HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM — Analysts cite an effort to strengthen Vietnam’s South China Sea territorial claims as a key reason Hanoi welcomed Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this month, despite potential fallout from links to Moscow in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

They also say Russian investment in offshore oil and gas reserves off Vietnam’s coast in the South China shows Hanoi strengthening its territorial claims.

Vietnam and Russia signed 11 agreements during the visit. They included, according to the Kremlin, granting an investment license for a hydrocarbon block off Vietnam’s southeastern coast to Zarubezhneft, a state-owned Russian oil and gas firm with a history of joint ventures with Vietnam.

Ian Storey, senior fellow at Singapore’s ISEAS Yusof-Ishak Institute, told VOA that Vietnam wants to expand its oil and gas operations with Russia inside its exclusive economic zone for two reasons.

“First, the resources in the fields being worked by Vietsovpetro [a Russian-Vietnamese oil and gas joint venture] are running low and it’s time to start operations in new blocks,” Storey wrote over email on June 25, referring to an existing oil partnership.

“Second,” he wrote, “Vietnam wants to internationalize the energy projects in its EEZ because it adds legitimacy to its jurisdictional claims in the South China Sea.”

Storey added that although there have been reports of Hanoi making an arms purchase by using funds from the joint oil enterprise Rusvietpetro, it is unlikely that the leaders settled plans for a weapons sale during the visit.

“While there have been reports that Russia is considering providing loans to Vietnam to buy military hardware using the profits from their joint venture in Siberia, it is unclear whether the two sides have reached a final agreement,” Storey wrote. The New York Times reported on a leaked March 2023 document from Vietnam’s Finance Ministry that outlined plans for Hanoi to purchase Russian weapons using loans from Rusvietpetro.

“The absence of Russian Defence Minister [Andrei] Belousov from Putin’s entourage to Vietnam suggests they have not,” he wrote.

Protecting disputed waters

Although Vietnamese territory stretches 370 kilometers off its coast according to international law, China claims the vast majority of the South China Sea with its disputed so-called nine-dash line delineating its claims in the sea.

Ray Powell, director of the Sea Light Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation at Stanford University, wrote over WhatsApp on June 27 that the block licensed to Zarubezhneft “appears to be inside” the nine-dash line.

Nguyen The Phuong, a maritime security expert and Ph.D. candidate at the University of New South Wales Canberra, told VOA during a call on June 26 that the key takeaway from Putin’s visit is Hanoi’s intention to secure its territorial integrity.

“Vietnam wants Russia to have more presence in the South China Sea because, different from the United States or Western countries, the presence of Russia will not infuriate China,” Phuong said. “It could somehow prevent China from going overboard, from being overly aggressive.”

Alexander Vuving, professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, said it is important for Hanoi to maintain strong ties with Moscow after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

“The Ukraine war is pushing Russia closer to China, and that is the Vietnamese nightmare,” Vuving said during a Zoom call with VOA on June 27, noting that Moscow is Hanoi’s leading partner to counter Chinese aggression in the South China Sea.

“From Vietnam’s perspective, they need Russia,” he said.

Vietnam is attempting to diversify its military equipment away from Russia, which has been its primary supplier, and it is not clear whether the two sides agreed on an arms sale during this visit. Nevertheless, Russia remains Hanoi’s top option to update its aging military arsenal, Vuving said.

“[Vietnam] is still trying to buy arms from Russia for many reasons,” he said. “The price is not so high like some other alternative sources but there’s also the question of the issue of trust – Vietnam would trust Russia,” Vuving said.

That trust comes from a long history of support from the former Soviet Union and later Russia, Nguyen Hong Hai, senior lecturer at Hanoi’s Vinuniversity, told VOA. Along with military aid to support Vietnam’s fights for independence, the Soviet Union and Russia helped to bring the country out of poverty and most of Vietnam’s top leaders trained there, Hai said.

“For the generation who lived during that period of time, they still have very fond memories of the Soviet Union’s and Russian assistance to Vietnam,” Hai said June 25 by Zoom.

Some see dangers

Even with the historic connection, some point to the dangers of welcoming Putin after the invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s visits to China and North Korea.

“This trip was made right after Putin visited [Chinese President] Xi Jinping and [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Un. The two most brutal dictators in East Asia,” Tran Anh Quan, a Ho Chi Minh City-based social activist wrote to VOA in Vietnamese over Telegram.

