Benefits and contradictions of the trade and economic cooperation between Russia and ASEAN

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the trade and economic orientations of the Russian Federation shifted from the EU and the USA to the countries of Africa and Asia, among which ASEAN plays one of the leading roles. Russia’s trade with the ASEAN countries is important not only economically, but also politically: these trade and economic ties are of great geopolitical importance for the Russian Federation. Currently, trade and economic cooperation between the Russian Federation and ASEAN is being actively formed in the energy, military-industrial, transport and infrastructure, agro-industrial, information and scientific and technological fields. In this article, an analysis was made of the fundamental problems and trends in the trade and economic activities of Russia and ASEAN. It was concluded that Russia and ASEAN have a narrow-limited locus of areas of effective cooperation, each of which contains a significant potential for utility that has not been realized to this day. After analysis of Asian markets, trends, dynamics and directions of development of the ASEAN countries, the economic opportunities of the Russian Federation, the following was revealed: the most promising are such branches of interstate cooperation as the military-technical, information, fuel and energy, transport and technological industries, the least relevant interstate contacts in the field of eco-technologies and agro-industrial complex of the Russia-ASEAN. At the same time a potential of certain areas of trade and economic transactions between the Russian Federation and ASEAN was revealed, including in such areas as energy, high technology, transport and military developments.

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