Before war in Ukraine, Putin was planning to attack Japan

The war in Ukraine has consumed the Western world but a leaked email shows that if things had gone slightly differently, Russia could have attacked Japan instead.

According to a leaked email from a whistleblower with Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), months before Vladimir Putin began his disastrous invasion of Ukraine he was planning to attack Japan.

Dated on March 17th, 2022, the email was sent to exiled human rights activist Vladimir Osechkin from a Russian whistleblower dubbed “Winds of Change,” who has been writing regular dispatches to Osechkin since the war with Ukraine began. 

Igor Sushko, the executive director of the Wind of Change Research Group has been translating and analyzing the correspondence from Russian to English since the start of the war and has been sharing the information with the American weekly online journal Newsweek. 

In the email to Osechkin, the FSB whistleblower stated that Russia was “quite seriously preparing for a localized military conflict with Japan.”

The whistleblower also mentioned the war in Ukraine and suggested that they were certain Russia would go to war, but that they weren’t sure why Ukraine was chosen. 

"Confidence that the countries would enter the stage of acute confrontation and even war was high,” wrote the FSB whistleblower in their March 17th, 2022 email to Ovechkin. 

“Why Ukraine was chosen for war in the end [the scenario was not changed much] is for others to answer," the whistleblower continued.

Isabel Van Brugen, the Newsweek journalist who broke the story wrote about the specific details involved with Russia’s proposed attack on Japan. 

“The whistleblower detailed movements of electronic warfare helicopters targeting Japan, while Russia's propaganda machine was also initiated, with a huge push to label Japanese as ‘Nazis’ and ‘fascists’.”

While the verbiage may sound very similar to what Russia used as its justification to go to war with Ukraine, it is difficult to know whether or not Winds of Change is a legitimate FSB leaker or if their emails are part of the larger information war at play. 

Christo Grozev, an expert on Russia’s Federal Security Service, stated that he believes the emails from Winds of Change are from a genuine agent connected to the FSB.

Grozev said he had shown the letter “to two actual (current or former) FSB contacts” and those agents had “no doubt it was written by a colleague.”

All of this leads one to ask why? What advantage would Russia gain from attacking Japan? Well, the answer might have something to do with the two countries' dispute over the Kuril Islands. 

After the end of World War II the new Japanese government never formally signed a peace treaty with the Soviet Union, largely because of their disputes over a group of islands that were being occupied by Soviet forces— which are still under Russian occupation today. 

Ultimately, however, the whistleblower wrote that the Russian leadership “sort of swapped out Japan for Ukraine.”

"But on the whole,” the FSB whistleblower continued, “war was inevitable for Russia due to the maniacal desire for war by the leadership…And now the bulk of the combat-ready units from that direction has been redeployed to Ukraine." So we shouldn’t expect a Russian attack on Japan anytime soon.