PANO - Senior Lieutenant General Nguyen Chi Vinh, Deputy Minister of National Defence, at his reception given to the outgoing ambassador on July 7th, expressed his belief that at any positions, the outgoing UK Ambassador to Vietnam Antony Stokes would continue backing Vietnam and develop Vietnam-UK strategic partnership in general and bilateral defence ties in particular in an intensive, practical and effective way. 

For his part, Ambassador Antony Stokes said that the UK and Vietnam’s establishment of the strategic partnership in 2010 has laid an important foundation to enhance bilateral relations and defence cooperation as well. Notably, over the past three years, the two sides have boosted their defence ties strongly. It was demonstrated by the memorandum of understanding on bilateral defence cooperation signed by the two defence ministries in November 2011, the agreement on the establishment of working group on bilateral defence cooperation in January 2013, the first exchange of hi-ranking defence delegations, the UK’s appointment of a resident defence attaché to Vietnam and the UK’s support in training Vietnamese officers participating in UN peacekeeping forces.

The outgoing ambassador also proposed the two sides to sign a bilateral defence cooperation program and did believe in the more fruitful defence cooperation in various fields, including training, navigation security and anti-piracy.

General Vinh highly valued the two countries’ cooperation achievements and agreed that the two countries should beef up defence strategy-level exchanges on issues of common concerns and agreed to build a bilateral defence cooperation program to boost cooperation on defence industry.

Translated by Ha Thanh