Russian regulators on May 6 approved Sputnik Light, a single-dose version of the country’s Sputnik V vaccine against the coronavirus.
The regulatory approval, which will allow it to be marketed and administered as a separate COVID-19 vaccine, came even though advanced testing to ensure its safety and effectiveness is still ongoing.
The two-dose Sputnik V will remain “the main source of vaccination in Russia,” said Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) CEO Kirill Dmitriev, whose organization bankrolls the Sputnik vaccine.
Sputnik Light will be exported “to our international partners to help increase the rate of vaccinations in a number of countries in the face of the ongoing fight with the pandemic and new strains of coronavirus,” he said.
Dmitriev said in a statement that “the single dose regimen solves the challenge of immunizing large groups in a shorter time, which is especially important during the acute phase of the spread of coronavirus, achieving herd immunity faster.”
Russia faced criticism last year for authorizing Sputnik V before advanced trials had started and for offering it to medical workers while those trials were under way.
But Sputnik V, which has been approved in several countries, overcame initial international skepticism after peer-reviewed results published in the medical journal The Lancet showed it to be safe and 91.6 percent effective against COVID-19.
Russia’s own vaccination drive is currently lagging. According to Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova, 13.4 million people in Russia, or just 9 percent of the country’s 146 million people, had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine as of May 6. About 6 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated.
Russia’s official death toll from COVID-19 along with those of several other countries came under question on May 6 in a new estimate by researchers at the University of Washington.
The university’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation puts the number of COVID-19 deaths at 6.9 million globally — more than double that of a widely cited tally by Johns Hopkins University.
The estimate is based on a comparison of pre-pandemic death trends with deaths from all causes during the pandemic adjusted to remove deaths that couldn’t be directly attributed to the virus.
It has long been acknowledged that official government figures likely are undercounts because not all deaths occur in hospitals and because not all COVID-19 deaths can be confirmed by a test.
The University of Washington researchers believe the largest undercounts are in India, which may have close to three times more deaths than the official 221,000, and Russia, which the researchers calculate has had more than five times the 109,000 official government count.
“The one that’s been the most underrecorded is the Russian Federation,” Christopher Murray, director of institute, said.
The data also suggest the U.S. death count is more than 905,000, far higher than the 580,000 estimated deaths in the Johns Hopkins tally.
NUR-SULTAN — The fact that it hasn’t completed its clinical trials hasn’t stopped thousands of Kazakh citizens from getting their first shot of the domestically developed coronavirus vaccine QazVac.
The two-dose vaccine is still in its third stage of studies, which are expected to be completed in July. But QazVac’s developers — the state-backed Research Institute for Biological Safety Problems — insists the vaccine is safe and effective.
The institute claims QazVac has shown a 96 percent efficacy against the virus during second-phase testing.
No serious side effects have been reported among the vaccine recipients since the QazVac rollout began on April 26. The Health Ministry says 50,000 doses of QazVac have been distributed across the Central Asian country of nearly 19 million people.
I’d support vaccination with QazVac once I see enough published data [that backs the developers’ claims].”
But some independent experts have expressed skepticism due to what they describe as insufficient testing information, as well as the relatively small number of participants in QazVac testing thus far.
By the QazVac developers’ own admission, some 3,000 people took part in the trials that began in September. For comparison, the study for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine involved more than 43,000 participants.
Lesbek Kutymbetov, a QazVac developer, said the team is “fully confident that the vaccine is harmless.” He added that the research institute has been involved in vaccine production for decades.
QazVac was developed using the traditional method of taking a dead virus to spur an immune response from the body, Kutymbetov explained. After testing the vaccine on animals, Kutymbetov was the first person to get a QazVac jab in its early trials.
According to the QazVac manufacturer, it doesn’t need to be stored in freezers like the prominently used Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. QazVac can be kept in regular refrigerators.
Like the other coronavirus vaccines, it’s not yet clear how long QazVac will give immunity from the coronavirus to someone. Early research showed “antibodies lasted about half-a-year and then their numbers decreased in the seventh month,” Kutymbetov said.
‘No Time To Write Articles’
QazVaq developers haven’t published much information about their research on the vaccine, with Kutymbetov saying that they “don’t have time…to write articles.”
Asel Musabekova, a French-based expert on cellular and molecular biology, said a lack of information makes it impossible to assess the vaccine’s safety and efficacy.
“They could at least publish the results of the first and second phases of the clinical trials,” she said. “I’d support vaccination with QazVac once I see enough published data [that backs the developers’ claims].”
Asel Musabekova, a French-based expert on cellular and molecular biology, wants to see more published data about the QazVac vaccine.
Musabekova also said QazVac developers should have recruited a much larger pool of participants during the trials.
“Rare side effects can only be seen in large-scale clinical trials involving tens of thousands of people,” the Kazakh-born expert explained.
Limited Choice
The lack of information, however, hasn’t dampened the mood among many Kazakhs who stood in line to get injections across the country.
Aigul Nurlybekova, a 27-year-old resident of the capital, Nur-Sultan, received her first QazVac shot on April 28. The second dose should be taken three weeks later.
