Asean Tribune

A ban on aid vehicles entering Myanmar’s Loikaw city amid intensifying clashes between junta troops and the armed resistance has led to a humanitarian crisis in the Kayah state capital, relief workers and residents said Monday.

A member of a charity organization in Loikaw who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke to RFA Burmese on condition of anonymity citing fear of reprisal, said he left the city on Nov. 24 after the junta ordered groups to stop using their vehicles two weeks earlier.

“There are no more volunteers for relief aid, as we all fear for our security,” he said. “In the past, we evacuated [civilians] trapped in the city. We carried people hit by artillery shelling to hospitals and buried the bodies of people killed. Now our hearts are broken because we can’t provide relief to people in need.”

Loikaw city is located about 225 kilometers (140 miles) east of Myanmar’s capital Naypyidaw by car. Charity groups told RFA that more than 10,000 civilians are “trapped” in the city amid the recent fighting that has seen the rebels advance on junta-held territory.

Aid workers said that junta troops also confiscated two of their trucks on Nov. 11, suggesting they might fear that members of the People’s Defense Force, or PDF, paramilitaries will use ambulances or other vehicles to disguise themselves and carry out attacks against the military in the city.

“However, aid organizations have never done this kind of thing,” another member of a charity group said. “Also, the PDF doesn’t seek medical treatment [for their fighters] at Loikaw Public Hospital because they have their own medical treatment facilities.”

Sources in Loikaw told RFA that the junta had tightened security in the city after pro-military netizens “spread misinformation” on social media platforms about local aid groups providing assistance to the PDF.

Need for aid urgent

There are at least five charity organizations in Loikaw, but all of them stopped providing services after the junta banned them from using vehicles on Nov. 11.

A resident told RFA that the need for humanitarian assistance in the city is still urgent, noting that following an attack by the military on PDF forces on Nov. 26, at least one injured civilian died from blood loss, which could have been prevented if they had access to basic treatment.

“A woman was wounded in her thigh and abdomen after soldiers shot her on her motorbike in the downtown area,” the resident said. “No charity group could rescue her. She fell down in the middle of the road and, as no one helped her, she died.”

The junta has not made any announcement prohibiting charity organizations from operating in Loikaw. Attempts by RFA to call Myint Kyi, the junta’s social affairs minister and spokesperson for the Kayah state government, went unanswered Monday.

Ban akin to ‘rights violation’

Banyar, the founder of the NGO Karenni Human Rights Group, said that the ban is “a form of human rights violation” that will likely lead to unnecessary deaths.

“No charity organizations are working in Loikaw as armed conflict is intensifying and artillery attacks may hit any time,” he said. “The prohibition will lead to loss of lives … People will die from their injuries if they do not receive first aid.” 

At least 76 civilians were killed in Loikaw, as well as the Kayah townships of Pekhon and Moebye from Nov. 11-27, including a dozen minors, the group Karenni Humanitarian Aid Initiatives said in a Nov. 28 statement. 

A recent offensive by the armed resistance in Kayah state saw ethnic Karenni forces seize Loikaw University and several military outposts. The groups say they have no plans to end their attacks on the junta’s administrative mechanisms in the city.

Translated by Aung Naing. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

A provincial board of Vietnam’s only state-recognized Buddhist Sangha decided over the weekend to expel ethnic Khmer Krom monk Thach Chanh Da Ra after authorities accused him of being “uncooperative,” state media reported.

Thach, 33, is the abbot of Dai Tho Pagoda in Vinh Long Province, in southern Vietnam.

According to state media, when a task force from the Tam Binh District People’s Committee came to the pagoda for “working purposes” on Nov. 22, the monk refused task force members entry to the pagoda and filmed their visit to “defame local authorities and divide national unity.”

The state-owned newspaper Giac Ngo Online has since accused Thach of “seriously violating Buddhist law” and the charter of the Vietnam Buddhist Sangha by carrying out “propaganda against the state” and refusing to obey the regulations of the VBS.

However, Khmer Krom Buddhists in the region claim that neither Thach nor Dai Tho Pagoda have violated Vietnamese law. 