“If Putin can link up with Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, and To Lam, it will form an alliance of tyrants of the world’s major dictatorial states,” Quan said, referring to former public security minister To Lam, who became president in May.

Quan said he has not seen much response from the Vietnamese public to Putin’s Hanoi visit.

He said many are afraid to speak out in the current political environment and the public is more focused on the case of Thich Minh Tue – a monk who is not part of a state-sanctioned Buddhist group and became famous for walking barefoot across the country before he was detained by police in early June.

“Vietnam is increasingly suppressing critical voices, so people dare to speak out less than before,” Quan said.

Zachary Abuza, Southeast Asia expert and professor at the National War College in Washington, also noted the negative image Putin’s visit casts, adding that Russia’s war on Ukraine highlights the degradation of international laws, crucial to Vietnam, given its territorial tensions with neighboring China.

“The optics of it are terrible,” he told VOA on June 17. “This is the leader who is trying to upend the international rules-based order and change borders through the use of force. … The legal rationale that Russia and Putin have come up with for the invasion of Ukraine is really dangerous for Vietnam.”

Still, Hai said that although Vietnam and Ukraine are two small nations neighboring larger powers, it is too simplistic to compare the relationships between Vietnam and China with Ukraine and Russia.

“[Vietnam] has coexisted with China for over 4,000 years and understands its neighbor well,” he said, while noting the countries continue to have territorial disputes and had a border war in 1979.

“Since normalizing relations in 1991, the two countries have managed their relationship effectively,’’ Hai said. ‘’Both nations aim to avoid conflict.”

Further, he added that Hanoi does not “take sides” with Russia, and when leaders express their debt to the Soviet Union, that includes its former republic, Ukraine.

“In the joint statement between Vietnam and Russia during the Putin visit … Vietnam was very careful to show it does not side with Russia,” Hai said.
…

washington — Russian courts last month issued arrest warrants for three journalists who are in exile, in a move that analysts say is designed to harass critics outside the country’s borders.

A Moscow court on June 17 ordered the arrests of Ekaterina Fomina and Roman Anin on charges of spreading what the Kremlin views as false information about the Russian military.

In a separate case on June 27, a court issued an arrest warrant for Farida Kurbangaleyeva on charges of justifying terrorism and spreading what Moscow views as false information about the Russian military.

Kurbangaleyeva has reported for Russian and international channels and runs a YouTube channel where she interviews Ukrainian and Russian politicians, according to reports.

The case involving Fomina stems from a 2022 documentary she worked on at the investigative outlet IStories, which Anin founded. In the documentary, a Russian soldier confessed to killing a Ukrainian civilian.

“If you’re openly speaking against the current Russian regime, you can’t be safe anywhere,” Fomina told VOA. “We can’t say that we can continue our normal life.”

Since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has stepped up repressive tactics against journalists inside and outside the country, say watchdogs. And while arrests in absentia are less severe than other forms of harassment that Moscow is accused of carrying out, like poisoning and surveillance, experts say they’re still a cog in the transnational repression machine.

Such warrants serve to both intimidate exiled journalists and signal to Russia’s domestic audience that criticism is not tolerated, according to Grady Vaughan of Freedom House in Washington.

“It does send the message that just because this person left Russia doesn’t mean we forgot about them,” Vaughn told VOA.

Russia is among at least 26 governments that have targeted journalists and critics overseas over the past decade, according to a 2023 report by Freedom House.

Karol Luczka, who covers Eastern Europe at the International Press Institute, believes the practice may be part of an effort “to satisfy on-paper internal management demands for a certain amount of repressed journalists, activists and other dissenting figures within a given time frame.”

Luczka mentioned that on Friday evenings, for example, Russia’s Ministry of Justice typically adds four or five names — often including a journalist — to the country’s list of so-called “foreign agents.”

Arrest warrants can also “contribute to discrediting journalists among [Russia’s] own population,” said Luczka, who is based in Vienna.

Russia’s Washington embassy did not immediately reply to VOA’s email requesting comment.

Earlier this year, Fomina spoke with VOA about the psychological toll of starting over in new cities and the legal threats that she has faced for more than six months.

The Russian journalist has lived in Europe since 2022 but she won’t publicly say where she’s based out of fear that Russian authorities may surveil her.

One of the hardest realizations for Fomina is that the arrest warrant will pose limitations on where she can safely travel — and report from — over concerns that certain governments could extradite her to Russia.

