After his unusual visit to North Korea, Putin signs eleven agreements with Vietnam and leaves his mark in Asia

Vietnam and Russia signed this Thursday, during the official visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to Hanoi, eleven cooperation agreements in matters of energy, science and education and signed a joint declaration in which they committed to deepening their historic relationship.

The agreements were signed at the Presidential Palace in Hanoi in the presence of Putin and the country’s president, To Lam, and among them up to four stand out in educational matters, both between government organizations and universities, as well as documents on nuclear energy and disease prevention, according to the Vietnamese press.

Likewise, they signed a memorandum of understanding for cooperation between the state-owned company Petrovietnam and Novatek, the largest independent producer of natural gas in Russia.

According to what Putin published in the Vietnamese Communist Party’s newspaper regarding his visit, the Russian gas company Novatek plans gas projects in the Asian country, while the state nuclear corporation Rosatom plans to create a center for nuclear energy and technologies.

The two sides signed another agreement between Vietnamese asset manager BVIM and the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a sovereign investment fund established by Moscow in 2011, as well as other scientific and judicial cooperation.

President To Lam also announced the signing of a joint statement byto “deepen” the strategic cooperation relationship existing between both countries, without providing more details for now.

“I firmly believe that with the success of President Putin’s visit to Vietnam and the determination of our leaders, relations between the two countries will continue to strengthen in the future,” he said.

Putin, who arrived in Vietnam at dawn on Thursday after an unusual trip to North Korea, (the first in 24 years) a country with which he agreed the day before to offer mutual military assistance in the event of aggression, travels with the foreign ministers. , Sergei Lavrov; Energy, Sergei Tsiviliev; the Deputy Minister of Defense, Alexandr Fomin; and the director of the federal agency for military-technical cooperation, Alexandr Mijéev.

The Russian leader also met this Thursday in Hanoi with the general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, Nguyen Phu Trong, the most powerful man in the countryand he plans, among other events, to attend a banquet in his honor before leaving the surrounding Asian country at night.

After concluding his state visit to his ally North Korea, Putin arrived early in Vietnam in the hope of shore up crucial partnerships in the region while fighting a protracted war in Ukraine.

Putin’s war in Ukraine has left him isolated from the West, and his need for ammunition to fight that war has brought him closer to North Korea and its leader, Kim Jong Un. The two leaders have been united by their common historical opponent, the United States, and on Wednesday revived a Cold War-era mutual defense commitment between their nations.

In Vietnam, by contrast, Putin met with officials who They have recently forged deeper ties with Washington. But Moscow has long been Hanoi’s main source of weaponsand is willing to maintain that position.

It is Putin’s fifth visit to Vietnam and follows last year’s trips by President Joe Biden and President Xi Jinping of China, two leaders who they asked for assurances from Hanoi that it would not side with the other.

For Vietnam, Putin’s trip is an opportunity to solidify ties with Russia, its most important defense partner. Although it has improved relations with the United States, Vietnam was still seeking last year secret ways to buy Russian military equipment in violation of US sanctions.

Washington has rebuked Hanoi for inviting the Russian leader, saying: “No country should give Putin a platform to promote his war of aggression and allow him to normalize his atrocities.”

This week, Vietnam’s newly installed president, To Lam, told the local Russian envoy that Hanoi “always considers Russia one of the priority partners in its foreign policy”.

With information from EFE and The New York Times