The Khmer Kampuchea Krom Federation said the Nov. 22 “task force” visit cited in the state media report was actually a planned attack on Dai Tho Pagoda by more than 50 members of the VBS. Three monks were injured in the altercation.

The advocacy group said the Dec. 3 order to expel Ra is the Vietnamese state’s way of punishing the monk for defending the pagoda.

The nearly 1.3-million strong Khmer Krom live in a part of Vietnam that was once southeastern Cambodia. They have faced serious restrictions on freedom of expression, assembly and movement.

Furthermore, they point out that Thach was never even registered with the VBS to begin with, as he felt that affiliating his pagoda with the state-controlled sangha would threaten the preservation of the Khmer Krom minority’s cultural and religious autonomy.

In protest, more than 20 Khmer Krom villagers have begun a sit-in at the pagoda to guard Thach Chanh Da Ra from being removed or arrested by Vietnamese authorities.

Khmer Krom activist Thach Nga told RFA that the monk has only disobeyed local authorities when attempting to protect Khmer Krom cultural heritage. 

For example, the monk once directed the pagoda’s inhabitants to prevent local police from cutting down a 700-year-old Koki tree inside the pagoda. Thach Nga explained that this tree has special cultural significance to the Khmer Krom.

Thach Chanh Da Ra has also gone against local authorities’ wishes by hosting Khmer Krom activists such as Duong Khai at Dai Tho pagoda. 

The monk told RFA that he fears for the safety of Khmer Krom Buddhists in Vinh Long Province.

“I am very worried for the well-being and safety of the monks and Buddhist followers,” he said. “I am very worried about Khmer Krom Buddhism, especially at Dai Tho Pagoda. I do not know how the future of Buddhism and our Khmer Krom indigenous culture will [turn out].”

He has since called on the Cambodian government as well as international human rights organizations to intervene on behalf of the Khmer Krom minority. 

As of Dec. 4, RFA has not been able to obtain a comment from the Vietnamese embassy in Cambodia or from the Cambodian government’s official spokesperson Pen Bona.

 

Translated by Anna Vu and Sok Ry. Edited by Claire McCrea and Malcolm Foster.

“Hey bro, I can’t make it out tonight. There’s a big test tomorrow that I gotta study for.”

“Fighting!” 

Using that English loanword in a text to offer encouragement could now get North Koreans in trouble.

Police in the country are randomly stopping people on the street to check their text messages for the offending expression, “Fighting!” – picked up from South Korean dramas smuggled into the country – and punishing them with up to six months in a disciplinary labor center, residents told Radio Free Asia.

It’s the latest attempt by North Korean authorities to eradicate influence from the capitalist South, derided as a “puppet” of the United States.

Three years ago, North Korea enacted the Rejection of Reactionary Thought and Culture Act, which lays out punishments for various cultural offenses, like watching or distributing South Korean media, not wearing the correct traditional attire during weddings, and even dancing like a capitalist.

One of the milder offenses is for speaking or writing like a South Korean, and North Korea has been punishing people caught using South Korean vocabulary, spelling, slang, or even singing South Korean-style songs.

‘Konglish’

The term “Fighting!” is an example of Konglish – English words that are used in Korean – but in a way that might not be readily intelligible to a native English speaker. 

For example, a cell phone might be referred to as a “handphone,” a coffee mug could be called a “mug cup,” and a buy-one-get-one-free deal is described as “one plus one.”

The expression “Fighting!,” which has been part of the South Korean lexicon for several decades, means something similar to “you can do it!” or “don’t give up!” 

The expression has appeared in South Korean TV programs, which are smuggled into the North on flash drives and secretly – and widely – circulated, to the chagrin of authorities who want to stamp out any influence from the capitalist South.

To keep such usage from spreading, police are checking cell phones of people on the street, a resident of North Pyongan province, in the country’s northwest, told RFA Korean on condition of anonymity for personal safety.

