Japan, Russia begin new talks on peace treaty: Japanese report

Japan and Russia began a first round of high-level talks in Moscow on Thursday aimed at concluding a peace treaty following their agreement in November to make efforts to sign the pact by 2000, the Japanese news agency Kyodo reported.

The Japanese delegation is led by Deputy Foreign Minister Minoru Tamba and the Russian by his counterpart Grigoriy Karashin, Japanese officials said.

Japan and Russia have yet to sign a peace treaty to formally end wartime hostility due to a decades-old territorial dispute over a chain of islands off Japan's northern main island of Hokkaido.

"The atmosphere surrounding Russo-Japanese relations has improved significantly and we hope it will be maintained. Russia hopes to promote cooperation with Japan in all fields," Karashin told Tamba in his opening statement.

"I am confident that this meeting will be constructive. We hope we can come close to a solution to the complicated issue in a way that does not harm both countries' political positions and national interests," he said.

Tamba will appeal to the Russians to recognize that Tokyo has sovereignty over the islands known as the northern territories in Japan, Japanese government sources have said.

He will also brief them on progress made in implementing an economic cooperation package agreed upon at the Krasnoyarsk summit between President Yeltsin and Prime Minisyter Hashimoto.

Japanese Foreign Minister Keizo Obuchi and Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeniy Primakov will meet in Moscow in February.

BBC Monitoring (http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk), based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.