“I contracted coronavirus last summer. Six months later, when I heard about QazVac, I decided to get inoculated with it,” Nurlybekova said, adding that she trusts the domestically made vaccine.
People wait their turn before entering a vaccination center located at a shopping mall in Almaty. More than 1 million people in Kazakhstan — about 5.7 percent of the population — have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine.
Five days since getting the injection, Nurlybekova said she hasn’t experienced any major side effects.
Almaty resident Ardak Bukeeva did her homework before opting for QazVac over the Russian-made Sputnik V, a second vaccine option that is offered in Kazakhstan.
A journalist by profession, Bukeeva visited the research institute in February and spoke with the QazVac team to inquire about the vaccine they were developing.
Bukeeva told RFE/RL that at the end it was the institute’s “years of expertise” as well as the tried-and-tested vaccine ingredient — “the fully neutralized virus” — that convinced her to choose QazVac for herself and her family. She received her first dose on April 27.
“I hope it will be effective against the various coronavirus strains that we hear about every day, in India and elsewhere,” Bukeeva said.
Both women say many of their friends and acquaintances who have received QazVac injections haven’t had any serious side effects and are content with the vaccine.
But some Kazakhs took to social media to share their reservations about the sparse information on QazVac.
“Where are the research results? Where is the evaluation by foreign scientists? Not much is known about the components of the vaccine — there is almost no data,” Nur-Sultan resident Viktoria Murzintseva wrote on Facebook.
“I can’t even find decent domestically produced underwear anywhere, [let alone a coronavirus vaccine],” wrote a more skeptical Nur-Sultan resident, Aigul Fort.
So far, more than 1 million people in the Central Asian country — about 5.7 percent of the population — have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, mostly Sputnik V.
The resource-rich nation has also placed an order with Beijing for a million doses of the Chinese-made Sinopharm vaccine.
Some Kazakhs say they’re patiently waiting until more is known about the coronavirus vaccines in general before deciding whether to get one or not.
“I will wait. I’m in no hurry,” wrote Kazakh social-media user Zhanargul Omarova. “I will continue to wear a mask, wash my hands. I’m not going to weddings or parties and I have no plans to travel abroad anytime soon.”
There has been an official total of some 332,000 cases of the coronavirus in Kazakhstan, with 3,796 deaths as of May 5. Many observers and media outlets say those figures are grossly underreported due to government officials trying to hide the actual numbers.
Written by Farangis Najibullah in Prague based on reporting by RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service
Serbia will pay citizens to get a COVID-19 shot as the government seeks to speed up the Balkan country’s flagging vaccination campaign.
President Aleksandar Vucic announced the plan on May 5, saying economic growth depends on vaccinating the population.
Under the incentive program, the government will pay 3,000 dinars ($30) to anyone who receives at least one vaccine dose by the end of May.
On average, Serbs earn a little over $600 a month.
Vucic said the government cannot discriminate against people based on whether they have been inoculated, but described those who refuse to get the shot as “irresponsible and selfish.”
“That is why we have been thinking about how to reward people who show responsibility,” he added.
Vucic also said state employees who are not vaccinated and get sick with COVID-19 will not receive paid leave.
Serbia ranks among the top countries in the world in vaccinating its population of 7 million, but as elsewhere the pace of administering shots has slowed after an initial rush to get vaccinated.
According to government figures, 1.3 million people have been fully vaccinated with either the Sinopharm, Pfizer ,Sputnik V, or AstraZeneca vaccines. The country has a population of around 7 million.
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — A Russian court has dismissed a case against an RFE/RL correspondent who was charged with the distribution of “false information about the coronavirus” over an article she wrote about a lack of ventilators for COVID-19 patients.
The lawyer for Tatyana Voltskaya, Leonid Krikun, told RFE/RL that the Gatchino City Court in the northwestern Leningrad region ruled on May 4 that there was no crime committed by the reporter.
Investigators initially demanded a criminal case be launched against Voltskaya regarding her article published on RFE/RL’s North.Realities website in April 2020.
In the story, Voltskaya reported on a lack of ventilation units at hospitals treating COVID-19 patients in the city of St. Petersburg, citing an unnamed physician.
After a local court refused to launch a criminal case, Russia’s Investigative Committee requested an administrative case against Voltskaya that could have seen her fined or spend several days in jail as punishment.
“The court had an opportunity to close the case because of the statute of limitations, but it looked into it taking into account our motion saying that Voltskaya had a right to express her opinion on an issue important for society and that the preparation of the report and offering it for publication were an expression of the journalist’s professional and civil position,” Krikun told RFE/RL.
After Voltskaya’s article in question was published last year, Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor demanded RFE/RL remove the material from the site, which the broadcaster refused to do.
In August, a court in Moscow fined RFE/RL’s Russian Service 300,000 rubles ($4,000) over Voltskaya’s article. RFE/RL refused to pay the fine, saying it was confident that the information in the article is valid.
Independent journalists across Russia have faced similar encounters as they worked to cover the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic in its early stages and the Russian government’s efforts to cope with it.
In addition, Amnesty International said last month that Russian police have never cracked down so extensively and systematically on journalists as they are in their recent efforts to prevent coverage of protests in support of Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny.
