The southern half of Sakhalin was acquired by Japan as a result of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 – 05, but at the end of World War II in 1945, the Soviets declared war on Japan and took possession of the Kuril islands and southern Sakhalin.

His wife, Tamara Timofeevna Pikhteevoi was of mixed Sakhalin Ainu and Gilyak ancestry.

After Korean Air Lines Flight 007, carrying 269 people, was shot down in 1983 after straying into the USSR's prohibited airspace, in the vicinity of Sakhalin and Moneron Islands, President Ronald Reagan issued a directive making GPS freely available for civilian use, once it was sufficiently developed, as a common good.

Despite Japan's demands for the entirety of Sakhalin and a war indemnity, and Russia's outright refusal, peace was attained through the actions of the participants, including Roosevelt's back-channel communications.

Japan gained a great deal from the treaty, but it was not what the Japanese public had been led to expect, since Japan's initial negotiating position had demanded all of Sakhalin and a monetary indemnity as well.

Mamiya Rinzō and Gennady Nevelskoy determined that the Sakhalin was indeed an island separated from the mainland by a narrow strait.

On 18 December 2011 the Russian oil drilling rig Kolskaya capsized and sank in a storm in the Sea of Okhotsk, some 124 km from Sakhalin Island, where it was being towed from Kamchatka.

Sakhalin was claimed by both Russia and Japan in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, which led to bitter disputes between the two countries over control of the island.

Under the Ming Dynasty, commerce in Northeast Asia and Sakhalin was placed under the " system for subjugated peoples ", or ximin tizhi.

According to Wei Yuan's work Military history of the Qing Dynasty (), the Later Jin sent 400 troops to Sakhalin in 1616, after a newfound interest because of northern Japanese contacts with the area, but later withdrew as it was considered there was no threat from the island.

A Japanese settlement in the southern end of Sakhalin of Ootomari was established in 1679 in a colonization attempt.

The first European known to visit Sakhalin was Martin Gerritz de Vries, who mapped Cape Patience and Cape Aniva on the island's east coast in 1643.

A katorga ( penal colony ) was established by Russia on Sakhalin in 1857, but the southern part of the island was held by the Japanese until the 1875 Treaty of Saint Petersburg ( 1875 ), when they ceded it to Russia in exchange for the Kuril Islands.

South Sakhalin was administrated by Japan as Karafuto Prefecture (), with the capital Toyohara, today's Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, and had a large number of migrants from Korea.

The Soviet attack on South Sakhalin was part of the Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation and started on 11 August 1945, after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and four days before the Surrender of Japan.

It was not until the 113th Rifle Brigade and the 365th Independent Naval Infantry Rifle Battalion from Sovetskaya Gavan landed on 16 August at — a seashore village of western Sakhalin — that the Soviets broke the Japanese defence line.

On September 1, 1983, the Korean Air Flight 007, a South Korean civilian airliner, flew over Sakhalin and was shot down by the Soviet Union, just west of Sakhalin Island, near the smaller Moneron Island ; the Soviet Union claimed it was a spy plane.

At the beginning of the 20th century, some 32, 000 Russians ( of whom over 22, 000 were convicts ) inhabited Sakhalin along with several thousand native inhabitants.

It may also be related to names for other islands that have traditionally been inhabited by the Ainu people, such as Kuyi or Kuye for Sakhalin and Kai for Hokkaidō.

Urup was originally inhabited by the Ainu, the native peoples of the Kurils, Sakhalin and Hokkaidō.

* 1875 – The Treaty of Saint Petersburg between Japan and Russia is ratified, providing for the exchange of Sakhalin for the Kuril Islands.

Historically, they spoke the Ainu language and related varieties and lived in Hokkaidō, the Kuril Islands, and much of Sakhalin.

In 1868 there were about 15, 000 Ainu in Hokkaido, 2000 in Sakhalin, and around 100 in the Kurile islands.

Their most widely known ethnonym is derived from the word ainu, which means " human " ( particularly as opposed to kamui, divine beings ), basically neither ethnicity nor the name of a race, in the Hokkaidō dialects of the Ainu language ; Emishi ( Ebisu ) and Ezo ( Yezo ) ( both ) are Japanese terms, which are believed to derive from another word for " human ", which otherwise survived in Sakhalin Ainu as enciw or enju.

On Sakhalin island, there are a few dozen people who identify themselves as Sakhalin Ainu, but many more with partial Ainu ancestry do not acknowledge it.

Ethnic Ainu living in Sakhalin Oblast and Khabarovsk Krai are not organized politically.

Some researchers have speculated that this minority of Haplogroup C3 carriers among the Ainu may reflect a certain degree of unidirectional genetic influence from the Nivkhs, a traditionally nomadic people of northern Sakhalin and the adjacent mainland, with whom the Ainu have long-standing cultural interactions.

The Ainu were distributed in the northern and central islands of Japan, from Sakhalin island in the north to the Kuril islands and the island of Hokkaidō and Northern Honshū, although some investigators place their former range as throughout Honshū and as far north as the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula in what is now Cape Lopatka.

According to the Russian Empire Census of 1897, 1446 persons in the Russian Empire reported Ainu language as their mother tongue, 1434 of them in Sakhalin Island.

After World War II, most of the Ainu living in Sakhalin were deported to Japan.

