Vaino Väljas[a] (28 March 1931 – 16 January 2024) was a Soviet and Estonian diplomat and politician.

From 1955 to 1961 he held the office of First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Leninist Young Communist League of Estonia.

From 1961 to 1971, Väljas was First Secretary of the Tallinn City Committee of the Communist Party of Estonia.

Since Väljas was considered to have Estonian "nationalist inclinations", he was removed from Estonia by the then communist party leadership in Moscow, and instead appointed by the Soviet central government as the Ambassador of the Soviet Union to Venezuela in 1980, and to Nicaragua in 1986.

As the Singing Revolution along with the Estonian independence movement both gained momentum in 1988, the relatively "liberal communist" Väljas was recalled by the Soviet leadership from Nicaragua and appointed by Gorbachev as leader of the communist party in the Soviet-occupied Estonia.