In 2012, Russian lawmakers passed the “foreign agent” law giving authorities the power to brand nongovernmental organizations, human rights groups, and news media deemed to receive foreign funding for political activity as “foreign agents.”
Among other things, the law — which has been expanded several times since — requires news organizations that receive foreign funding to label content within Russia as being produced by a “foreign agent.”
In 2017, the Russian government placed RFE/RL’s Russian Service on the list, along with six other Russian-language RFE/RL news services, and Current Time, a network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.
Roskomnadzor has prepared hundreds of complaints against RFE/RL’s projects for failure to follow these rules that could result in fines totaling more than $1 million.
RFE/RL has called the fines “a state-sponsored campaign of coercion and intimidation,” while the U.S. State Department has described them as “intolerable.”
The targeting of RFE/RL has raised concerns that the Russian government may be moving to shutter RFE/RL’s operations inside Russia and force its Russian-language services and Current Time out of the country.
Ukraine’s capital has eased tough lockdown measures imposed in March to prevent the rapid spread of the new coronavirus.
Starting on May 1, Kyiv authorities have allowed cafes, restaurants, shopping malls, and sports clubs to reopen, and they have also permitted the operation of transport services without restrictions, although the numbers of passengers and customers will be limited.
Wearing masks remains mandatory in transport and public places.
Schools and kindergartens are to open their doors from May 5, officials said.
In March, city authorities closed schools and kindergartens, theaters, and shopping centers, while cafes and restaurants were only allowed to provide takeaway food.
Kyiv public transport is now operating on special passenger passes for those working for critical infrastructure enterprises.
Despite the measures, Kyiv recorded some of highest numbers of new infections among Ukrainian regions in April, but new cases have dropped significantly over the past week.
The European Union says that China and Russia have intensified “state-sponsored disinformation” campaigns denigrating Western-developed COVID-19 vaccines while promoting their own.
“The so-called ‘vaccine diplomacy’ follows a zero-sum game logic” that seeks to “undermine trust in Western-made vaccines, EU institutions, and Western/European vaccination strategies,” a report from the strategic communications branch of the EU’s external action service said on April 28.
It said that Russian media, authorities, and state companies had united behind pushing the Sputnik V vaccine while using “antagonistic messaging” to accuse the EU of “sabotaging” the Russian jab.
The report said that part of the campaign was to sow distrust in the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
“Pro-Kremlin media outlets, including the official Sputnik V Twitter account, have sought to undermine public trust in the [EMA] and cast doubt on its procedures and political impartiality.”
State-backed media has been trying to “sow confusion” over an application for marketing approval by the Russian Sputnik V vaccine in a bid to fuel the narrative that the body had been deliberately delaying giving the green light, the report said.
“Pro-Kremlin outlets have also accused the EMA and the EU in general of political bias against the Russian-made vaccine,” it said.
Meanwhile, China is promoting its vaccines as “more suitable for developing countries,” including those in the Western Balkans, while deploying “misleading narratives” about the safety of Western vaccines and even on the origin of the coronavirus, the report said.
EU member Hungary has broken ranks with the rest of the bloc and has been administering the Russian and Chinese jabs, while Austria and Germany say they are in talks to purchase Sputnik V.
The EMA launched a rolling review of Sputnik V in March. If it gets the regulator’s approval it would be the first non-Western coronavirus vaccine authorized for use across the 27-member bloc.
Last month, EU member Slovakia’s government collapsed after its former prime minister orchestrated a secret deal to buy 2 million Sputnik V doses, despite disagreements with his coalition partners.
With more 20,000 new COVID cases and at least 400 deaths per day, Iran faces what looks like its worst wave of the coronavirus pandemic yet. After facing criticism for downplaying the virus last year, Iranian authorities have put partial lockdowns and other measures into place to try and slow the coronavirus’s spread.
Iranian health officials are warning the number of COVID-19 fatalities is expected to climb in the coming weeks as the country recorded its highest single-day death toll from the pandemic.
Health Ministry data showed the death toll from the virus increased by 496 in the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of deaths from the virus to 70,070.
The country also recorded 21,026 more confirmed infections, bringing the total to over 2.4 million cases.
Some officials have admitted actual virus numbers are likely higher than official figures.
Deputy Health Minister Iraj Harirchi warned that the death rate will likely increase for at least the coming two weeks.
“The bad news is that for at least the next two weeks the mortality trend will be upward,” the IRNA state news agency quoted him as saying.
Iranian officials say a variant of the virus devastating India is spreading in the country, after a highly transmissible variant first found in Britain led to a spike in infections.
The spread of the virus has been exacerbated by disregard of health measures, family gatherings, and the Persian New Year holiday in March.
On April 10, Iran began a partial lockdown in the capital, Tehran, and other major cities to stem a fourth wave of infections across the country of 84 million people.
Iran’s vaccine campaign started in early February but has been sluggish, with only 824,000 shots administered to date.
Kazakhstan has rolled out its locally developed vaccine against COVID-19, with Health Minister Aleksei Tsoi receiving the first injection.
Tsoi said that 50,000 doses of the QazVac vaccine developed by the state-backed Research Institute for Biological Safety Problems have been distributed across the country of nearly 19 million people.
