Urup has a roughly rectangular shape, measuring along its long axis and approximately along its narrow axis. It is the fourth largest of the Kuril Islands, with an area of. The highest point is Gora Ivao at. The strait between Urup and Iturup is known as the Vries Strait, after Dutch explorer Maarten Gerritsz Vries, the first recorded European to explore the area. The strait between Urup and Simushir is known as Bussol Strait, after the French word for "compass", which was the name of one of La Pérouse's vessels. This French mariner explored the area of the Kuril Islands in 1787. Urup consists of four major groups of active or dormant stratovolcanos:
Kolokol Group, with a height of has erupted as recently as 1973.
Rudakov, with a height of has a, funnel-like crater containing a lake
Tri Sestry, with a height of has flanks cut by deep ravines and has numerous hot springs.
Gora Ivao, with a height of is the highest point on the island. The southeast-most cone bisects a glacial valley, forming a lake.
Despite its temperate latitude, the cold Oyashio Current and powerful Aleutian Low combine to give Urup a subarctic climate, that is close to a polar climate with mild, foggy summers and cold, snowy winters. In reality the climate resembles the subpolar oceanic climate of the Aleutian Islands much more than the hypercontinental climate of Siberia proper or Manchuria, but the February mean of is well below the limit of "oceanic" climates. Urup, like all the Kuril islands, experiences extremely strong seasonal lag, with the highest temperatures in August and September, the lowest in February and temperatures typically in fact warmer at the autumn equinox than at the summer solstice.
Urup was originally inhabited by the Ainu, the native peoples of the Kurils, Sakhalin and Hokkaidō. The first recorded visit by Europeans was in 1643, when a ship of the Dutch East India Company commanded by Maarten Gerritsz Vries landed, probably seeking furs. It appears on an official map showing the territories of Matsumae Domain, a feudal domain of Edo periodJapan dated 1644, and these holdings were officially confirmed by the Tokugawa shogunate in 1715. Administration of the island came under the Matsumae domain’s regional office location on Kunashir from 1756. Russian fur traders appeared in the late 18th century, hunting sea otter and seizing foreign ships in the area. There were clashes between the Russians and the Ainu in 1772, and the Russians left for a time, but soon returned. G.F. Muller’s Voyages & Découvertes faites par les Russes contained a list and description of the Kuril Islands, including Urup whose people were said to trade with the Japanese but were not under their control. A small Russian presence was established on Urup by the fur trader Ivan Chernyi in 1768, acting on instructions from the governor of Siberia. During the 1770s it was the base for attempts to establish trade with the Japanese on Yezo which came to an end when it was destroyed by a tsunami in June 1780. During the decade following 1795, a party of 40 Russian men and women under Zvezdochetov established on Urup a colony baptized "Slavorossiia". In 1801, the Japanese government officially claimed control of the island, incorporating it into Ezo Province. This led to a series of clashes with Imperial Russia over Urup and the other Kurils, and sovereignty initially passed to Russia under the terms of the Treaty of Shimoda in 1855. The same year, in an effort to find the Russian fleet in the Pacific Ocean during the Crimean War, a French-British naval force reached the port of Hakodate, and sailing further north, landed on Urup, taking official possession of the island as "l'Isle de l'Alliance" and nominating a local Aleut inhabitant as provisional governor. The Treaty of Paris restituted the island to Russian control. Three whaleships have been wrecked near or on the island: one in 1853 and two in 1855. On the night of 27–28 April 1853, the ship Susan, of Nantucket, was stove by ice and sank in Bussol Strait while attempting to enter the Sea of Okhotsk. Two men were lost, one drowning and the other perishing on the ice. The remaining twenty-five crew members crowded into two whaleboats and reached Urup on the afternoon of 29 April. Here they spent eight days before being rescued by the barqueBlack Warrior, of New London. On 13 May 1855, the ships King Fisher, and Enterprise, both of New Bedford, were wrecked on the island while attempting to pass through Vries Strait into the Sea of Okhotsk. All hands were saved. Under the Treaty of Saint Petersburg, sovereignty passed to the Empire of Japan along with the rest of the Kuril islands. The island was formerly administered as part of Uruppu District of Nemuro Subprefecture of Hokkaidō. The remaining local inhabitants were transferred to Kamchatka, according to their will, and replaced by Japanese colonists.
During World War II, all civilian inhabitants of the island were relocated to the Japanese home islands, and towards the end of the war, the Imperial Japanese Army stationed approximately 6,000 troops on Uruppu, including the IJA 129th Independent Mixed Brigade, 5th Independent Tank Company, 23rd Independent AA Company, 80th Airfield Battalion and 6th Disembarkation Unit. During the Invasion of the Kuril Islands by the Soviet Union after the end of World War II, Japanese forces on Uruppu surrendered without resistance. In 1952, upon signing the Treaty of San Francisco, Japan renounced its claim to the island. Soviet Border Troops occupied the former Japanese military facilities. As early as the 1950s, a P-14 radar "Tall King" VHF air defense radar existed on the far northeastern tip of Urup Island. The troops were withdrawn upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the co-located airfield was turned into a bombing range. The island is now uninhabited and is administered as part of the Sakhalin Oblast of the Russian Federation.
