The steady expansion of Vietnam-Russia economic relations was disrupted by the imposition of Western sanctions against Russia in 2022. As shown in Figure 1, bilateral trade volume plunged significantly in 2022, with Vietnam’s exports to Russia registering a nearly 50 percent decrease. Russian officials noted that this was due to the logistical, payment, and investment issues prompted by the wide-ranging Western sanctions designed to restrict Russia’s economic interactions with the outside world.

Since 2022, the Vietnamese and Russian governments have taken concerted steps to mitigate the challenges imposed by Western sanctions, with a particular focus on the improvement of logistical arrangements. For instance, Vietnam and Russia opened a direct shipping route from Vietnamese ports to Vladivostok in May 2022 while the Russian transport company TransContainer launched a railway transportation service for consumer goods from Hanoi to Moscow. With the jointly proclaimed goal of raising Vietnamese-Russian trade volumes to US $10 billion by 2025, Hanoi hosted the 24th Intergovernmental Commission on Trade, Economic, Scientific, and Technical Cooperation in April 2023. Vietnamese and Russian participants in the forum discussed potential avenues of continued economic cooperation and signed new agreements on trade, energy, industrial infrastructure, and tourism, though Vietnam has been also careful not to openly breach Western sanctions against Russia since 2022. The recent Vietnam-Russia summit on 20 June 2024 also produced bilateral agreements designed to further expand economic cooperation between the two nations.

Despite these efforts, the latest data from 2023 (shown in Figure 1) appear to suggest that bilateral trade has not recovered from the disruptive effects of Western sanctions: nearly 50 percent of Vietnam’s total exports to Russia vanished. However, it is important to note here that bilateral trade data usually does not take into account indirect trade through transit countries. For example, while Russia’s oil exports to EU member states registered a dramatic decrease in 2022, India’s oil exports to Europe more than doubled between 2022 and 2023. Given that India is a major importer of Russian oil, it is suggested that Russia’s loss of direct oil export to Europe is (at least partially) compensated by its indirect export to Europe via India.

The preliminary trade statistics for the year 2023 suggest that Vietnamese companies might have used similar tactics. For instance, bilateral trade turnover between Vietnam and Kazakhstan dramatically increased by 85.4 percent in 2023. Since Russia and EAEU member states share a common multilateral market, Vietnamese companies might have developed alternative indirect routes to export their products to Russia via these transit countries around Russia. Indeed, Vietnam and Kazakhstan signed twelve new agreements to bolster bilateral relations in August 2023. Further longitudinal research is needed to investigate the extent to which the EAEU’s common market has enabled the Russian economy to enhance its resilience against the disruptive effects of Western sanctions.

Societal Relations

Despite the relative decline of societal ties between Vietnam and Russia after the end of the Cold War, Vietnamese citizens continued to view Russia and President Putin favorably in the 2010s. The Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Survey in 2017 showed that 83percent of Vietnamese citizens had favorable views of Russia, while 79 percent of respondents expressed their confidence in President Putin’s ability to make the right decisions in international affairs. Even after February 2022, Vietnamese officials, experts, and media commentators largely refrained from directly criticizing Russia. Existing research shows that the collective memories of the Soviet Union as a main supporter of Vietnam’s independence from Western imperialism continue to underline Russia’s soft power in Vietnam (and in other Southeast Asian nations).
In the 20th century, Hanoi and Moscow maintained close educational ties, and many top Vietnamese leaders (including Ho Chi Minh) were trained in the Soviet Union. Over time, Vietnam and Russia have developed various joint educational cooperation programs led by the Vietnam Ministry of Education and Training and the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education as well as the Rossotrudnichestvo. Bilateral education cooperation continued after 2022, with the Russian government allocating 1,000 scholarship positions to attract Vietnamese students. However, among Vietnamese youth, Russia no longer appears to be a popular destination for the pursuit of higher education and vocational training. Official data for the 2019-2020 academic year shows that the majority of 190,000 Vietnamese students studying abroad were enrolled at Western educational institutions in Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and the US. The number of Vietnamese students studying in Russia as of 2021 remained rather low at around 5,000, with the possibility of further decrease due to the economic and financial restrictions imposed by Western sanctions.

As a part of Vietnamese President Nguyen Xuan Phuc’s visit to Moscow in December 2021, Hanoi and Moscow signed the Cultural Cooperation Program between the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism of Vietnam and the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation for the period 2022-2024, envisioning the organization of Vietnam and Russia Cultural Days in both countries. The imposition of Western sanctions since February 2022 seemingly derailed these plans. In 2022, no large-scale Russian cultural event was organized in Vietnam. In 2023, however, bilateral cultural cooperation fully resumed and the Vietnam and Russia Cultural Days were successfully held in Moscow in April and in Hanoi, as well as in Ha Long, in July. In November 2023, the Vietnam-Russia Friendship Association and the Russian Consulate in Da Nang also organized a joint cultural event. Along with the resumption of Vietnam-Russia cultural events, bilateral tourism cooperation also restarted. In August 2023, Vietnam launched a 45-day visa-free visit scheme for Russian citizens and enhanced its tourism cooperation with Russia. In February 2024, Russia’s flagship carrier Aeroflot resumed direct flights from Moscow to Ho Chi Minh City and Vietnam was one of the top ten foreign travel destinations for Russian citizens in that month.

Overall, the recent developments noted above suggest that bilateral educational, cultural, and tourism cooperation between Vietnam and Russia has largely gone back to “business as usual” in 2023. Though Vietnamese-Russian societal ties may not be as extensive as they were during the Cold War, shared historical memories appear to serve as an anchor that stabilizes bilateral societal interactions in turbulent times.

Conclusion: Managing the Russia-China-America Triangle?

Despite the relative decline in bilateral trade volume, President Putin’s recent visit to Hanoi and other developments in Vietnam-Russia relations demonstrate that political and societal/cultural ties between the two nations remain resilient. That said, given that Vietnam’s bamboo diplomacy is operating in an increasingly complex terrain of multi-alignment involving Moscow, Beijing, Washington, and others, US foreign policy actions may play a key role in (re)shaping the further evolution of Vietnam-Russia relations in the years to come. Though Vietnam deepened its security ties with the US in recent years, Washington’s divisive rhetoric to define global politics as an epic struggle between Western-style liberal democracies and non-liberal regimes is likely to limit the depth of Vietnam-US relations. Indeed, Vietnam was not included in the US-led Summit for Democracy while several other ASEAN states were invited. Framing the military confrontation between Russia and Ukraine as a binary conflict of “democracy vs autocracy” is also likely to have similar antagonizing effects on a great number of Global South nations that do not subscribe to such a worldview. Most recently, Vietnam sent its Deputy Foreign Minister to the BRICS Foreign Ministers meeting held in Nizhny Novgorod on 10-11 June but it did not participate in the Western-backed Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland.

In the wake of the growing bilateral and multilateral ties between Vietnam and Russia, American policymakers face a fundamental foreign policy dilemma. When Washington rebukes Vietnam’s deepening relationship with Russia, as it did in the face of President Putin’s recent visit to Hanoi, it may provoke resentment from Vietnamese policymakers who value the principle of autonomy and push them closer to Russia or China. If Washington remains silent, however, American acquiescence may inspire other Global South nations to defy Western wishes and pursue similar multi-alignment strategies. In this light, further research is needed to explore the dynamics of multi-alignment and their implications for US foreign policy in the post-Western world.