QazVac requires two doses three weeks apart and can be stored in a regular refrigerator.
The vaccine is currently in its third stage of clinical trials, which are expected to be completed in July. Its developers claim the vaccine had a 96 percent efficacy in the second stage.
Tsoi said that 1-in-20 Kazakhstanis have been vaccinated against the coronavirus since the Central Asian country’s vaccination drive kicked off in February.
The Russian-developed Sputnik V vaccine is dominating the vaccination effort in Kazakhstan, which earlier this year became the first foreign country to produce a vaccine.
As of April 26, Kazakh health authorities have registered more than 309,000 coronavirus cases, including 3,570 deaths. A total of 755 more deaths were registered as caused by atypical pneumonia with COVID-19 symptoms.
Mexico’s foreign minister has left for talks in Moscow on a plan to bottle Russia’s Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine in Mexico after delays in the delivery of shipments from Russia.
Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard left Mexico City on April 25, his office said. Ebrard’s visit to Moscow will last through April 28 and include a meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov.
Birmex, Mexico’s state-run vaccine manufacturer, is working with Russia on a plan to bottle Sputnik V in Mexico, Ebrard said last week, adding that there had already been “significant progress” on the plan.
A Health Ministry official said on April 25 that the government’s aim is to ramp up distribution of Sputnik V in Mexico and other parts of Latin America.
Mexico’s Health Ministry signed an agreement to acquire a total of 24 million doses of Sputnik V, but deliveries are running behind.
The government said in late February that it expected to receive 7.4 million doses of Sputnik V by April and an additional 16.6 million shots in May. Russia has shipped just 1.1 million doses to Mexico to date.
Delays in getting the Sputnik V vaccine and others have prompted Mexico to change its strategy and bottle vaccines domestically. It already has bottled 2.6 million shots of China’s CanSino vaccine.
The government is aiming to quicken its vaccination drive, which so far as inoculated only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population of 126 million people.
Nearly 215,000 people have died from COVID-19 in Mexico. The country’s death toll is fourth-highest after the United States, Brazil, and India.
In Kyrgyzstan, five directors are making a series of short films about the COVID-19 pandemic hitting the country in the spring and summer of 2020. Ten different stories will tell about how ordinary people experienced quarantine, how they fought for other people’s lives, and how the local health-care system was unready for the outbreak.
Most Ukrainian hospitals are overwhelmed with coronavirus patients. The number of hospitalizations over the past month has increased dramatically and many medical facilities are suffering from an acute oxygen shortage. In the western Ukrainian city of Khmelnytsky, the main designated COVID-19 hospital is running out of beds and some have even been placed in an operating room.
European Union member Austria said on April 20 that it plans to send 651,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine to six countries in the Western Balkans by August as part of an EU scheme to provide assistance to neighboring countries and Africa.
Vienna said that this first distribution of doses may be followed by others.
The European Commission in January announced plans for a vaccine-sharing mechanism, with Austria serving as the mechanism’s coordinator for the Western Balkans.
Among the six Western Balkans countries, Serbia has one of the highest vaccination rates in Europe.
But the other five — Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Kosovo have had less success. The shortage of vaccines has even led to street protests in Bosnia.
“With this initiative we are showing that we are not leaving the region behind,” Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg told a news conference.
Schallenberg, whose government faces growing public frustration with the slow pace of vaccinations in his own country, said the doses will not be taken away from Austria’s quota.
“There is absolutely no connection here to the provision of vaccines in Austria and in other (EU) member states,” he said.
“These doses are not from a national quota. These are vaccine doses that the EU explicitly secured from the beginning for the purpose of passing them on to partners.”
Schallenberg said the vaccines will be distributed from early next month based on which countries need them most.
Bosnia will get the biggest share with 214,000 doses, followed by Albania with 145,000, and North Macedonia with 119,000. Serbia is last with 36,000.
BISHKEK — An effort by Kyrgyz authorities to promote a toxic root for treatment of COVID-19 has been met with criticism in the Central Asian nation.
On April 16, Health Minister Alymkadyr Beishenaliev announced at a press conference that a solution with extracts of aconite root had been given to 300 coronavirus-infected patients.
He also sipped from a cup containing the poisonous root’s extract in front of journalists and said that “the solution is not dangerous for health.”
“The solution must be consumed when it is hot only and in two to three days anyone who tested positive on coronavirus will immediately feel better,” Beishenaliev said.
The previous day, President Sadyr Japarov announced on Facebook that his country found an “effective” method to treat COVID-19.
Japarov posted a video on Facebook showing men without protective equipment bottling the solution with the extracts of the aconite root, warning that drinking the solution while it is cold might result in death.
The World Health Organization’s mission in the Central Asian nation harshly criticized the idea, saying that there’s no proof aconite root is safe for treatment of any illnesses, including coronavirus infection.
Several physicians who spoke with RFE/RL said use of the root to treat COVID-19 violates Kyrgyzstan’s law on public safety
Aconite root is found in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang and some parts of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.
Some people use the root in herbal soups and meals, believing in its health benefits. But aconite roots contain aconitine, a cardiotoxin and neurotoxin. Consuming aconite root can lead to sickness or even death.