After the arrest of Keizo in 1967, Tamara and her son Alexei Nakamura were expelled from Kamchatka Krai and sent to the island of Sakhalin, to live in the city of Tomari.

In 1963, he married Tamara Pikhtivoi, a member of the Sakhalin Ainu tribe.

The descendants of Tamara and Alexei are found in Kamchatka and Sakhalin.

The first problem that caused the pause in reconnaissance flights took place on August 30, an Air Force Strategic Air Command ( SAC ) U-2 flew over Sakhalin Island in the Far East by mistake.

The main feeding habitat of the western Pacific subpopulation is the shallow ( 5 – 15 m depth ) shelf off northeastern Sakhalin Island, particularly off the southern portion of Piltun Lagoon, where the main prey species appear to be amphipods and isopods.

Offshore gas and oil development in the Okhotsk Sea within 20 km of the primary feeding ground off northeast Sakhalin Island is of particular concern.

The second incident occurred on 1 September 1983, during a period of heightened Cold War tension, when a Soviet Su-15 interceptor shot down a straying Korean Air Lines Flight 007 near Moneron Island, just west of Sakhalin Island.

In summer, however, sunshine hours are lowest on exposed parts of the Pacific coast where fogs from the Oyashio current create persistent cloud similar to that found on the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin.

Japan agreed to relinquish mineral extraction rights in the northern half of Sakhalin, but otherwise made no concessions.

Russia's major islands and archipelagos include Novaya Zemlya, the Franz Josef Land, the Severnaya Zemlya, the New Siberian Islands, Wrangel Island, the Kuril Islands, and Sakhalin.

But actually these accounts reveal the supernatural powers that the masters were in fact supposed to possess, as well as the extreme degree of popular credulity: `` Hwang Pah ( O Baku ), one day going up Mount Tien Tai which was believed to have been inhabited by Arhats with supernatural powers, met with a monk whose eyes emitted strange light.

`` That it had found a planet on which human beings could live and which was already inhabited by sentient beings ''!!

The Aegean Sea was later invaded by the Persians and the Romans, and inhabited by the Byzantine Empire, the Bulgarians, the Venetians, the Genoeses, the Seljuq Turks, and the Ottoman Empire.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau of Geneva was the first of many to present the Alps as a place of allure and beauty, banishing the prevalent conception of the mountains as a hellish wasteland inhabited by demons.

Achill has a long history of human settlement and there is evidence that Achill was inhabited as many as 5, 000 years ago.

Prior to its proclamation as a British settlement in 1836, the area around Adelaide was inhabited by the indigenous Kaurna Aboriginal nation ( pronounced " Garner " or " Gowna ").

They settled down near Kurile Lake, which was inhabited by the Kamchatka Ainu and North Kuril Ainu.

Amphipolis (: Amphípolis ) was an ancient Greek city in the region once inhabited by the Edoni people in the present-day region of Central Macedonia.

He also said that the moon had mountains and believed that it was inhabited.

It was Absalon's intention to clear the Baltic Sea of the Wendish pirates who inhabited its southern littoral zone which was later called Pomerania.

Some traditions related that at the time when Aeacus was born, Aegina was not yet inhabited, and that Zeus changed the ants () of the island into men ( Myrmidons ) over whom Aeacus ruled, or that he made men grow up out of the earth.

) was an ancient seaport town on the south coast of Spain, between Malaca ( now Málaga ) and Carthago Nova ( now Cartagena ), in the district inhabited by the Bastuli.

Strabo ( 7. 3. 6 ) thinks that the Black Sea was called " inhospitable " before Greek colonization because it was difficult to navigate, and because its shores were inhabited by savage tribes.

Her husband, Prasutagus, was the king of Iceni, people who inhabited roughly what is now Norfolk.

During the post-Roman centuries of Germanic migration and settlement, the region afterwards included in the Diocese of Bamberg was inhabited for the most part by Slavs.

Prior to the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century, northern and central Chile was under Inca rule while independent Mapuche inhabited south-central Chile.

The area known today as Croatia today was inhabited throughout the prehistoric period.

What is now China was inhabited by Homo erectus more than a million years ago.

A popular legend in New Orleans concerns a popular lovers ' lane called Grunch Road which was said to be inhabited by " grunches ," creatures similar in appearance to the Chupacabra.

The variant English name " Bohemian " was used until the late 19th century, reflecting the original English name of the Czech state derived from the Celtic tribe of Boii who inhabited the area since the 4th century BC.

In a historical or geopolitical sense the term usually refers collectively to Christian majority countries or countries in which Christianity dominates or was a territorial phenomenon .“ Christendom is originally a medieval concept steadily to have evolved since the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the gradual rise of the Papacy more in religio-temporal implication practically during and after the reign of Charlemagne ; and the concept let itself to be lulled in the minds of the staunch believers to the archetype of a holy religious space inhabited by Christians, blessed by God, the Heavenly Father, ruled by Christ through the Church and protected by the Spirit-body of Christ ; no wonder, this concept, as included the whole of Europe and then the expanding Christian territories on earth, strengthened the roots of Romance of the greatness of Christianity in the world .”

During the mid-18th century, the area was inhabited by a Native American tribe known as the Potawatomi, who had taken the place of the Miami and Sauk and Fox peoples.