“The day before yesterday, a social security agent inspected the text messages on my cell phone while I was passing by Sinuiju Station Square,” he said. “The reason why social security agents are cracking down on young people’s cell phones is to censor text messages and catch people using the puppet word ‘fighting.’”

Specific search

The resident said that since the law went into effect, the authorities would often confiscate devices to see if the user was storing any South Korean TV or movie files, but this is the first time that they have inspected all of a user’s text messages for a specific word.

“I don’t know how many people were arrested by the social security department throughout the day, but as I was waiting for my turn to be inspected, I saw a female worker at a textile factory who looked to be just over 20 being taken to social security department after sending a ‘fighting’ message to a coworker,” said the resident.

If punished under the Rejection of Reactionary Thought and Culture Act, users of the word “fighting” in text messages could be sent to a disciplinary labor center for up to six months.

Authorities in South Pyongan province, north of the capital Pyongyang, began inspecting cell phones of college students and young people on Nov. 27, a resident there told RFA. 

“‘Fighting’ is the most commonly used word among young people these days,” he said.

Crackdowns on other South Korean-origin words have resulted in those words disappearing from the mouths and text messages of North Korean youth, the South Pyongan resident said.

These have included “oppaya,” which literally means older brother, but can be a term of endearment from women to older men in their lives, “namchin,” which is an abbreviation of “namja chingu,” which means boyfriend, and “ttaranghae,” which is a cuter way of saying “saranghae,” or I love you. Also gone from North Korean texts these days is “ㅋㅋㅋ” (pronounced keukeukeu) which represents laughter in a way similar to “lol” in English.

“No matter how much the judicial authorities crack down on cell phones, it will not be easy to completely eliminate South Korean language and speech among young people,” he said.

Many young North Koreans, he said, think these South Korean expressions are more effective at communicating feelings of love and friendship than the North Korean-style of speaking.

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee and Leejin J. Chung. Written in English by Eugene Whong. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

One year after crowds of protesters across China held up blank sheets of paper, chanting slogans calling for an end to the zero-COVID policy and for President Xi Jinping to step down, many who took part in the “white paper” movement have fled overseas.

Chinese authorities moved quickly to quash the protests, arresting a number of young people for taking part.

Among them was Huang Guoan, a 30-year-old software programmer who had attended a protest in the southern city of Guangzhou, where he was living at the time.

Huang, who had been making plans to leave China, was taken to a detention center where police accused him of spreading an essay criticizing the ruling Chinese Communist Party published on a website run by the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement.

During his 15-day detention, Huang cooperated with police and “confessed” following repeated interrogations during which he was tortured with sleep deprivation through bright lights, and with pepper spray, he said.

“The light is so strong you can’t block it out even if you shut your eyes,” Huang told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview. “It’s still red and dazzling.”

The lights also affected Huang’s daytime vision, he said.

“It’s difficult for your eyes to recover even after a whole day – it’s pitch black and very frightening, and you feel like you’re blind,” he said.

“As for the pepper spray, it’s very painful, and you don’t recover from it for a long time, even if you drink some water,” Huang said.

Starvation diet

Now a political asylum-seeker in New Zealand, Huang said his motivation for joining the “white paper” movement stemmed from the suffering he witnessed and the hardship he endured while under lockdown during the “zero-COVID” era that ended shortly after the “white paper” protests in late November 2022.

Huang, who once pulled in a good salary as a project manager and software engineer for state-owned China Southern Power Grid, said he never thought he would ever be forced to the edge of starvation.

“It was October 2022,” he said. “My Health Code had turned red, which happened if your phone had gotten close to someone who also had a red code.”

“The pandemic enforcers would use that to lock you up in your own home,” Huang said. “I had stored mostly rice, so I eked out a small bag of rice for more than a month.”

“By the end of that month, I was eating thinner and thinner congee, and I knew that in just a few days, I would go hungry,” he said, adding that calling emergency services or municipal helplines didn’t get him anywhere, as the people who answered citing lack of supplies as a reason not to supply him with food.

Huang also remembered witnessing a suicide attempt by a man on the streets of downtown Guangzhou.

