Japanese Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru said on Tuesday that his country is ready to participate in an international coalition to guarantee the security of Ukraine after a prospective peace deal with Russia.
“We’ll watch the ongoing discussions closely, and while carefully considering what Japan can and should do – including various legal and capability aspects — we’ll play an appropriate role,” Ishiba said at a press conference on Tuesday, shortly after President Donald Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders at the White House.
“At this point, we cannot say specifically what we are going to do,” he said.
Ishiba was cautiously optimistic about the progress of peace talks, but he noted that “achieving a fair peace is an extremely difficult task that will take time.”
The Japan Times noted that Tokyo is a little nervous about the peace talks because it is deeply invested in “condemning unilateral attempts to change the status quo by force” and worries that if Russia comes away with solid gains after invading Ukraine, Japan or its ally Taiwan might next be targeted by China.
Japan also has its own longstanding territorial disputes with Russia, with whom it is still technically at war, because the two nations never signed a peace treaty to end World War II. Any progress toward resolving the decades-old dispute between Tokyo and Moscow was scuttled when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and Japan imposed the first of several rounds of sanctions against the Russians.
At his press conference, Ishiba asked Trump and European leaders to ensure that any deal with Russia “does not undermine global security and the international order, including that of the Indo-Pacific region.”
Japan became the first country outside of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to sign a security pact with Ukraine at the G7 summit in June 2024. Japan agreed to provide $4.5 billion in defense assistance and support Ukraine over the course of the next ten years.
In a Fox News interview on Monday, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte listed Japan as one of the countries that was ready to provide security guarantees to Ukraine, in lieu of Ukraine formally joining NATO, which is a red line for Russia.
“Over the last couple of months under the leadership of Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, and Emmanuel Macron, the French President, a group of now 30 countries, including Japan and Australia are working on this concept of security guarantees,” Rutte said.
President Trump emphatically stated on Tuesday that America would not put “boots on the ground” in Ukraine, although it might provide air support and intelligence for the peacekeeping effort. Trump hinted that nations like France, Germany, and the United Kingdom could provide ground forces to secure Ukraine’s borders.
Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday that European officials envisioned a “reassurance force” of several hundred troops from “about ten countries” would be sent into Ukraine. Bloomberg’s sources did not mention if Japan could be one of those countries. The exact terms of Ukraine’s security guarantees are supposed to be finalized by the end of this week.
Japan has contributed personnel to 15 peacekeeping missions around the world, mostly under the auspices of the United Nations.
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