“I used to be an independent journalist, very flexible, very mobile, ready to fly in one hour if something happened,” she said. “Now, I’m really limited, and I can’t go to many countries.”

Fomina, who now works at the exiled Russian outlet TV Rain, said she’s concerned that the action might make it harder for her to find sources in Russia who are willing to speak with her.

She expects that a court will eventually try and convict her in absentia. Despite that, she remains undeterred.

“I truly believe that we can’t be silent,” she said. “I’m standing on my values.”

 
…

NATO will roll out “concrete ways” to accelerate Ukraine’s eventual membership in the Atlantic alliance during a summit next week in Washington. The summit will also address top security concerns amid Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine and challenges in the Indo-Pacific region. VOA State Department Bureau Chief Nike Ching has the story, narrated by Elizabeth Cherneff.
…

paris — France on Wednesday expelled an Iranian suspected of influence peddling on behalf of Tehran and having links to the Revolutionary Guard’s ideological army, his lawyer and Iranian officials said.

The deportation of Bashir Biazar, reportedly a former senior figure in state television in Iran, frustrated Paris-based activists who last month filed a torture complaint against him.

Biazar had been held in administrative detention since the beginning of June and was subject to a deportation order from the French interior ministry.

Mohammad Mahdi Rahimi, the head of public relations for the office of the Iranian president, wrote on X that Biazar “has been released and is on his way back to his homeland.”

He said Biazar had been “illegally arrested and imprisoned in France a few weeks ago.”

But a representative of the French interior ministry, speaking at a hearing earlier Wednesday, said Biazar was an “agent of influence, an agitator who promotes the views of the Islamic Republic of Iran and, more worryingly, harasses opponents of the regime.”

The representative accused Biazar of filming journalists from Iranian opposition media in September in front of the Iranian consulate in Paris after an arson attack on the building.

French authorities also accused him of posting messages on social networks in connection with the war between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza in which he denounced “Zionist dogs.”

During the hearing, his lawyer Rachid Lemoudaa said that the expulsion order was based on assumptions and that his client’s comments fell within the scope of “freedom of expression.”

“I have never been made aware of any threat whatsoever” posed by Biazar, he added.

Biazar has been described by the London-based Iran International television channel as a former official for Iranian state broadcaster IRIB.

Iranian state media have described him as a “cultural figure.”

The case has emerged at a time of heightened tensions between Paris and Tehran, with three French citizens, described by France as “state hostages,” still imprisoned in Iran.

A fourth French detainee, Louis Arnaud, held in Iran since September 2022, was suddenly released last month.

Activist group Iran Justice and victims of human rights violations filed the torture complaint against Biazar last month in Paris.

It accuses Biazar of complicity in torture because of his past work with IRIB, describing him as a former director of production there.

The complaint referred to the regular broadcasts by Iranian state television of statements by, and even interviews with, Iranian or foreign prisoners, which activists regard as forced confessions.

“It is incomprehensible … that no legal proceedings have been initiated” against Biazar, Chirinne Ardakani, the Paris-based lawyer behind the complaint, told AFP.

She said there were “serious indications” implicating Biazar “in the production, recording and broadcasting of forced confessions obtained clearly under torture.”

“Nothing is clear in this case,” she added.

The French citizens still held in Iran are Cecile Kohler, a teacher, and her partner Jacques Paris, detained since May 2022, and another man identified only as Olivier.

Kohler appeared on Iranian television in October 2022 giving comments activists said amounted to a forced confession.

Amnesty International describes Kohler as “arbitrarily detained … amidst mounting evidence Iran’s authorities are holding her hostage to compel specific action[s] by French authorities.”
…

Turkey’s bid to join the BRICS trading group is likely a topic discussed between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the two-day Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Kazakhstan on Wednesday. As Dorian Jones reports from Istanbul, the bid has Erdogan playing a delicate balancing act in his relations with both Washington and Moscow.
…

Paris — The far-right National Rally (RN) is the only party capable of winning an absolute majority in France’s legislative elections, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said Wednesday, urging voters to block their rise to power.  

Attal admitted four days ahead of the polls that many French voters would have to hold their nose and vote for parties that they do not support in order to take control of the government.   

The RN dominated the first round of polls, presenting the party of Marine Le Pen with the prospect of forming the government and her protege Jordan Bardella, 28, taking the post of premier in a tense “cohabitation” with President Emmanuel Macron.   