“I saw a guy, a white-collar worker, who had jumped straight off the building,” he said. “I didn’t see him actually jumping – I just saw him lying on the ground covered in blood.”

“The police had cleared and cordoned off the area within about 20 minutes, and they were telling people to delete any video or photos from their mobile phones and WeChat accounts.”

“Anyone who did post something online would soon have been discovered by the Internet police, and then their account would be blocked,” Huang said.

The Chinese health ministry refused in November 2022 to publish statistics on suicides under the country’s zero-COVID policy of rolling lockdowns and electronic tracking.

Circumventing the Great Firewall

Despite government information blackouts and constant online censorship, young people in China were finding ways to circumvent the Great Firewall and get a more realistic picture from outside the country’s tightly controlled internet content, he said.

Shaken out of his expectation of privilege and comfort by the privations of lockdown, Huang joined a WhatsApp anti-lockdown group that had around 500 members, and started posting any information he found online to the group.

The posts were historical, about the kangaroo courts and political killings of the turbulent Cultural Revolution era from 1966-1976, but also about more recent scandals, including trafficking in children, organ harvesting and forcible demolitions and land grabs by local officials.

As crowds started to gather in the wake of a fatal lockdown fire in Xinjiang’s regional capital Urumqi, Huang started printing flyers containing links from his posts, and handing them out on the streets of Guangzhou, packaging them as entertainment or gambling websites.

He said online discussions about opposition to Xi’s zero-COVID policy soon erupted into real-world action.

“Everyone went out to bang on the locks and break through the fences,” Huang said in a reference to the fencing and welding used by COVID-19 enforcers to confine people to their homes and residential neighborhoods.

“The police were very violent at that time,” he said. “I watched from behind at a close range.”

“The police used iron rods and electric batons to smash people’s heads – they fell to the ground,” Huang said. “The people at the front must have been arrested on the spot.”

One by one, the friends who stood alongside Huang in the back row of the protests fell silent, presumed detained.

Huang started to make plans to leave China, and received his visa for New Zealand in early May, just before he was detained and interrogated, he said.

In July, after his release, Huang boarded a flight to New Zealand. A few days later, police descended on his former home in Guangzhou, searching it from top to bottom and issuing an arrest warrant for him.

The warrant told Huang that they knew he was already in New Zealand, and called on him to come back to China and turn himself in immediately in order to “protect himself and his family.”

Since then, Huang’s colleagues, friends and younger brother have all been hauled in for questioning, while a bank account containing 380,000 yuan (US$53,600) has been frozen, he said.

Huang’s attorney Alan Williams confirmed that his client has submitted an application for refugee and protected status in New Zealand, adding that he will be interviewed before next June. 

Due to a large backlog of applications this year, the approval process could take up to 12 months, he said.

In the meantime, an organization in Auckland has been helping him get set up with rented accommodation and starting to look for a job, he said.

According to Huang, the number of Chinese nationals seeking political asylum in New Zealand has risen sharply since the start of the pandemic, with an approval rate of around 50% currently reported.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

Chinese censors have deleted a news report investigating claims that local governments had brought back a hated disease-tracking app that was used during the “zero-COVID” era to confine people to their homes, amid an ongoing wave of respiratory infections across the country, according to local media reports and residents.

The Dec. 1 Top News article cited social media posts across China as saying that local governments in Sichuan and Guangdong had both brought the app back online after retiring it following the lifting of three years of harsh COVID restrictions in December 2022, with users posting screenshots of their “green” health code from the app.

While the article remained visible in syndicated form on Sohu.com’s mobile website on Monday, it had disappeared from the Top News website.

Guangzhou officials told the news service that some aspects of the app had never been retired, but that the app’s ability to impose travel restrictions on individuals had been shut down in February and never reactivated.

The article also reported that the Tianfu Health Pass app in the southwestern province of Sichuan was once more showing a green code, according to residents who checked the government app.

‘Physiological nausea’

The deletion of the article, which was also picked up by several media organizations outside mainland China, comes as hospitals in China struggle to cope with a wave of respiratory disease, much of it among children.

