As the Russia–Ukraine war nears its fourth year, Moscow’s eastward pivot has accelerated amid ongoing sanctions from the United States, G7, and the European Union (EU), and its exclusion from Western markets and institutions. In Southeast Asia, ties with Russia have shifted from their traditional focus on defence exports and arms co-operation toward growing trade and energy partnerships with key regional states, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Vietnam.
These evolving ties offer an important moment to reassess Southeast Asia’s engagement with Russia and its broader strategic calculus in a fragmenting international order. For the region, maintaining relations with Moscow — despite mounting Western pressure — reflects a deliberate effort to preserve strategic flexibility and secure mutually beneficial partnerships. These ties are likely to deepen as great power competition intensifies and geopolitical uncertainty continues to rise.
Expanding partnerships on trade and energy
Between 2020 and 2024, Russia–ASEAN bilateral trade rose from C$19.8 billion to C$25.4 billion, reflecting steady growth despite the disruptions of war and sanctions (Figure 1). Over this period, however, Russia’s imports of many ASEAN products declined, especially key products such as electrical machinery and equipment, nuclear reactors and boilers, animal and vegetable oils, and rubber products (Figure 2). In contrast, ASEAN continued to expand its purchases of Russian goods — led primarily by mineral fuels, followed by fertilizers, iron and steel, and other metals and stones (Figure 3).
Following sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies in 2022 aimed at restricting Russia’s import of high-tech goods, Russia has increasingly turned to select Southeast Asian countries to reroute imports of critical electronics and industrial components.
Moscow has depended on intermediary hubs and shell companies across the region to access the Western-origin technologies used in its defence and weapons systems. In November 2025, for example, the U.S. Department of the Treasury identified Thailand-based Bentozer as having transshipped over 100 cargo loads of vital electronic components to Russia.
In response, G7 members in 2024 issued co-ordinated guidance urging governments and industries to tighten their due diligence and prevent the diversion of restricted goods to Russia through third-country intermediaries. U.S. President Donald Trump has since maintained Washington’s enhanced export controls and sanctions targeting the transfer of advanced technologies — including those related to artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and defence and aerospace.
Russian energy exports to Southeast Asia have also expanded rapidly, especially following the sanctions imposed by President Trump in October 2025 targeting major Russian energy firms, Rosneft and Lukoil. With the EU set to ban imports of Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) in just over a year (beginning in January 2027), the urgency for Moscow to find alternative markets will only intensify.
Between 2020 and 2024, ASEAN’s imports of Russian mineral fuels and energy products nearly doubled, rising from approximately C$5.91 billion to C$11.63 billion. Over this period, ASEAN member states together purchased more than C$42 billion in Russian energy commodities, including both refined and unrefined petroleum.
This surge has been driven by Moscow’s expanding energy partnerships with select Southeast Asian economies. Since 2022, several ASEAN member states have sharply increased their imports of Russian fuels. Indonesia’s purchases grew from C$255 million to C$1.52 billion at their peak in 2023, while Malaysia’s imports rose from C$721 million to C$2.83 billion over the same period (Figure 4). By May 2025, Malaysia had also imported 320,000 tonnes of Russian semi-refined crude and fuel oil — up from 190,000 tonnes the previous month. On October 19, reports surfaced of a U.S.-sanctioned Russian LNG vessel preparing for a ship-to-ship transfer off Malaysia’s coast as part of Moscow’s broader strategy to reroute energy exports through trusted Southeast Asian partners.
Meanwhile, Singapore — despite having publicly condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — remains Southeast Asia’s largest purchaser of Russian energy commodities. The city-state’s imports have more than tripled since 2020, rising from C$1.73 billion to over C$6 billion in 2024 (Figure 4). In April 2024, Singapore’s imports of Russian refined oil products reached a record one million tonnes. The city-state has also benefited from its role as a key trading and refining hub, blending the sanctioned Russian oil with other sources before redistributing the “blended product” at a margin.
This Russia–Southeast Asia energy co-operation is only expected to broaden in the coming years. Moscow has begun exploring energy infrastructure projects with several Southeast Asian partners through technology transfers and project development. This has included prospective nuclear development partnerships with Indonesia, Myanmar, and Vietnam, as well as hydropower collaboration with Cambodia and Laos.
Russia’s shrinking role in Southeast Asian arms trade
Unlike the growth seen in some areas of Russia-Southeast Asia trade, exports of Russian defence products to the region have declined overall. Russia had traditionally been Southeast Asia’s dominant arms supplier, providing close to one-third of the region’s arms imports at its peak in 2011, but its prominence began to wane after the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the subsequent imposition of Western sanctions. From 2011 to 2021, Russian arms exports to the region dropped sharply, from C$2 billion to C$124 million.