But over 200 candidates from the left and the center this week dropped out of three-way races in the second round of the contest, sacrificing their hopes to prevent the RN winning the seat.   

“There is one bloc that is able to have an absolute majority (in the National Assembly) and it’s the extreme right,” Attal told France Inter radio.   

“On Sunday evening, what’s at stake in the second round is to do everything so that the extreme right does not have an absolute majority,” he added.   

“It is not nice for some French to have to block… by using a vote that they did not want to,” he said.  

“I say it’s our responsibility to do this,” he added.    

An absolute majority of 289 seats is needed in the 577 seat National Assembly for a party to form a government on its own. But Le Pen has said that the RN will try if it gets any more than 270 seats by winning over other deputies.   

“At the end of this second round, either power will be in the hands of a far-right government, or power will be in parliament. I am fighting for this second scenario,” said Attal.   

One option that is the subject of increasing media attention is the possibility that rather than a far-right government France could be ruled by a broad coalition of pro-Macron centrists, the traditional right, Socialists and Greens.   

But Attal was non-committal: “I did not speak about a coalition. I do not want to impose on the French a coalition that they did not choose.”   

Former prime minister Edouard Philippe, still an influential voice in the pro-Macron camp, told TF1 TV in his constituency on Sunday he would be voting for a Communist candidate to stop the far right.   

He said that after the election he would support a new parliamentary majority that could span “conservative right to the social democrats” but not include the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI). 
…

…

…

…

London — Britons look set to elect a new government by landslide as the country prepares to head to the polls on Thursday July 4. The vote comes amid weak economic growth and struggling public services, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the war in Gaza among the major foreign policy challenges lying ahead for the next administration.

The current opposition Labour Party under Keir Starmer is polling around 20% ahead of the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives, who have been in power for the past 14 years, a period that witnessed Britain’s bumpy exit from the European Union and a much-criticized response to the coronavirus pandemic.

“There is clearly widespread and very deep dissatisfaction with the Conservatives,” said Ursula Hackett, a political expert at Royal Holloway, University of London. “The question there is the cost of living, but I also think it’s a sense of scandal and sleaze,” she told the Associated Press.

While Labour is in a buoyant mood ahead of the election, analysts caution that voter dissatisfaction appears to extend across the entire political spectrum — with little evidence of positive enthusiasm for the main opposition or its leader, Starmer.

Voter dissatisfaction

The town of Dartford, east of London, is known as a “bellwether” constituency. Its voters have picked a candidate from the winning party of every general election since 1964, making it a useful gauge of national political feeling.

Eighteen-year-old Yasmine Nicholls, who volunteers at a local food bank, is preparing to vote for the first time — but is already disillusioned.

“The people of England don’t actually get to decide on what is going to happen in the country. … We don’t really get to have a say in a lot of things that happen, we just have to follow,” she said.

Retired store worker Linda Skinner, who is 64, echoed that sentiment. “Governments are no longer for the people. To be honest, I haven’t voted for a long time. Our votes don’t count. The same people basically get in each time, Labour, Conservative, they are all the same,” she told AP.

For some, that lack of trust has been driven by recent political scandals.

“Across the board. I don’t trust any of them. Especially when our (former) Prime Minister Boris Johnson lied. He lied straight across the board. He went to a party when everybody was in lockdown, and then from that point onwards, that’s it, that was enough for me,” said pensioner Hilmi Hilmi.

Scandal

Johnson — who resigned last year following a series of scandals, including the breaking of COVID-19 lockdown rules — is one of five different Conservative prime ministers over the past eight turbulent years.

Analysts say the current Prime Minister Sunak is struggling to shake off that image amid new investigations by Britain’s Gambling Commission into Conservative members placing bets on the timing of the upcoming election.

Weak economy

The opposition Labour Party under Starmer is well ahead in most polls. But he would inherit a struggling economy, noted Anand Menon, a professor of international politics at Kings College London.

“We have crumbling public services after, in some cases, years of underinvestment. We’ve got very, very low median wage growth over the last 10 to 15 years. So we’ve got a public that is increasingly worried about the state of the economy.

“At the same time, we have very little in the way of money to address these problems. The tax burden is the highest it’s been since the end of the Second World War. Debt repayments are high, and crucially, growth is very, very low. One of the first big questions to face a Starmer government is going to be, how are you going to raise the money to fix our crumbling public services?” Menon told VOA.

