Russia’s Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine has sown division among former Eastern Bloc countries, analysts have said, with some seeing it as a godsend and others as a Kremlin propaganda tool.
Countries in the region have been particularly hard hit by COVID-19 and found themselves torn between a readily available jab from their old ally and EU resistance to Russian influence.
Analysts said such discord benefits Russia and its efforts to sow disorder in the region since the Soviet Union crumbled three decades ago.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“It is very clear that Sputnik V has become a tool of soft power for Russia,” Michal Baranowski from the German Marshall Fund of the United States told reporters.
“The political goal of [Russia’s] strategy is to divide the West,” said Baranowski, who heads the Fund’s Warsaw office.
Slovakia found itself facing a government crisis only days after receiving its first batch of Sputnik V on March 1.
Slovakian Prime Minister Igor Matovic hailed the jab, saying “COVID-19 does not know anything about geopolitics,” while Slovakian Minister of Foreign Affairs Ivan Korcok called the vaccine “a hybrid war tool.”
The vaccine has 91.6 percent efficacy against COVID-19, according to a study published by The Lancet, and it is already being used in several countries around the world.
It is yet to be approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for use in the EU, but some ex-communist member states are planning to roll out the jab regardless.
EU members like Slovakia started to look east after Europe got off to a slower-than-expected start procuring Pfizer/BioNTech, AstraZeneca/Oxford and Moderna vaccines.
Experts agree that rapid vaccination is the only way out of the coronavirus crisis, which is hitting Central and Eastern Europe particularly hard.
Slovakia and its neighbor the Czech Republic have had the worst per capita death rates in the world for weeks, according to Agence France-Presse statistics based on official data, and hospitals across the former Soviet satellites are reaching capacity.
Czech President Milos Zeman last month in a letter asked his ally Russian President Vladimir Putin for a Sputnik V supply.
When the Czech minister of health refused to accept a vaccine lacking approval from the EMA, Zeman asked for his dismissal, a request that has not been carried out.
“The potential use of Sputnik V in the Czech Republic has become a purely political weapon,” Prague-based political analyst Jiri Pehe said.
He dubbed the vaccine “a tool of political struggle and propaganda.”
He said Russia has had problems producing enough Sputnik V vaccines for its own needs and there were questions about the conditions in which the vaccine was produced.
“If Vladimir Putin really trusted the vaccine, he would be the first to get a jab with a great pomp, but he’s giving it a wide berth,” Pehe said.
Sputnik V’s spread has led EU Council President Charles Michel to say that vaccines should not be used for propaganda purposes.
“We should not let ourselves be misled by China and Russia, both regimes with less desirable values than ours, as they organize highly limited, but widely publicized operations to supply vaccines to others,” Michel said this week.
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