The field of the acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese by foreigners has been poorly explored. Furthermore, very little has been published concerning Russophones in Latin America. However, Russians are among 15 nationalities who get the greater number of work permits in Brazil. Many Russians and Russophones from the former Soviet Republics come to Brazil for other reasons. We have previously found that the Russian accented speech influences the perception of speakers’ characteristics by Brazilians. The aim of the current project is to investigate the perception and production of Brazilian Portuguese open and close mid vowels by native Russian speakers living in São Paulo. First, we developed a perception test to investigate if native Russian speakers living in São Paulo have difficulty in recognizing and producing the minimal pairs containing the phonemes /ɔ/ — /o/ and /ɛ/ — /e/. The stimuli for the perception test were produced by a native speaker of Brazilian Portuguese; 101 Russian speakers performed the test online realizing 30 tasks. The mean percentage of right answers was 68% (SD = 14%). There was no correlation between the number of right answers and residence time in Brazil or the way they have learned Portuguese. Secondly, we have evaluated the production of 12 Brazilian Portuguese words containing the vowel pairs by 13 Brazilians and 15 Russian speakers. The measurements of F1 and F2 formants conformed that all Brazilians correctly differentiated the vowels as expected. However, there were no differences between mid high and mid low vowels in the recordings of the native Russian speakers. To improve Russian speakers’ performance, we propose training strategies emphasizing acoustic cues distinguishing Portuguese open and close vowels.