Global challenges

The next government will also face a daunting list of global challenges. There is uncertainty over future Western military aid for Ukraine, as Kyiv battles to regain lost ground from invading Russian forces.

Amid huge loss of life in Gaza, members of the Labour Party are demanding that Starmer be more critical of the Israeli government’s actions. Starmer has said he wants to recognize a Palestinian state as part of a wider peace process.

China continues to pose an economic and geopolitical challenge to the West. But Britain’s allies shouldn’t expect a dramatic change of foreign policy, said analyst Menon.

“One of the striking things about British politics at the moment is that over the two big crises of our time, Gaza and Ukraine, there’s very little, if any, difference between the positions adopted by the big parties. So, I don’t think there’ll be much of a change,” Menon said.

Small parties

Britain’s smaller parties could play a big role in deciding the election outcome and the scale of Labour’s expected victory. The center-left Liberal Democrats have a chance of pushing the Conservatives into third place.

The anti-immigration, pro-Brexit Reform party could also peel off right-leaning Conservative voters. Reform leader Nigel Farage was widely criticized by other parties after saying the West provoked Russia into invading Ukraine, while party activists were recently filmed undercover using racist insults, drawing condemnation from across the political spectrum.
…

Britain is set to hold a general election on Thursday, July 4, with polls suggesting the country is likely to elect a new leader. How might that change Britain’s stance on key issues like Russia’s war on Ukraine? Henry Ridgwell has more from London.
…

PARIS — Candidates in France on Tuesday faced a deadline to register for the run-off round of a high-stakes parliamentary election, as President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist camp and a left-wing alliance scrambled to prevent the far right from taking power.

On Sunday, French people go to polls for the decisive final round of the snap election Macron called after his camp received a drubbing in European elections last month.

His gamble appears to have backfired, with the far-right National Rally (RN) of Marine Le Pen scoring a victory in the first round of voting last Sunday.

Macron’s centrists trailed in third place behind the left-wing New Popular Front alliance.

Faced with the prospect of the far right taking power in France for the first time since the country’s occupation by Nazi Germany during World War II, Macron’s camp has begun cooperating with the New Popular Front alliance which includes the hard-left France Unbowed party.

The rivals are hoping that tactical voting will prevent the RN winning the 289 seats needed for an absolute majority.

Macron has called for a “broad” democratic coalition against the far right, with the political crisis overshadowing France’s preparations for the Olympic Games this summer.

Speaking to broadcaster TF1 on Monday evening, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal once again urged voters not to give the far-right an absolute majority.

“That would be catastrophic for the French,” he said, adding that the far-right would fuel divisions in society.

Third-place candidates who qualified for the second round have been urged to drop out to present a united front against the far right.

The deadline to decide whether to stand down is 6 pm Tuesday. According to a provisional count by AFP, more than 150 left-wing or centrist candidates have already dropped out.           

“Only a strong republican front, uniting the left, center and conservatives, can keep the far right at bay and prevent France from tipping over,” daily newspaper Le Monde said in an editorial.

Le Pen has urged voters to give the RN an absolute majority, which would see Jordan Bardella, the 28-year-old RN chief with no governing experience, become prime minister.

But most projections show the RN falling short of an absolute majority — although the final outcome remains far from certain.

The RN garnered 33 percent of the vote last Sunday, compared to 28 percent for the New Popular Front alliance and just over 20 percent for Macron’s camp.

Speaking on television on Monday night, Bardella derided efforts by Macron’s camp and the left-wing coalition to put up a united front, suggesting that the “dishonorable” alliance had been formed out of desperation.

He accused the French president of coming “to the rescue of a violent extreme-left movement” he himself had denounced just days ago.

Macron convened a cabinet meeting Monday to decide a further course of action.

“Let’s not be mistaken. It’s the far right that’s on its way to the highest office, no one else,” he said at the meeting, according to one participant.

The emotion was palpable, with several ministers dropping out of the race.

“We’ve known happier meetings,” one minister told Le Monde.

Analysts say the most likely outcome of the snap election is a hung parliament that could lead to months of political paralysis and chaos.

With a total of 76 candidates elected in the first round, the final composition of the 577-seat National Assembly will be clear only after the second round.

The second round will see a three-way or two-way run-off in the remainder of the seats to be decided, although a tiny number of four-way run-offs are also possible.
…