sovereignty over the Kuril Islands. The Russian public was generally outraged by the action and demanded the government to counteract. The Foreign Ministry of Russia announced on July 18, 2008 "[these actions] contribute neither to the development of positive cooperation between the two countries, nor to the settlement of the dispute," and reaffirmed its sovereignty over the islands. In 2010, President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev became the first Russian president to take a state trip to the Kuril Islands. Medvedev shortly ordered significant reinforcements to the Russian defences on the Kuril Islands. Medvedev was replaced by Vladimir Putin in 2012. In November 2013, Japan held its first ever diplomatic talks with the Russian Federation, and the first with Moscow since the year 1973. In September 2017, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Russian President Vladimir Putin met at Eastern Economic Forum, which held at Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok. The main reason of meeting was approving joint economic activities on disputed islands off Hokkaido. In their talks the two leaders decided to sign off on joint projects in five areas — aquaculture, greenhouse farming, tourism, wind power and waste reduction. At the 2018 Thirteenth East Asia Summit in Singapore, Shinzo Abe followed up on a proposal from Vladimir Putin to sign a peace treaty without preconditions by the end of the year. The Soviet–Japanese Joint Declaration of 1956 promised that the USSR would give Japan the Habomai islet group and Shikotan and keep the remaining islands, in return for negotiation of a formal peace treaty. At the time, the United States threatened to keep Okinawa if Japan gave away the other islands, preventing the negotiation of the promised treaty. Putin and Abe agreed that the terms of the 1956 deal would be part of a bilateral peace treaty. The outbreak of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine prompted Japan's hardline stance on the disputed islands. On March 7, 2022, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida declared the southern Kurils as "a territory peculiar to Japan, a territory in which Japan has sovereignty." Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi added that they are an "integral part" of Japan. Military cooperation The Russian Chief of General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov, visited Tokyo in mid-December 2017 to meet with his Japanese counterpart, Admiral Katsutoshi Kawano. He stated that there will be more than thirty joint military drills held by Russia and Japan in 2018. Russia's military chief,