This decline accelerated following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, as Russia began redirecting weapons exports for domestic use and faced tightening legal and financial restrictions. The U.S.’s Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) further discouraged purchases by threatening penalties for third parties buying Russian defence systems. By 2023, the average share of Russian arms sales in the region had fallen to less than 10 per cent (Figure 5).
Rising competition from other exporters, such as China, Japan, South Korea, and the U.S., has also driven Southeast Asia’s diversification of defence procurement. India has sought to enter the region’s arms market as part of New Delhi’s growing efforts to advance India–Southeast Asia defence engagement. In 2024, India delivered its supersonic cruise missile to the Philippines as part of its C$520-million arms deal with Manila, marking New Delhi’s first substantial arms export to the region.
Even Vietnam, historically Moscow’s largest arms importer in the region, has begun diversifying its defence procurement. Between 1995 and 2014, 90 per cent of Vietnam’s arms imports originated from Russia. Between 2016 and 2021, this share dropped to about 70 per cent, reflecting the growing efforts of Hanoi, and several other Southeast Asian countries, to diversify amid Western sanctions and the war in Ukraine.
Russia and Vietnam: A strategic balancing act in the South China Sea
Russia’s expanding presence in Southeast Asia is not without complications. Vietnam, in particular, represents one of Moscow’s oldest and most comprehensive regional partnerships, built on Soviet-era ideological support, defence training, and decades of security and economic co-operation. However, this enduring relationship has, at times, generated friction with other major players — most notably China — in geopolitical flashpoints such as the South China Sea.
Although arms transfer between Russia and Vietnam has declined in recent years, co-operation in the energy sector remains robust and continues to expand in disputed maritime jurisdictions. Russia currently operates at least two state-owned energy companies within Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone, an area also claimed by China under Beijing’s disputed nine-dash line.
Despite its increasingly close strategic partnership with China, Russia maintains an official stance of neutrality in the South China Sea disputes. In practice, however, Russian–Vietnamese energy ventures have inadvertently helped bolster Vietnam’s maritime claims, heightening tensions with Beijing. Chinese coast guard vessels have frequently patrolled near these Russian energy projects, at times shadowing or issuing navigational warnings to service ships.
Moscow has also long served as a key supplier of critical military equipment to Vietnam, providing submarines equipped with anti-ship missiles, radar systems, and coastal defence artillery. These transfers, as part of the two countries’ decades-long defence linkages, have substantially enhanced Vietnam’s maritime surveillance and deterrence capabilities in the South China Sea. While not explicitly aimed at countering China, such capabilities have nevertheless strengthened Hanoi’s ability to manage and respond to Chinese incursions in the contested waters.
A calculus of strategic diversification
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — and the Western sanctions and isolation that followed — has accelerated Moscow’s pivot toward Southeast Asia in some areas, while reversing engagement in others. Through expanding trade and energy ties, Moscow has sought to reinforce its linkages with key regional states even as its long-standing role as Southeast Asia’s primary arms supplier continues to wane. For traditional partners like Vietnam, decades of defence co-operation have gradually evolved toward deeper energy collaboration; for Indonesia and Malaysia, engagement with Russia has broadened through shared interests in trade diversification and global engagement. For Myanmar, Russia has become an indispensable ally for the junta, helping it navigate sanctions and diplomatic isolation amid a protracted civil war.
For Southeast Asian states, engagement with Russia represents a pragmatic form of diversification — one that helps preserve strategic autonomy in a region increasingly defined by U.S.–China competition. Russia’s continued footprint in the region’s energy and trade landscape provides ASEAN members with an alternative partner as they navigate Beijing’s expanding regional influence and the U.S.’s growing disengagement from multilateral platforms and institutions.
Looking ahead, Russia’s role in Southeast Asia will likely remain uneven but persistent. Moscow’s capacity to maintain and expand influence will depend on the durability of its energy exports and trade networks amid the war in Ukraine, and the willingness of regional governments to engage with Russia despite geopolitical headwinds. Nonetheless, Moscow’s ability to offer diplomatic, economic, and technological partnerships ensures that it will remain a relevant — if constrained — player in the region’s strategic calculus.
• Graphic Design by Chloe Fenemore, Senior Designer, APF Canada; edited by Erin Williams, Director, Programs, and Vina Nadjibulla, Vice-President Research & Strategy, APF Canada