Current Time has visited the intensive-care unit of a COVID-19 hospital in Kyiv, where a recent surge in infections means every single bed is full. Many patients arrive in critical condition and require mechanical ventilation of their lungs. Medical staff say they’re battling difficult conditions and fatigue, while surviving patients speak of the trauma they have experienced.
The Ukrainian capital Kyiv will remain on lockdown until April 30 as the daily number of new coronavirus cases and coronavirus-related deaths continues to climb.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko announced the decision in a televised briefing on April 14, saying there was “no other choice, otherwise the medical system would not be able to cope with a further rise in the number of patients, otherwise there will be even more deaths.”
Last month, city authorities closed schools and kindergartens, theaters, and shopping centers, while cafes and restaurants were only allowed to provide takeaway food. Kyiv public transport is now operating on special passenger passes for those working for critical infrastructure enterprises.
Klitschko recommended that companies keep employees working remotely, or, have them take vacation.
“No time to be frivolous. Today, our main task is to preserve the health and life of Kyiv residents, to help our doctors cope with this wave,” he said.
The mayor said the capital reported 1,457 new coronavirus cases on April 13 and some 47 related deaths.
Ukraine has registered a total of nearly 1.9 million coronavirus infections and over 38,220 related deaths since the start of the pandemic.
KYIV – If you’ve ever used Grammarly to polish up a piece of writing, hired a Portuguese-language tutor on Preply, kept your dog or cat out of trouble with Petcube, or found a job through Jooble, you have used products designed by companies with Ukrainian roots.
They are some of the best-known names to emerge from an IT industry that has been booming in recent years — and whose growth has been slowed a bit but not stopped by the coronavirus pandemic, which has hit Ukraine hard and continues to take a deadly toll more than a year after its onset.
The economy contracted by 4 percent in 2020 and Ukraine is undergoing a third wave, with more than 1.8 million cases recorded and more than 35,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19 as of April 6.
A hands-off approach from state regulators and tax collectors, at least when it comes to individual contractors has left Ukraine’s IT industry mostly untouched and allowed it to thrive.
After recording growth of 30 percent in 2019, the sector defied the disruptive effects of the pandemic to grow by 20 percent in 2020, exceeding $5 billion in total exports for the first time. It also drew a record high of $563 million in investments, according to Yuliya Sychikova, director of AVentures Capital, a venture capital fund that also advises IT firms and other funds on strategy and execution.
Computer services accounted for more than 8 percent of the nation’s exports after steel, food, and labor, central bank data shows. One out of five Fortune 500 firms use the IT services of Ukrainian companies, according to the Tech Ecosystem Guide to Ukraine, a report produced by UNIT.City, an innovation park on the outskirts of Kyiv.
Driving the growth is “minimum red tape that is careful not to incapacitate the goose that lays the golden eggs, a stable industry-wide tax policy, and the professionalism of Ukraine’s IT specialists,” said Andy Hunder, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine. In turn, he said, the industry’s performance is “strengthening Ukraine’s image as a reliable and innovative IT partner.”
Around the time Ukraine recorded its first COVID-19 case, in March 2020, about 35 percent of orders in the IT sector were canceled, according to Nataly Vyeryemyeyeva, program office director of Tech Ukraine, a nonprofit that serves as a development platform for the industry.
Silver Lining For Some
But as companies around the world adopted and began to implement work-from-home policies, business picked up, and the Ukrainian IT sector’s growth accelerated in the last quarter of the year, Sychikova said.
“The pandemic accelerated the demand for higher digitalization needs as businesses moved online,” she said, adding that “companies got leaner and increased [research and development] budgets — a beneficial macro trend for the outsourcing industry.”
One company that has weathered the pandemic so far is Grammarly, which helps users identify plagiarism in research papers and improve their writing by assessing the tone and correcting mistakes in grammar, syntax, and other areas.
With offices in Kyiv and three North American cities including San Francisco, where it is based, Grammarly sent people home to work and changed schedules to have time zones overlap for project collaboration.
Anatoliy Visikirskiy, a Grammarly “people partner” in Kyiv.
This meant that 250 employees in Kyiv started and ended work later to cooperate with colleagues in San Francisco who got up earlier to accommodate for a 10-hour time difference, said Anatoliy Visikirskiy, the company’s “people partner” — a senior human resources position.
As a result, Grammarly surpassed 30 million active users in 2020 “and we continue to hire and grow,” Visikirskiy told RFE/RL.
Ukraine’s rich talent pool has made it “one of the top destinations for outsourcing in Eastern Europe with one of the largest workforces,” Sychikova added.
Ukraine has about 200,000 IT engineers capable of producing “high-end solutions,” according to the Tech Ecosystem Guide, which places it seventh in the world in terms of the quality and efficiency of its freelance workforce.
The work they do ranges from software development for mobile phone platforms to gaming, financial technology, health-care programs, artificial intelligence, and e-commerce.
Ukraine now hosts more than 110 research and development centers run by multinational companies, including Apple, Google, Samsung, Huawei, Boeing, Siemens, and French game developer Ubisoft.
Whether Kyiv or Silicon Valley, the IT sector has a lingo all its own: “people partners,” for example, and also unicorns, ecosystems, clusters, startups, co-working spaces, and early-stage and late-stage investors.
