Japanese prisoners of war in the Soviet Union

After World War II there were from 560,000 to 760,000 Japanese personnel in the Soviet Union and Mongolia interned to work in labor camps as POWs.^[1] Of them, it is estimated that between 60,000^[2][3][4][5] and 347,000 died in captivity.^{[citation needed]}

The majority of the approximately 3.5 million Japanese armed forces outside Japan were disarmed by the United States and Kuomintang China and repatriated in 1946. Western Allies had taken 35,000 Japanese prisoners between December 1941 and 15 August 1945, i.e., before the Japanese capitulation.^[6] The Soviet Union held the Japanese POWs in a much longer time period and used them as a labor force.

Soviet Union behavior was contrary to the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact from the beginning^{[citation needed]}, and also to the Potsdam Declaration, which guaranteed the return of surrendered Japanese soldiers to Japan. When Russian President Boris Yeltsin arrived in Japan in October 1993, he apologized for being an "inhumane act."^[7]

However, the Russian side said, "The transferred Japanese soldiers are" prisoners of war "who were legally detained during the battle and do not fall into the category of" detainees "who were unfairly detained after the end of the war."^[8]