Vietnam’s imports of weapons last year slowed to a trickle as it worked to diversify supplies away from Russia, data released on Monday showed, while experts said the country could be vulnerable during a regional conflict.
Despite an estimated budget of more than US$1 billion annually for arms imports, last year it placed no new major orders, data released on Monday by defense think tank the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) showed.
The main delivery was a naval corvette donated by India, the data showed, making last year’s arms imports Vietnam’s lowest by volume since 2007 — other than 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Photo: Reuters
Amid rising tensions between China and Taiwan, and frequent skirmishes in the South China Sea between Chinese vessels and ships from other regional powers, Vietnam lacks enough modern weaponry to defend itself in a large-scale conflict, defense experts said.
“The disparity in conventional military power will increase in China’s favor if Vietnam continues to mark time,” said Carl Thayer, a senior expert in Vietnam security at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra.
The Vietnamese government declined to comment on the reasons for the apparent slowdown.
A top Vietnamese defense official in January said that the country had reached several deals at a military fair in December 2022, but the Vietnamese Ministry of Defense did not elaborate.
The lack of public deals might be the result of ongoing hard negotiations, with Vietnam considering competing offers, SIPRI senior researcher Siemon Wezeman said.
The Southeast Asian nation mostly needs warships, fighter jets and drones, Thayer and other experts said.
It operates air defense systems imported from Russia and Israel, some of which were first introduced more than 30 years ago, a 2019 report from the defense ministry said.
Hanoi is trying to improve its own military industry, but cannot yet produce large weapons, such as aircraft or ships.
Russia, for decades Vietnam’s top provider of weapons, markedly reduced its global arms exports last year, SIPRI data showed, and Vietnam has struggled to pay for Russian weapons without breaching US sanctions, two people briefed on the discussions said.
They declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Hanoi held its first international arms fair in 2022, saying publicly that it wanted to diversify its supplies from Moscow, confirming a shift that began after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, according to public data.
However, talks with other potential sellers have not yet produced visible results.
Israel, Vietnam’s No. 2 arms supplier, has not sold Hanoi any weapons in the past two years, SIPRI data showed, even though Israel’s global arms exports have increased in that period.
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