Russia downplays hopes to peace treaty with Japan during initial talks

The Kremlin warned on Monday that neither Russia nor Japan would abandon their national interests in peace talks to resolve a decades-old territorial dispute and said everyone should be realistic about the difficulty of getting a breakthrough.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is making a push to end a dispute over islands captured by Soviet troops in the last days of World War Two that has prevented the countries from signing a peace treaty. Ahead of talks in Moscow between Abe and President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said negotiations to resolve the dispute were in their early phases and that there was still a lot of work to be done.

(With inputs from agencies.)