In February this year, Russian veteran journalist Alexey Venediktov singled out three achievements Russian President Vladimir Putin felt most proud of at the time. Those were Moscow’s peace-making efforts in Nagorno-Karabakh, the development of new weaponry and the Russia-developed coronavirus vaccine. Given Putin’s predilection for public appraisal of the Russian vaccines, there are no grounds to distrust Venediktov’s observation, which came on the back of a traditional private meeting between Putin and editors-in-chief of the Russian media.

Hence, one should not be surprised by looking at how sensitive Russian authorities become when confronted with any criticism of the Sputnik V vaccine. Moscow is assiduous in promoting the home-produced drug around the world, including in the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region. But however hard the Russian propaganda machine works to pin all the blame for Sputnik V’s troubles on the Western plot against Russia, there is no way around the fact that the development, production and distribution of the vaccine were hastily handled. This was aggravated by disinformation, violation of rules and incompetence on the Russian side.

The bottom line is that the controversy around Sputnik V’s reputation was unavoidable and independent of any meddling from abroad. Indeed, Russians themselves display a wary attitude toward the vaccine. The slow pace of vaccination in the country serves as a testament to that.

So preoccupied the Kremlin is with gaining the status of the virus "destroyer" (both at home and abroad) that it decided to limit the access of foreign vaccines to its citizens. Indeed, Russia is one of only three countries in the world (alongside Cuba and China) that practices such vaccine isolationism. For example, an Israeli clinic in Moscow, Hadassah, could not succeed in bringing into the country a batch of the Pfizer-BioNTech-produced vaccine (BNT162b2). That is despite Hadassah being part of the Skolkovo medical network, which operates under a special legal regime that gives it access to drugs registered in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development member states.