The channels in the Video Editor do not correspond to any audio channel in the final downmix.
What you can do is, select your audio strip, enable the Mono option in the sidebar > Strip tab > Sound panel.
Then you can play with the Pan value:
Sound Strip's pan: Strip — Sound: Pan
Used to pan the audio between speakers in multichannel audio. Only works for mono sources. The number of audio channels can be configured in the Audio Output settings.
For stereo output panning works from left (-1) to right (1). When the output uses more than two channels, values can be between -2 and 2, where 0 means front/center, -1 means to the left and 1 to the right.
To address rear speakers, you can pan to those with the higher values: -2, 2 is back. This value basically represents the angle at which it’s played if you multiply the value by 90 degrees.
For smooth animation you can assign values outside the soft bounds, since the angle wraps around over multiple rotations.