Did Americans "steal" the Kuril and Sakhalin Islands from Japan instead of the Soviet Union taking over those territories at the end of World War II? No, that's not true: The decision to take Imperial Japan's Northern Territories had already been agreed on at the Yalta Conference in 1945, as a condition for the Soviet Union to join the offensive against Japan in the Pacific Theater. The American military did transfer military vessels to the Soviet Union in the context of the so-called "Project Hula," in anticipation of the Soviet Union's participation in the offensive against Japan, but did not help the Soviet military in annexing the territories.
The claim originated in a TikTok (archived here) video, published on April 20, 2024. Translated from Japanese to English, it opened:
The Northern Territories and Chishima [Kuril] Island were annexed by the Soviet Union after World War II, but the ships used at that time were owned by the American military [...] The American military taught the Soviets how to use these ships at Alaska's Cold Bay military base [...] I don't think it's wrong to say that the Americans stole the Northern Territories, so please spread this.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue Jul 23 08:12:18 2024 UTC)
The Kuril and Sakhalin Islands (archived here), also known as the Northern Territories and Chishima Island in Japan (archived here), were not "stolen" by the Americans, as claimed in the TikTok video. Before the official Soviet participation in the Pacific Theater, the Yalta Conference (archived here) discussed what the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union would do once Germany had been defeated. The Yalta Conference also addressed the ambiguity of an early Japanese surrender in the Pacific Theater at the time, thus laying the conditions for a formal Soviet participation in the offensive against Japan (archived here). In the agreement signed at the Yalta Conference (archived here), one of the conditions was a promise to the Soviet Union to be able to annex the Kuril and Sakhalin Islands, which Japan mainly controlled (archived here) throughout World War II due to the terms in the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905. In Article IX of the Treaty (archived here), it was agreed that Japan was allowed to keep the territories it annexed during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, which included the South of Sakhalin and all of the Kuril Islands.
While it is true that a transfer of American naval vessels to the Soviet Union, named "Project Hula" (archived here), was in effect, the American military did not take the Kuril and Sakhalin Islands and conceded it to the Soviet Union. Military aid was only given by transferring American naval vessels stationed in Alaska's Cold Bay base (archived here) to the Soviet Union and training Soviet personnel to use these naval vessels to aid them in their invasion of Japan. Adding to the fact that Project Hula was never completed because Japan had surrendered before the project ended (archived here), it cannot be sustained that the American military "stole" the Kuril and Sakhalin Islands from Japan.
The Kuril/Sakhalin Islands dispute has been an ongoing territorial dispute between Japan and Russia since the end of World War II due to ambiguous phrasing in the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty (archived here), which outlined that Japan renounce all "rights, title, and claim to the Kuril Islands" but doesn't explicitly recognize the Soviet Union's sovereignty over the islands.