Ukraine’s first unicorn, a term used to describe a privately held company with a value of $1 billion, is GitLab. It stores and edits programming code and is currently valued at nearly $6 billion.
History Lesson
Grammarly followed suit in 2019, raising $90 million that year. Next could be Reface, a popular face-swap video application, Sychikova said. It’s been downloaded more than 70 million times since hitting app stores in January 2020, making it one of the top five in about 100 countries.
Another growing IT company is Ajax Systems, a Kyiv-based outfit that was founded a decade ago and makes wireless security systems for homes and offices.
Ingredients in the sector’s success include history and human capital, according to Vyeryemyeyeva, who said that “cybernetics is rooted in Ukraine.”
Tech Ukraine program office director Nataly Vyeryemyeyeva delivers a presentation in Kyiv
“One of the first computers” – the MESM, or Small Electronic Calculating Machine – “was invented in Kyiv” about 70 years ago, she said.
Generations were trained at such institutions as polytechnical schools in Kharkiv, Lviv and Kyiv. Emerging from the earlier generation is Lubomyr Romankiw, an American who was born in western Ukraine in 1931. He and a colleague at IBM are credited with inventing the technique that produced the first practical and manufacturable thin film magnetic head that allowed for data to be stored on discs.
Fast forward a few decades and Jooble, a job-search site, was created in a dormitory room by two students at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute.
Today, dozens of tech hubs are sprawled across the country and there are special tech startup schools and IT clusters in big and small cities alike. A 2.5-hectare innovation park is currently being built in the Black Sea port of Odesa.
The government, meanwhile, has established a Ukrainian Startup Fund that allocates seed money of $25,000 to $75,000 to finance startups engaged in artificial intelligence, augmented reality, Big Data, blockchain, cybersecurity, defense, travel, robotics and the “Internet of things,” according to Ukrainian World, a website that promotes the country’s image.
A Taxing Question
As it grows, the industry is also maturing, Vyeryemyeyeva suggested.
Ukrainian providers of tech services are increasingly being used to work on “mature projects — providing more solutions, [taking] more risks, instead of being used as merely heads with brains,” she said.
At the same time, the product and startup side of the industry — the area that attracts investment and keeps capital and intellectual property inside the country — is growing, Vyeryemyeyeva added.
As companies develop, they eventually open offices abroad and sometimes set up their headquarters outside the country while keeping a research and development team in Ukraine.
There’s a catch, though, and the IT industry is divided into two categories: Freelancers, or individual contractors, often work as registered self-employed people and pay a simplified 5 percent tax, while the tax burden for legal entities, in one form or another, can be up to 40-60 percent of income.
This two-track situation poses a dilemma for the newly formed Ministry of Digital Transformation (MDT): How to put a some of the proceeds of the booming sector into state coffers without scaring away “top talent,” Sychikova said.
At an IT industry roundtable in Kyiv on March 25, Digital Transformation Minister Mykhaylo Federov said he wants to reduce the tax burden for IT companies fivefold.
“We want Ukraine to be known as a country with the best tax system, as a country of startups and large food companies — and as a country where it is easy to do business,” he said.
Speaking at a news conference after the discussion, Ajax Systems founder and chief executive Oleksandr Konotopskiy said Ukraine desperately needs to introduce special tax conditions for IT companies.
“We need to create conditions for talented people to create value — there are no other options,” he said.
Iranian authorities say COVID-19 cases have surpassed 2 million, with a new daily record of more than 22,000 infections, following the Persian New Year holiday.
“Unfortunately, with 118 new fatalities since yesterday, we have recorded a total of 63,884 coronavirus deaths,” Health Ministry spokeswoman Sima Sadat Lari told state television on April 8, adding that the number of infected people had reached 2,006,934 with 22,586 new cases.
Some critics say they believe the government has suppressed reporting and that the actual numbers are much higher.
Iran is battling the Middle East’s deadliest coronavirus outbreak, and officials have blamed the latest surge on trips made by millions of Iranians during the Norouz holiday, which ran for two weeks from March 20, despite health guidelines warning them not to travel.
Last year, officials enacted tight restrictions on gatherings and the movement of people across the country during the Persian New Year.
Iran has avoided imposing a full lockdown on its population of 82 million since the pandemic started more than a year ago, resorting instead to temporary bans on travel or businesses.
The country launched its vaccination drive in February.
The COVID-19 pandemic is raging across Ukraine. At a small rural hospital in the village of Lavriv in the country’s Lviv region, there are no spare beds and patients are lying in corridors. Ukraine has recorded over 37,000 deaths since the start of the pandemic. The Lviv region has recorded more deaths than any other apart from Kyiv.
Slovakia’s drug regulator has said that the Russian Sputnik V doses it received differ from the same vaccine reviewed by the EU’s drug overseer and the U.K.-based medical journal The Lancet.
The State Institute for Drug Control (SUKL) did not explain how the mix-up might have occurred.
“Batches of [Sputnik V] vaccine used in preclinical tests and clinical studies published in The Lancet journal do not have the same characteristics and properties as batches of vaccine imported to Slovakia,” the SUKL said a statement.