The reports highlight public concerns that restrictive measures may make a comeback, as some suspect that the current pneumonia wave is being driven in the background by COVID-19, which affects people’s ability to fight off opportunistic infections like mycoplasma pneumonia, and which has been associated with waves of other respiratory infections in children.

“I hope this will never happen again in my lifetime,” commented Weibo user @uuk20_fca from Guangdong, while blogger Lao Xiaoza commented in a post to the China Digital Times that “there is no smoke without a fire.”

“When I saw this, my first reaction was physiological nausea,” the blogger wrote. “Don’t tell me how this great invention of digital governance has protected everyone’s health. I will never accept this account, no thanks.”

Another blogger on the same site, Qinghui Youmo, posted a number of screenshots of reappearing health codes from social media users across China, including Zhejiang, Tianjin, Hebei, Guangxi and Shaanxi.

“Don’t scare me like that – I’m close to tears,” commented @YipingXuzijiang in a screenshot posted in the blog post.

Wave of sickness

The concerns come as a wave of respiratory disease sweeps across the country, prompting reported class closures amid official warnings of growing cases of influenza, mycoplasma pneumonia, respiratory syncytial virus and COVID-19.

The World Health Organization called on Beijing to share its data on an outbreak in Beijing and Tianjin that made international headlines last week.

Later media reports dismissed people’s concerns about the return of the Health Code app, citing officials as saying that the app had never entirely been taken offline, because it offers other health data services in addition to COVID-19 tracking and tracing.

However, sporadic reports of compulsory COVID-19 testing have also emerged on social media in recent days, including at a conference in Guangzhou, according to Qinghui Youmo’s blog post.

A staff member at Shanghai Pudong International Airport who gave only the surname Ma for fear of reprisals said incoming passengers are being tested for COVID-19 on arrival.

“They say incoming passengers are being randomly tested, but I actually saw an entire flight being tested for COVID,” the person said. “A friend of mine flew to Australia yesterday, and they were spraying the plane with disinfectant.”

“Health codes have already started coming back online in various places,” they said.

A nurse at a hospital in the central city of Wuhan, who gave only the surname Sun, said health codes are being reactivated in some parts of the country, including Fujian, Guangdong, Shaanxi and Sichuan.

“Mycoplasma pneumonia is very serious now, and health codes have been resumed in some areas of Fujian, Guangdong, Shaanxi, and Sichuan,” she said. “The wave of mycoplasma pneumonia started in children and then started to spread, just like COVID-19 did back then.”

“Now you have to line up for seven or eight hours to get anti-inflammatory shots at the hospital,” she said.

Sichuan hit hard

A resident of Sichuan’s provincial capital Chengdu, who gave only the surname Jiang, said Sichuan has been particularly hard hit.

“The outbreak in Sichuan is particularly serious – the hospital corridors are full of patients,” he said. “A lot of people can’t even get admitted to hospital.”

But he was skeptical about the reports of the return of health codes, saying: “I don’t think so.”

The ongoing concern about health tracking came as authorities in Zhejiang’s Yiwu city sent out a directive requiring urban and rural residents to stockpile grain, and maintain enough to feed everyone for 10 days.

“All departments and work canteens should maintain a large stock of grain in storage, equal to the average consumption over a 15-day period from the previous year,” the directive, which was widely posted online, said.

The reports also sparked concern that the authorities are quietly readying themselves for a return to lockdown measures in a bid to stem the spread of infectious diseases.

The authorities on Dec. 1 also added several newly developed COVID-19 vaccines to their list of medicines approved for emergency use, according to the Associated Press.

National Health Commission spokesperson Mi Feng said on Sunday that the current outbreak is being caused by known pathogens, and called on people to wear masks and wash their hands.

Chinese health authorities are “actively monitoring and assessing winter respiratory diseases,” and that outpatient clinics will start operating round the clock to meet demand for treatment, Mi said.

Measures are also being taken to ensure the supply of influenza and other vaccines, with a focus on early vaccination for key groups such as the elderly and children to reduce the risk of illness, Mi said in comments quoted by state news agency Xinhua.

