Russia, which boasted of developing one of the earliest COVID-19 vaccines, has been unable to persuade large swathes of the population to take it, and is now facing its highest daily death rates of the pandemic.
Public hostility to vaccination has hit other Eastern European countries that were within Moscow's orbit during the Cold War. The EU states with the lowest vaccination rates are all part of the former communist eastern bloc, including Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Poland, Latvia and Estonia.
Romania, where one person is dying of COVID-19 every five minutes, had the world's highest death rate per capita this week, with Bulgaria close behind. Only 36% of Romanian adults are vaccinated, compared with 74% across the EU as a whole.