The SUKL had already said the day before that lingering questions about the efficacy and risks of the Russian vaccine due to inadequate data from the producer were preventing use of the doses.
EU member Slovakia received 200,000 batches of Sputnik V, which has still not been cleared by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), last month.
The Russian Health Ministry, which supervises the Gamaleya Institute where Sputnik V was developed, did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
“On March 30, 2021, the agency officially sent an evaluation report to the Health Ministry, in which it stated that it was not possible to make a conclusion on the balance of benefits and risks of the Sputnik V vaccine,” Reuters quoted SUKL as saying on April 7.
The regulator cited “an amount of missing data from the producer, inconsistency of dosage forms, and [the] impossibility of mutually comparing batches used in various studies and countries.”
As its inspection continues, reports say the EMA’s approval will also be contingent on “good clinical practice” (GCP) standards.
Russian backers of the vaccine, which was registered to great Kremlin fanfare last year despite concerns about underlying data and unfinished clinical trials, have denied the problems should stand in the way of safe rollout.
Slovakia’s prime minister, Igor Matovic, was forced to resign last week under a cloud of questions about his administration’s order for 2 million doses of Sputnik V.
In the neighboring Czech Republic, Prime Minister Andrej Babis on April 7 announced the dismissal of a health minister who was reportedly resisting pressure — including public complaints by President Milos Zeman — to order Sputnik V.
Sputnik V is already being used in EU member Hungary and other countries around the world.
The German state of Bavaria recently announced an agreement to buy 2.5 million doses of Sputnik V pending approval by European regulators.
Georgian rescuers have recovered the bodies of four people who drowned in the Inguri River after trying to sneak across the administrative border separating the breakaway Abkhazia region from Tbilisi-controlled territory, to avoid coronavirus quarantine rules.
The four, identified as residents of Abkhazia’s Gali district, drowned as they tried to cross into the Zugdidi region, authorities said on April 7.
Three bodies were initially recovered, while a fourth was found hours later.
Georgia’s State Security Service said the deaths “once again demonstrated the inhuman and criminal nature of the occupation [of Abkhazia], for which the Russian Federation bears full responsibility.”
Since 2017, a bridge over the Inguri has been the only route for people looking to cross the administrative border with Abkhazia. That border was hardened after the brief 2008 war in which Russian forces occupied Abkhazia and another Georgian region, South Ossetia. In 2017, the number of administrative checkpoints was cut from six, to one.
Most people living in the Gali district are ethnic Georgians who maintain close contacts with the other side of the river. Many of them must regularly cross the bridge to buy groceries and receive their pensions or medical treatment.
According to the Democracy Research Institute, Abkhazia residents must quarantine for five days when crossing into Tbilisi-controlled territory as part of COVID-19 measures.
The result is some Gali district residents try to sneak in undetected.
“We call on the Georgian government to immediately lift the quarantine, which endangers the lives of people,” the institute said in a statement.
After the 2008 war, Moscow recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent. Only a handful of other countries, however, have followed the Kremlin’s lead, which has kept Russian forces in both regions.
Georgia has reported more than 268,000 coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic and 3,650 COVID-related deaths.
A Ukrainian couple with 13 children have both died of COVID-19 in quick succession. The funeral was held for Diana Rodikova on March 31, just days after her husband, Volodymyr, succumbed to the virus. Eleven of their children are under 18. The family moved to Kyiv in 2014 after Russia-backed separatists seized their home city of Makiyivka in eastern Ukraine. The family’s eldest daughter, Oleksandra Slyusarenko, 21, and her husband, are to become the remaining children’s legal guardians.
Iran has set a new daily record for new coronavirus infections amid a surge of cases following the Norouz holiday.
The Health Ministry said on April 7 that in the previous 24 hours, 20,954 new cases had been reported, breaking the record set a day earlier of 17,430 infections.
Deputy Health Minister Iraj Haririchi said on state television that some members of the country’s coronavirus task force were to blame for the surge by “preventing us from using the golden opportunity of [the holiday] to extinguish the flames of the coronavirus.”
Last year, the two-week Persian New Year celebration was a muted affair after officials enacted tight restrictions on gatherings and the movement of people around the country.
Haririchi said similar measures weren’t enacted this year because of some officials, whom he did not name. Instead, millions of Iranians hit vacation hotspots across the country to celebrate the holiday, despite health guidelines warning them not to.
“Travel should have been stopped,” he said.
Iran has struggled for months to curb the worst outbreak of the coronavirus in the Middle East.
Official figures on April 7 put the total number of cases in the country at 1,984,348, with the death toll at 63,699.
Some critics say they believe the government has suppressed reporting and that the actual numbers are much higher.
The European Union’s drug regulator will begin its investigation next week into the clinical trials in Russia of the Sputnik V vaccine and whether those tests — to ensure efficacy and safety — followed “good clinical practice,” the Financial Times reports.
The U.K.-based newspaper cited anonymous sources familiar with the European Medicines Agency (EMA)’s approval process as expressing ethical concerns over the testing of Sputnik V in preparation for its use in the fight against COVID-19 in Russia and around the world.
