evidence: In 1939, for example, the Soviet Union invaded Finland. That war ended with the cession of Gulf of Finland islands, the Karelian Isthmus and Ladoga Karelia to Russia. As Putin says he is against colonialism, then it is only right that the United States should declare that it considers those territories to belong rightly to Finland and to consider Russia an illegal occupying power. The same holds true for Kaliningrad or, more properly, Königsberg, a Prussian city colonized by the Russians in the tail end of World War II. The fact that the Soviet Union took Königsberg via the Potsdam Agreement and not a formal treaty should ease any U.S. reinterpretation over the region’s sovereignty. Russia might claim that the 1990 Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany effectively renounced German claims to Königsberg, but Putin would expose his own hypocrisy on Ukraine by claiming that the 1990 treaty, which did not specifically mention Kaliningrad, should apply. The Soviet occupation of the Karafuto Prefecture (South Sakhalin) is likewise invalid. While Japan renounced claims to Sakhalin in the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco, it did not acknowledge Soviet or Russian sovereignty. Given the Japanese and Korean heritage of the prefecture’s population, it is reasonable for the United States to recognize it again as legal territory of Japan. Certainly, there should be no dispute over the Kuril Islands; they are legal Japanese territory.