On a cold Monday morning, the first day of March, airport workers in Košice, Slovakia, loaded crates with ‘Sputnik V’ and stamped with the accompanying boast ‘the first registered COVID-19 vaccine’, from a military cargo plane just landed from Russia.
Slovak Prime Minister Igor Matovič, a media mogul who has only been in office for a year and has a reputation as a showman while leading the party against corruption, ordinary people and independent personalities, held a press conference in front of the plane to reveal the surprise that he’d secretly negotiated with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government: 200,000 doses of Sputnik V – with another 2 million doses on order.
Matovič told reporters that Slovakia could not afford to wait for more vaccines from the European Union, the bloc to which Slovakia belongs and usually obtained anti-COVID drugs, and thanked Moscow for ‘its correct approach’, adding that the delivery proved that Russia is a “stable partner we can rely on in this difficult time.”
For the enclosed Eastern European nation of nearly 5.5 million people, the advent of additional vaccines, wherever they come from, was at least initially a welcome sight. More than 10,000 Slovaks have died since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the highest per capita deaths in the world, and more than 350,000 people have tested positive for the disease. As the flow of vaccines into the EU entered more slowly than expected, with Slovakia inflicting just over 300,000 shots, Matovič promised that the boxes of Sputnik V (pronounced ‘cattle’) would speed up the country’s vaccination program. 40 percent would increase.
Because Sputnik V is not yet registered with the European Medicines Agency, it is still not widely available in the EU. Meanwhile, the Lancet, the prestigious medical journal, recently published results of a study showing that the vaccine has an efficacy rate of 91.6 percent. For a brief moment, the event over the tarmac in Košice seemed to Matovič and Putin a coup.
But there was one big problem: the contents of the crates did nothing to help Slovaks sniff out the coronavirus. Slovakia’s state institute for drug control announced last week that the agency found after inspection that the vaccine was different from the one reviewed in the Lancet.
“The vaccine groups included in the preclinical tests and clinical trials published in the Lancet do not use the same characteristics as the vaccine groups imported into Slovakia,” the State Drug Institute said in an email to Yahoo News.
Even before the unveiling, however, Matovič’s surprise deal with Russia was not good with many in his own government.
The delivery was “a real shock – to many’s great surprise,” Daniel Milo, a senior research fellow at the GLOBSEC Policy Institute in Bratislava, told Yahoo News. Among those indignant when they saw the press conference: Matovič’s partners in the country’s four-party ruling coalition, which only two weeks before definitively determined the use of the Russian vaccine until the EMA got approval. The cheerleader for transparency simply went behind their backs to get his Sputnik V-Series.
Slovak Foreign Minister Ivan Korčok, a former US ambassador, became ballistic when he heard the news and spoke out against Sputnik V as a tool for a ‘hybrid war’, adding that the use of the Russian vaccine before approval divides us here at home. , it divides us abroad, it questions processes in the EU. ”
And divide it: within days of the birth, the Slovak government was on the verge of collapse, Matovič was ousted from the prime minister’s seat, and relations with Russia reached the bottom.
The Russian Direct Investment Fund, which manufactures Sputnik V, called the state institute for drug control “false news” and part of a “disinformation campaign”. of contract. But Matovič, who then became finance minister, was not ready to play prime minister. He traveled to Moscow and devised another plan: to send Slovakia’s vaccine for testing to a laboratory in Hungary under the leadership of pro – Putin Prime Minister Viktor Orbán – a move that undermines Matovič’s own drug authority. And six weeks after the vaccination, not one person in Slovakia had the Sputnik V shot.
Critics of Putin say the chaos resulting from vaccine vaccinations was part of a calculated plan to sow divisions inside and outside Europe.
