Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam)/Vietnam and Russia made a show of closeness this Thursday during Vladimir Putin’s official visit to Hanoi, in which they signed a dozen agreements, including energy, and committed to improving their defense cooperation, which cushions international isolation. from Moscow.
Putin landed in Hanoi early Thursday morning after passing through North Korea, a country with which he agreed on mutual military assistance in the event of an attack, and met with Vietnamese authorities during a day that ends his tour of Asia.
In what marks the first visit of the Russian leader to Vietnam in more than a decade, Putin and Vietnamese leaders, including President To Lam and the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Nguyen Phu Trong, the country’s highest authority, showed harmony when the thirtieth anniversary of the treaty that defines their relations since the dismemberment of the Soviet Union marks.
At the beginning of the day, the President of Vietnam announced that both countries will increase their defense cooperation and work together to contribute to international stability. “We will fight together against new and traditional challenges,” To Lam said at a press conference with Putin after their meeting at the Presidential Palace in Hanoi.
For his part, Putin stressed that both countries “firmly defend the principles of the supremacy of international law, sovereignty, non-interference in the internal affairs of other States and efforts on key international platforms.”
Vietnam, which in the last decade has maintained a foreign policy nicknamed “bamboo diplomacy” for its ability to maintain good relations with the great powers without taking sides, has abstained from four United Nations resolutions condemning the invasion of Ukraine. The Asian country has relied on Russia to purchase weapons in recent decades and its dependence in this area remains great, despite the fact that in recent years it has tried to diversify its suppliers of military equipment.
The Asian country has relied on Russia to purchase weapons in recent decades and its dependence in this area remains great.
Although the intention to increase bilateral cooperation in defense lacked details, Putin’s gesture and presence in Vietnam two years after the Ukrainian war returns the leader in part to the international scene, as it is a country that, Unlike North Korea, it maintains solid relations with both the United States and its allies and China.
Although Putin has an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for war crimes, Vietnam does not belong to this body, so it has no obligation to arrest the president. Vietnam, meanwhile, once again demonstrates its diplomatic flexibility with Putin’s visit, which he directs for his own benefit, after receiving the presidents of the United States and China, Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, last year.
China is Vietnam’s largest trading partner, which in turn receives help from the United States in its territorial disputes with Beijing in the South China Sea, while Washington looks for partners in the region to counteract the world’s second largest economy and diversify the supply chain. supply.
However, Vietnam managed the visit cautiously and without as much pomp as Pyongyang, and the eleven agreements that were announced this Thursday were initially of little weight. These include four on education, as well as documents on nuclear energy and health, and a memorandum of understanding between the state-owned company Petrovietnam and Novatek, Russia’s largest independent natural gas producer.
According to what Putin told the Vietnamese Communist Party 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. President To Lam also announced the signing of a vague joint declaration to “deepen” the existing strategic cooperative relationship between both countries.
“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,” he said.
Putin, who traveled to the country accompanied by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Energy Minister Sergei Tsivilov, among others, will attend a banquet in his honor before leaving.
With the visit to this country, which maintains a good relationship with the United States, Putin breaks the image of isolation that has accompanied him since the invasion of Ukraine. Analyst Carl Thayer indicated in an article on Wednesday that “Russia wants to demonstrate to the Western coalition that opposes its intervention in Ukraine that it is not isolated.”
Russia is today one of the seven countries with which Vietnam has a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership agreement, a closeness that the Russian Federation inherited from the USSR. Soviet arms support for communist Vietnam was essential in its wars against France and the United States, a privileged relationship that continued throughout the 1980s, when Soviet aid propelled Vietnam to deal with postwar misery and international isolation. In the words of Deputy Prime Minister Tran Hog Ha to his Russian counterpart Dmitry Chernyshenko at a meeting last year: “Vietnam will never forget the support of the Russian people.”
One of the most recent examples of Vietnam’s aversion to taking sides is the war in Ukraine
In the current context, Vietnam remains impartial in the face of the war in Ukraine. Academic Yusof Ishak Ian Storey explained in an article in Fulcrum Last March, a large part of the Vietnamese diplomatic elite attributed the conflict to a joint failure of the three major international actors. “The West for provoking Russia with NATO’s eastern expansion, including the prospect of Ukrainian entry; Russia for overacting in the post-Soviet space, and Ukraine for its failure to address its legitimate security concerns with Russia,” he said. .
Although its commercial relations with Russia are much less important than those with the United States and China, they focus on strategic sectors such as security and energy. Vietnam has relied on Russia to purchase weapons in recent decades and its dependence remains great, despite the fact that in recent years it has tried to diversify its suppliers of military equipment. In addition, both countries share interests in the energy sector, with the exploitation of oil and gas fields on the Vietnamese coast by Russian companies.