A Guangzhou-based lawyer who declined to be named for fear of reprisals said public opinion in China is divided over the cause of the current wave of sickness, but few believe that the government is giving them the whole story.

“Privately, everyone believes that [these cases] are either sequelae from COVID-19 infections, or that they’ve been caused by [China’s homegrown] vaccines,” the lawyer said, in a reference to public mistrust of vaccines following a number of public health scandals in which children died or were otherwise harmed by fake or incorrectly stored vaccines.

Some medical journals have reported coinfection with COVID-19 and Mycoplasma pneumoniae, while others have pointed to weakened immunity from infection and reinfection with COVID-19.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

>>> Read the more on Bear East

Ask any Russian person which country in Southeast Asia they have heard about and you’d probably hear “Thailand.” Russian tourists are crowding its beaches, bars and even its Orthodox churches.

That’s not just a sign of Thailand’s legendary reputation for hospitality and knack for catering to foreign visitors that has earned the country the moniker “Land of Smiles.” Thailand welcomed 11.4 million foreign tourists in 2022. But with Russians increasingly limited on where they can visit because of international restrictions imposed on Moscow relating to the war in Ukraine, Thailand has kept its doors open.

From Russia with love

On the southern island of Phuket, some areas have turned into something resembling a resort town on the Black Sea with Russian men and women lounging on the beach, trying to soak up as much sun as possible. 

There are signboards in Cyrillic, Russian mothers pushing strollers around and new Russian restaurants that offer a taste of home. Russian real estate agents, tour companies and even Russian tour guides cater to the visitors – which rankles locals in the tourist trade, who say they are losing business.

“Russian people love Thailand, the people, the climate, the nature and the delicious food,” gushed Olesya, a young Russian businesswoman. She and her husband, Denis, have been to Phuket five times. 

Olesya said they felt welcome here and “have not sensed any negative vibes” against Russians – although they were shy of speaking to a journalist and requested to be identified by their first names only.

Thailand is America’s oldest ally in Asia, and was for decades a bulwark against Soviet influence in Southeast Asia during the Cold War, but it’s also a nation with a storied past with Russia. 

Diplomatic relations date back 126 years, when the then-Kingdom of Siam’s modernizing monarch, Chulalongkorn, also known as King Rama V, traveled to St. Petersburg in 1897.

Despite the international maelstrom over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Thailand has not condemned Moscow and has abstained from several votes against Russia at the United Nations.

But perhaps more significantly, there are still ways for Russians to spend their money in Thailand, which relies heavily on tourism earnings.

Due to U.S. and U.K. sanctions, Russians can’t conduct transactions via the global SWIFT electronic payment system. But they can still use China’s UnionPay – the world’s largest card payment network – or use cash or cryptocurrencies. 

Cornering the condo market

The Thai Tourism and Sports Ministry said that between January and June this year nearly 800,000 Russian nationals visited the Kingdom, and the number is expected to reach more than 1 million by the end of the year. The Tourism Authority of Thailand has set an ambitious target of receiving 2 million Russian visitors in 2024. Half of them are expected to fly to Phuket.

A free 45-day visitor visa and direct flights between the two countries make the goal easier. 

Maetapong “Oun” Upatising, president of the Phuket Real Estate Association, says that the Russian market bounced back quickly after the COVID downturn, both in tourist numbers and property demands.

Russian visitors prefer to rent villas and condominiums instead of hotels when staying longer than three months, and the number of rental units in Phuket alone is more than ten thousand a month, he said.

There is also a growing number of rich Russians who obtained long-term resident visas that let them stay in Thailand for five to 10 years or more. Those so-called “elite visas” cost at least U.S.$20,000 yet the number of elite visa holders from Russia is increasing steadily. 

Between 5,000 and 10,000 wealthy Russians are thought to have obtained long-term visas and become residents in Phuket. Last year Russian buyers purchased nearly 40% of all condominiums sold to foreigners on the island, according to the Thai Real Estate Information Center.

