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Ukraine war
This Week in AsiaPeople

Vietnamese in Ukraine and Russia find themselves with divided loyalties

  • Vietnamese residents in Ukraine back war effort, while those in Russia have sought to distance themselves from conflict despite support
  • Members of the community are divided over the war due to personal experiences of studying, living and working in Russia or Ukraine, observers note

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Pham Van Bang providing humanitarian aid for families in Kyiv earlier this year. Photo: Pham Van Bang
Bac PhamandBennett Murray
Pham Van Bang, a 62-year-old from Hanoi, was a teenager when he last sheltered from enemy bombs at the end of the Vietnam war. Almost five decades later, he once again hears air raid sirens almost daily amid Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
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“I still hear the sound of rockets whistling, the sound of bombs dropping and exploding, very scary,” said Bang in a phone interview from Kyiv, where he has lived since 1994.

Bang, who is the chairman of the Vietnamese Association in Kyiv and owner of a plastic packaging factory in the city, added that the 8,000 members of Ukraine’s Vietnamese community were united in support of their adoptive home’s war effort.

“Putin poisoned and instilled in the heads of the Russian people that the current Ukrainian government is a fascist government, but all Vietnamese in Ukraine support Ukraine and President [Volodymyr] Zelensky’s government,” said Bang, who attended university in Moscow from 1978 to 1983. “We do not see the image of fascism here.”

Bang favourably compared the Ukrainian military to the Vietcong and called Ukraine’s defence a “resistance war”, the same term used in Vietnam to refer to both the anti-colonial struggle against France and the later fight against the United States.

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