Russia poses no threat to Japan while pointedly noting that Tokyo, not Moscow, holds a territorial claim against the other.

What has changed since 2022 is not simply Russian rhetoric but Russian company. Russia and China have drawn visibly closer, their navies and air forces now conducting joint exercises in the waters and skies around Japan, prompting frequent scrambles by Japanese fighter jets.

North Korea, which this month described Japan’s own military build-up as a “transformation into a war state,” has sent troops and artillery shells to support Russia’s war effort in Ukraine.

Japan’s own defence white paper, issued this month, again flagged growing risk from all three. Reporting by international outlets has separately described Japan as having become, in effect, a hub for Russian intelligence activity and a source of dual-use technology feeding Moscow’s war machine, a claim Tokyo takes seriously enough to have reshaped its own defence posture around it.

Put plainly; a loose but increasingly coordinated grouping, Russia, China and North Korea, is now operating in visible proximity to a loose but increasingly coordinated grouping of the United States, Japan and their G7 partners.

Neither side has issued the other a formal declaration of anything. Both sides are behaving, in practice, as though the lines are already drawn.

A pattern history has seen before

It is worth being careful here, because historical analogies are seductive and frequently wrong. But the shape of what is forming is one that a student of the summer of 1914 would find familiar.

In the decades before a Bosnian Serb nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, Europe had spent roughly forty years quietly sorting itself into two rival alliance blocs, the Triple Entente of France, Russia and Britain on one side, and the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy on the other.

Neither bloc was built around a single shared ideology. Both were built around a colder logic: better to be bound to allies in advance than to face a crisis alone.

When the assassination came, it did not create the war by itself. It simply pulled a trigger that decades of alliance-building had already loaded.

Nobody sensible is predicting an assassination or an imminent world war from a caviar tasting on a Pacific island. The nuclear weapons both blocs now hold make the mechanics of 1914 a poor literal guide to 2026; mutual annihilation concentrates minds in ways that cavalry and telegrams did not.

Economic interdependence, however strained, also complicates any clean bloc-versus-bloc rupture in a way the pre-1914 world only partially experienced.

ADVERTISEMENT

Serious analysts remain divided on how far the “new Cold War” framing should be pushed, and readers should treat that framing as one lens among several, not settled fact.

What the Kuril visit usefully illustrates, though, is the same underlying instinct that built the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance; powers positioning themselves early, so that whenever the next crisis does arrive, whether over Taiwan, the Korean peninsula, or a future flashpoint nobody has named yet, they are not the ones caught without an ally.

Where Africa fits into a quarrel it did not start

This is not a story happening at a safe distance from Africa, however far Sakhalin sits from Abuja or Nairobi. The same great-power competition visible in the Pacific has a well-documented African chapter.

Russia’s Wagner Group, and its Ministry of Defence-controlled successor, Africa Corps, have built a security presence across the Central African Republic, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Libya and Sudan, frequently trading military protection for mining concessions and access to gold, uranium and other resources.

China, largely through infrastructure financing and trade rather than paramilitary deployment, has built its own extensive footprint across the continent.

The United States and Europe, watching both, have begun their own countermoves, including the Lobito Corridor, an 800-mile railway linking Congo’s mineral-rich interior to the Angolan coast, explicitly framed as a Western counterweight to Chinese-financed infrastructure.

None of this makes Africa a battlefield in the way Ukraine has become one. But it does make the continent, once again, a chessboard on which outside powers compete for resources and influence while offering African governments a menu of partnerships that rarely come without strings.

The pattern is old enough to have a name from an earlier century, the Scramble for Africa, and new enough that its current form, drones and mercenaries and mineral deals rather than treaties carved up in Berlin drawing rooms, deserves to be recognised for what it is by African publics, not just African governments.

Nigeria’s careful straddle

Nigeria’s own posture offers a useful case study in how a serious African state is choosing to navigate this moment.

Abuja formally accepted BRICS partner-country status in January 2025, a bloc whose founding members, Brazil, Russia, India and China, have positioned it as a counterweight to Western-dominated global institutions.

At the same time, Nigeria has preserved its security cooperation with the United States and Europe, and its Foreign Minister, Yusuf Tuggar, has described the approach less as non-alignment in the Cold War sense than as “multi-alignment,” extracting benefit from multiple partners rather than committing exclusively to any one bloc.

Analysts have described this as strategic hedging: a recognition that in an anarchic system of competing great powers, a country with Nigeria’s population, oil wealth and security challenges has more to gain from keeping its options open than from picking a side in a quarrel it did not start and cannot control.

Whether that hedging proves wise will depend on discipline Nigeria’s leadership has not always displayed in past decades: the ability to accept help from multiple directions without becoming captured by any of them, and the wisdom to read a moment like Putin’s Kuril visit not as distant news, but as one more data point in understanding how the great powers around Nigeria are positioning themselves for whatever comes next.

A caviar tasting, and a warning worth heeding

Vladimir Putin’s afternoon on a Pacific island will not, on its own, reorder the world. But leaders who study history rather than merely quote it understand that world orders rarely collapse in a single afternoon; they are built, brick by brick, out of exactly this kind of small, deliberate gesture, repeated often enough, across enough continents, until one day the bricks form a wall nobody quite remembers laying.

Sarajevo did not create the alliance blocs of 1914. It only revealed how completely they had already formed.

The question worth sitting with, in Abuja as much as in Tokyo, is not whether Putin’s trip to the Kurils changes anything by itself. It is what kind of wall is quietly being built around the world today, and whether those of us watching from Africa will recognise it before, rather than after, it is finished.