Russian investors also put large sums of money into other types of properties, among which luxury villas are the top buy. Those villas come with hefty price tags, starting from 25 million baht ($730,000), according to Maetapong from the Phuket Real Estate Association.

Organized crime

Phuket even has its own Russian newspaper. Despite the comparative ease with which Russians can travel to Thailand, the paper’s editor gripes that his countrymen get a bad rap.

“Right now, it’s legitimate not to like the Russians,” said Anton Makhrov, the editor of Novosti Phuketa, who likens it to a kind of xenophobia against Russians in Thailand.

“When you get on Facebook, you’ll see lots of comments such as ‘the Russians are aggressive and arrogant, we don’t like you’ but when you talk to people they all say they have good relations with some Russian friends,” he said, speaking in the weekly paper’s office in a small alley in Kathu district of Phuket.

Russian visitors have also often been blamed for bad behavior, as well as petty crime such as drunk-driving and theft.

The invasion of Ukraine in 2022 also appears to have dimmed Thais’ perception of Russian people. Katherine Aliakseyeva, principal of the Russian Dance Academy “Katyusha” in Bangkok, says she’s worried about the safety of her staff and students.

The school has been regularly taking part in cultural events organized by the Russian Embassy.

There are also long-held suspicions that Russian “mafia” operate in Thailand. A December 2009 cable by the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok that was declassified in 2019 said that “Russian organized crime circles established a presence in Thailand in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

According to the diplomatic cable, U.S. and Thai law enforcement agencies reported that “criminal networks composed of mostly Russian nationals operating in Pattaya and Phuket are responsible for the commission of numerous crimes, including extortion, money laundering, narcotics trafficking, real estate fraud, financial fraud, human smuggling, pandering, counterfeiting, document fraud, cybercrime and illegal importation of cars.”

“A number of U.S. law enforcement agencies are involved in investigating or monitoring cases involving Russian organized crime in Thailand in cooperation with Thai partners,” it said.

However, earlier this year Thai police officials were also quoted by domestic media as saying that “no Russian organized crime rings have been detected amid the recent influx of visitors.”

Police Maj. Gen. Phanthana Nutchanart, deputy commander of the Immigration Bureau, told the Bangkok Post that “most legal issues involving Russian citizens in Thailand were minor offenses, such as traffic violations.”

‘Everything else is God’s will’

There is a spiritual side to Russia’s presence in Thailand.

As the number of Russian visitors has grown, so has the demand for places to worship.

Today there are 10 Russian churches in Thailand. The first parish – the Nicholas parish, named after Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II – was opened in Bangkok in 1999.

In 2007, Thailand’s Queen Sirikit visited Russia to commemorate the 110th anniversary of diplomatic relations, and a year later, the Russian Orthodox Church was officially recognized by the Thai government. 

The churches mainly serve the Russian-speaking community that is made up of tourists and locally-based businessmen, but it draws some Thais too.

Several priests from Thailand, as well as from Laos and Cambodia – all predominantly Budddhist countries – have attended Russian Orthodox seminaries and are now serving in Southeast Asia.

The war in Ukraine has created serious tensions within the Orthodox Church. The head of the Russian Church – Patriarch Kirill – has openly thrown his support behind President Vladimir Putin, but Patriarch Bartholomew, the head of the world’s Orthodox Christians, has condemned the Russian invasion.

Bartholomew in December 2018 granted independence to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and more than 100 Ukrainian churches have now distanced themselves from Moscow.

In Thailand, both believers and priests alike also try to distance themselves from the conflict. Danai Wanna, who was the first Thai national ordained as a Russian Orthodox priest and is now serving in the resort city of Pattaya, said that priests are not allowed to speak about the war.

The Church of All Saints nestles in a village on the outskirts of Pattaya. It boasts a large collection of Russian icons, which Danai is very proud of, even if most of them are replicas.

Services are conducted in a small hall on the second floor, and the priest said during the high season and on Christian holidays he receives hundreds of worshippers.

“Many different nationals come here to pray and we don’t talk about anything but friendship and love,” he said.

