HANOI–MOSCOW EXPRESS PREPARES TO DEPART

A ROUTE WITH ROOM TO GROW

Establishing a regular rail service on the route from Vietnam to Russia via China is a pressing item on the transport agenda, Andrei Nikitin said.
The FESCO Vietnam Shuttle service – direct shipments from Vietnam to Moscow across China and Mongolia – was launched in July 2025. “Now we want to speed them up and establish more regular services,” the head of the Transport Ministry noted.
At present the service operates in two stages. First, containers from the Vietnamese cities of Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Haiphong and Da Nang are railed to the Chinese city of Chengdu. There they are transhipped onto scheduled FESCO trains, which run from Chengdu via the land border crossings at Erenhot (China) – Zamyn-Üüd (Mongolia) – Naushki (Russia) and on to stations in the Moscow region.
Transit time on the FESCO Vietnam Shuttle route averages 35 days or more.
“FESCO’s rail service from Vietnam to Russia across Chinese territory has been running steadily since its launch in 2025. We dispatch containerised cargo to the Moscow region several times a month,” Pyotr Ivanov, General Director of FESCO Transportation Group, told 1520International.
At the same time, he said, the company sees considerable potential for developing the route further and is actively working to cut transit times and improve the regularity of services.
“The scope for faster delivery depends largely on coordinated work by all participants in the transport chain, as well as on the situation at the border crossings and the capacity of railway stations in China,” Ivanov points out.

A WINDOW ON ASIA

Following the state visit to Moscow by Vietnamese President To Lam and his talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a number of documents were signed, among them a memorandum on strengthening cooperation in vocational education and staff training in the transport sector. It was signed by Andrei Nikitin and Vietnam’s Deputy Minister of Construction Nguyen Xuan Sang. “The memorandum opens the way to joint educational programmes and to exchanges of teaching staff, researchers and students. The Russian University of Transport will act as the core platform on the Russian side,” Nikitin commented.
Vietnam remains one of Russia’s key partners in South-East Asia, and the volume of bilateral trade continues to grow, says Elena Ganshina, Associate Professor at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation. As was noted during the talks between the two heads of state, trade between Russia and Vietnam rose by 5.7% in 2025 and by a further 13.8% in the first half of 2026.
In terms of strategic value, Vietnam is of interest to Russia above all as a window on ASEAN and as a partner that maintains working relations with Moscow while formally keeping a balance between all the major players, notes Igor Smirnov, Director for Freight Transport and Logistics at the Infrastructure Economics Centre.
Today it is Vietnam through which the routes to the rest of South-East Asia run – from Thailand and Cambodia to Malaysia and Indonesia – German Maslov, Executive Director of FESCO Integrated Transport, said at the recently concluded Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. For the time being, however, this applies mainly to maritime container shipping.

Dmitry Koptev