Putin promises deeper ties with Vietnam during US-criticised visit

 

The leaders of Vietnam and Russia said they wanted to strengthen ties as the two met in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi.

Vietnamese President To Lam praised his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, congratulating him on his recent re-election.

Putin, for his part, said that strengthening the strategic partnership with the Southeast Asian country is one of Russia’s priorities.

His trip to Vietnam, which follows his lavish visit to North Korea, is being interpreted as a demonstration of the diplomatic support Russia still enjoys in the region.

“Congratulations to our comrade for receiving extraordinary support during the recent presidential election, underlining the trust of the Russian people,” President Lam said after Putin received a red carpet welcome.

The United States criticized the visit for providing President Putin with a platform to promote his war of aggression in Ukraine.

Vietnam still values ​​the historical ties it has with Russia even as it works to improve its relations with Europe and the United States.

Looming over a small park in Ba Dinh, Hanoi’s political district, a five-meter-tall statue of Lenin depicts the Russian revolutionary in a heroic pose. Every year, on his birthday, a delegation of high-ranking Vietnamese officials solemnly lay flowers and bow their heads before the statue, a gift from Russia when it was still the Soviet Union.

Vietnam’s ties with Russia are close and date back many decades, to the vital military, economic and diplomatic support provided by the Soviet Union to the new communist state of North Vietnam in the 1950s.

Vietnam described their relationship as “full of loyalty and gratitude.” After Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978 to oust the murderous Khmer Rouge regime, it was isolated and sanctioned by China and the West, and depended heavily on Soviet assistance. Many older Vietnamese, including the powerful Communist Party general secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, studied in Russia and learned the language.

Today, Vietnam’s economy has been transformed by its integration into global markets. Russia has lagged far behind China, Asia, the United States and Europe as a trading partner. But Vietnam still uses mostly Russian-made military equipment and relies on partnerships with Russian oil companies for oil exploration in the South China Sea.

The invasion of Ukraine represented a diplomatic challenge for Vietnam, which however it has so far managed to meet. He has chosen to abstain from various UN resolutions condemning Russia’s actions, but has maintained good relations with Ukraine and even sent some aid to Kiev. They also share the legacy of the Soviet era; thousands of Vietnamese worked and studied in Ukraine.

This is in line with Vietnam’s long-standing foreign policy principles of being friends with all but avoiding any formal alliance – what the Communist Party leadership now calls “bamboo diplomacy”, bending to the whipping winds of rivalry between great powers without being forced to take sides.

This is why Vietnam so readily improved its relations with the United States, a country against which its former leaders fought a long and destructive war, in the interests of seeking profitable markets for Vietnamese exports and balancing its close ties with its giant neighbor, China.

The United States has opposed President Putin’s official visit to Vietnam on the grounds that it undermines international efforts to isolate him, but they can hardly be surprised. Aside from special historical ties to Russia, public opinion in Vietnam about the war in Ukraine is more ambivalent than in Europe.

There is some admiration for Putin as a strongman who challenges the West, and a skepticism, fueled in part by comments on social media, about U.S. and European claims that they uphold international law.

This also applies to other Asian countries, where the war in Ukraine is seen as a distant crisis. In Thailand, for example, a historic military ally of the United States that sided with Russia during the Cold War, public opinion is as divided as in Vietnam. Thais also value the even older ties between its monarchy and Russia’s pre-revolutionary tsars, and the Thai government today maintains close ties with Russia, valuing the contribution that millions of Russians make to its tourism industry.

How long Vietnam will maintain its camaraderie with Vladimir Putin is less clear. It is already looking for alternative sources of military equipment, but ending its current dependence on Russia will take years.

A series of high-level resignations within the Communist Party recently suggest intense internal rivalries over the next generation of leaders and, potentially, the direction the country will take. But there is still no talk of abandoning the ambition of being friends of all and enemies of none. [BBC]

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