“We don’t discuss about what’s been happening but we pray for peace. Everything else is God’s will.”

Diplomatic pressure

Thailand’s refusal to yield to pressure from Western countries to condemn Russia has raised some eyebrows in Washington. A close U.S. ally, Thailand was once known as fiercely anti-communist. 

However, “in the post-Cold War era and especially since the turn of the twenty-first century, Thailand’s role in international affairs has become much less proactive,” according to Ian Storey, a senior fellow at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.

The relationship between Bangkok and Washington also eroded after the military coups in 2006 and 2014 in Thailand, which the U.S. condemned.

“In the country’s relations with the major powers, successive Thai governments have tried to pursue a balanced approach and not to take sides in the geopolitical squabbles,” Storey said.

In March 2022, a month after the invasion of Ukraine, then-Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha told a cabinet meeting that “Thailand must maintain a neutral stance” and that “the long-standing relations between Thailand and Russia must be taken into account.”

That year, the two countries celebrated the 125th anniversary of diplomatic relations. 

In fact, the first contacts between the monarchs of Russia and Siam go back as far as the 1860s when two Russian Imperial Navy Pacific Squadron ships anchored in Chao Phraya River and the sailors were granted an audience with Mongkut, King Rama IV. 

In 1891, King Rama V received Crown Prince Nicholas on his visit to Siam. Rama V’s son, Prince Chula Chakrabongse, studied and graduated from the Russian Imperial Military Academy and married a Russian woman.

In 2003, Putin became the first Russian leader to visit Thailand for more than 100 years. 

Arms sales and military cooperation

The recent warming in Russia-Thailand relations appears to stem primarily from pragmatic calculations. While trade between the two countries is modest at $1.81 billion in 2021, the Thai economy relies greatly on tourist income.

Thai tourism authorities say Russian visitors are among those who stay the longest and spend the most. 

Yet, following the 2014 Thai military coup that complicated the U.S.-Thailand alliance, Russia saw an opportunity to boost defense relations with Thailand, and together with it, arms sales.

Then-Prime Minister Prayuth, who had led the coup, traveled to Russia in May 2016. The two nations signed an agreement on military cooperation. A year later, they signed a military-technology collaboration agreement.

Thailand had expressed interest in buying Russian military equipment such as helicopters, fighter jets and tanks for its air force and ground troops. 

However, Storey from the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute said that so far Moscow has had little success in arms sales. Its defense exports to Thailand over the period 2006-2021 have amounted to just $73 million, he said, adding that Moscow has been “undercut by China on price.”

Two examples were when the Thai military junta invited bids for the supply of two submarines, as well as a new main battle tank, and both times awarded the contracts to China, which has now become Thailand’s leading supplier of military equipment.

“Russia is simply not a player in Thailand’s defense plans though they flirted heavily for years,” said Storey.

But the push continues. Since 2021, Thai cadets and officers have been sent to Russia to undergo training at the military academy under the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Defense. Courses vary from one to six years, according to the Russian Embassy.

And at a ceremony at U-tapao Air Base near Bangkok in March 2021, Russia handed over three Mil Mi-17V-5 transport helicopters to the Royal Thai Army. Moscow delivered 10 such helicopters between 2008 and 2021. The Thai Ministry of Interior also purchased two Kamov KA-32A11VS utility helicopters for disaster relief operations.

It was perhaps a sign of the times, and of Thailand’s elasticity in its dealings with world powers, that the ceremony to receive the Russian military equipment was staged at what a half-century earlier was a key U.S. Air Force base during the Vietnam War.

Then this April saw the first-ever talks between the Russian-Thai armed forces general staff, where they discussed “conducting joint operational and combat training activities,” Russia’s Defense Ministry said.

Thai strategists have long taken pride in their country’s pragmatic and flexible foreign policy, which they compare to the bamboo’s ability to bend with the wind and never break. Thanks to that policy, Thailand managed to avoid being involved in major wars in the region. But the same pragmatism may deter it from getting in too deep with Russia.