“This is part of a division strategy,” Pavel Havlíček, a foreign policy analyst at the Association for International Affairs in Prague, told Yahoo News. Havlíček, like others who have watched the saga, believes that Matovič was played by Putin. ‘Russia is trying to undermine confidence’ in leaders, governments and ‘the state agencies that regulate drugs. They are trying to undermine confidence in the EU. They are trying to spread mistrust among the member states, ‘some of whom are now competing to buy the Sputnik V vaccine.
Milo agrees. “Russia’s strategy seems to be working – to use this ‘salami method’, but only to cut from one country to another and enter into bilateral negotiations,” instead of treating the EU as a bloc. This, he believes, was “primarily their goal from the beginning.” He remains amazed at what he calls the “Sputnik affair” – including the fact that Matovič is trying to solve the vaccine questions Sending a Hungarian laboratory – an extremely unusual step. ‘
The terms of the agreement between Matovič and Russia for the vaccine also remain a mystery. “The whole thing is very dark,” Milo said. Despite increasing calls to make the contract public, “no one knows how much we had to pay for these 200,000 vaccines or possibly for 2 million doses.”
Russia’s ‘alleged breach of contract is also very strange because the contract was not announced,’ Milo added. “How could [the State Institute for Drug Control] know they’re breaking a contract if they have not seen it? ‘
While Matovič became prime minister in 2020, thanks in part to public outrage over the murder of murderous journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée in 2018, the Sputnik V scandal immediately wiped out the profit Matovič made to fight corruption; its approval rating dropped to 19 percent.
‘Only a year ago, Slovak citizens believed in a change for the better – in the return of decency in public life. Igor Matovič has trampled on hope, “said Viktoria Jancosekova, a Slovak who now works in Brussels as manager of the president of the Martens Center of European Studies. ‘The year of his rule is already considered the most chaotic year in Slovak politics. In addition to polluted relations with neighbors, the president and coalition partners, Slovak scientists and diplomats have distanced themselves in public. ”
The ‘Sputnik issue’ in Slovakia can not bode well for India, another country descended from COVID, which approved the Sputnik V vaccine this week – although the country is already concerned about Putin’s promise to Pakistan , India’s neighbor and enemy, with all the vaccines it needs.
Russia reports that the Sputnik V is currently used by more than 50 countries, despite little public information on its supply and production. Demand for Sputnik V has skyrocketed in recent weeks, with countries such as Austria and Germany negotiating purchases, pending approval by the European Medicines Agency.
But the vaccine that Russia approved for use last August – before undergoing crucial Phase III trials with tens of thousands of people – appears to be just another tool in Putin’s arsenal of political tricks designed to ensure that ‘Russia as a superpower is seen, ‘said Agnieszka. Legucka, an expert on post-Soviet Russia at the Polish Institute of Foreign Affairs. She described a number of other tools, including disinformation campaigns, aid packages sent worldwide and stamped “From Russia With Love” and military force.
Sputnik V, she noted, is the only new value export that “Russia has developed since the collapse of the Soviet Union”.
Roland Freudenstein, policy director of the Martens Center, believes that unrest in Russia is driving Putin’s vaccine diplomacy.
“Putin is enchanted at home. “He is probably in the worst domestic political crisis of his entire career,” Freudenstein told Yahoo News. ‘[Jailed Putin critic Alexei] Navalny and his health took a turn. And Putin knows exactly what would happen if Navalny, oh God, were to die. That is why he is doing these charming offenses on the one hand to the West, and on the other hand he is playing tough on the eastern border of Ukraine and threatening war. All this is certainly to be inferred from his domestic problems. ”
Legucka added: “Putin has changed the constitution to rule until 2036, and the Russians are not happy about it. And they are not happy with the economy, because since 2013 their real income has been declining year by year. “With the pandemic, the situation has worsened,” she said, “and the potential for protests is still quite large.”
Late Wednesday night, the Slovak spectator reported that Russian officials were apparently trying to send another consignment of Sputnik V vaccines to Slovakia. So far, Slovakia has not yet accepted the offer.
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