As negotiations broke down, the Japanese opted to go to war, staging a surprise attack on the Russian navy at Port Arthur on February 8, 1904. However, Russia refused Japan’s offer and demanded that Korea north of the 39th parallel serve as a neutral zone. Under the terms of the proposal, Japan would have maintained influence over Korea. With the Russians’ history of military aggression, the Japanese initially sought a deal, offering to cede control of Manchuria (northeastern China). Russia provided military support to the Qing Dynasty in China during that conflict, which pitted the two Asian powers against each other. The Japanese, meanwhile, had been concerned about Russian influence in the region since the First Sino-Japanese War of 1895. The Russian Empire already leased a port on the Liaodong Peninsula from China-Port Arthur-but it wanted to have a base of operations firmly under its control. However, with the Siberian shipping center of Vladivostok forced to close for much of the winter months, the empire was in need of a warm-water port in the Pacific Ocean, both for purposes of trade as well as a base for its growing navy.Ĭzar Nicholas set his sights on the Korean and Liaodong peninsulas, the latter located in present-day China. In 1904, the Russian Empire, ruled by the autocratic Czar Nicholas II, was one of the largest territorial powers in the world. Some have even referred to it as “World War Zero,” given that it took place less than a decade before the start of World War I. In fact, scholars have suggested that the Russo-Japanese War set the stage for World War I and, ultimately, World War II, as some of the central issues in the first conflict were at the core of the fighting during the latter two. Therefore, the war garnered significant global attention and its ramifications were felt long after the final shot was fired in 1905. Russia was already a significant world power in the early 20th century, with vast territories in Eastern Europe and central Asia under its control, and Japan was widely viewed as the dominant force in Asia at the time.
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