It quoted Kirill Dimitriyev, the head of the Kremlin’s sovereign wealth fund, which backed Sputnik V’s development, as saying “there was no pressure [on participants in testing] and Sputnik V complied with all clinical practices.”
EMA approval will hinge in part on determining whether the Russian clinical trials met so-called GCP standards, the newspaper reported.
Russian President Vladimir Putin mounted an all-out race for a vaccine ahead of domestic registration of the Sputnik V vaccine in August before a third stage of clinical tests on large segments of volunteers could be completed.
It is being widely used in Russia and dozens of other countries despite early misgivings about data secrecy and reliability among medical experts.
A study published in February in The Lancet, a prestigious peer-review publication in the United Kingdom, eased some international concerns by saying Sputnik V “appears safe and effective.”
But it has received neither U.S. nor EU regulatory approval, although EU members Hungary and Slovakia have purchased it, even as the scramble for vaccinations to beat COVID-19 around the world intensifies.
The European Union’s drug regulator will begin its investigation next week into the clinical trials in Russia of the Sputnik V vaccine and whether those tests — to ensure efficacy and safety — followed “good clinical practice,” the Financial Times reports.
The U.K.-based newspaper cited anonymous sources familiar with the European Medicines Agency (EMA)’s approval process as expressing ethical concerns over the testing of Sputnik V in preparation for its use in the fight against COVID-19 in Russia and around the world.
It quoted Kirill Dimitriyev, the head of the Kremlin’s sovereign wealth fund, which backed Sputnik V’s development, as saying “there was no pressure [on participants in testing] and Sputnik V complied with all clinical practices.”
EMA approval will hinge in part on determining whether the Russian clinical trials met so-called GCP standards, the newspaper reported.
Russian President Vladimir Putin mounted an all-out race for a vaccine ahead of domestic registration of the Sputnik V vaccine in August before a third stage of clinical tests on large segments of volunteers could be completed.
It is being widely used in Russia and dozens of other countries despite early misgivings about data secrecy and reliability among medical experts.
A study published in February in The Lancet, a prestigious peer-review publication in the United Kingdom, eased some international concerns by saying Sputnik V “appears safe and effective.”
But it has received neither U.S. nor EU regulatory approval, although EU members Hungary and Slovakia have purchased it, even as the scramble for vaccinations to beat COVID-19 around the world intensifies.
MOSCOW — The jailed former governor of Russia’s Far Eastern region of Khabarovsk Krai, Sergei Furgal, whose arrest in July sparked unprecedented protests, has tested positive for the coronavirus.
Furgal’s lawyer, Mikhail Karapetyan, said on April 7 that his client was tested the previous day in Moscow’s Lefortovo detention center, where he is currently held after being charged in 2020 with being involved in several murders that took place more than 10 years ago.
He and his supporters reject the charges, calling the case politically motivated. He was dismissed from the post after his arrest.
“The defense team is very much concerned about the illness because, as Furgal himself has said, he has problems with his lungs and fears that the illness may cause complications,” Karapetyan said, adding that his client is currently in a two-week quarantine and therefore will be unable to meet with his lawyers.
According to Karapetyan, a motion has been filed demanding investigators allow Furgal to be released from pretrial detention due to the illness.
The 51-year-old Furgal was elected in 2018 in a runoff that he won handily against the region’s longtime incumbent from the ruling United Russia party.
His arrest on July 9 sparked mass protests in Khabarovsk and several other towns and cities in the region by his supporters that until recently were held on an almost daily basis.
The protests highlighted growing discontent in the Far East over what demonstrators see as Moscow-dominated policies that often disregard their views and interests.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has been vaccinated with the Chinese-developed Sinopharm vaccine in a televised event aimed at encouraging skeptical Serbians to get an injection against COVID-19.
While Belgrade’s procurement of vaccines has been widely lauded abroad, anti-vaccine sentiment in the country has so far left millions of doses arriving in that Balkan state unspoken for, despite a fresh wave of coronavirus infections.
“I received the vaccine, and I feel great,” Vucic, 51, said via Instagram. “Thank you our great health workers. Thank you our Chinese brothers.”
Vucic has publicly chided the European Union over its approach to the pandemic, despite tens of millions of dollars in emergency health-care assistance to non-member Serbia.
He has also aggressively touted cooperation with Beijing and Moscow as his administration was arranging major shipments of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine and two Chinese vaccines, Sinopharm and Sinovac.
Serbia has also acquired supplies of the Pfizer/BioNTech and AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccines.
With more than 1.5 million Serbians already having gotten at least one injection, it is among Europe’s leaders among national vaccine rollouts. But dogged resistance and mistrust have left the sign-up for vaccines stalled despite Serbia’s population of nearly 7 million people continuing to suffer heavily, along with other Balkan states.
Last month, Serbian officials opened their vaccination effort to foreigners who wanted to come and get vaccinated there.
The number of Russians who have died from the coronavirus has surpassed 225,000, the nation’s statistics agency reported on April 2.
The data published by Rosstat covers the 11-month period from April 2020 through February 2021.
The figure puts Russia third globally for the most coronavirus-related deaths after the United States and Brazil, which have reported 553,000 and 325,000 fatalities, respectively, from the disease, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
The Rosstat death toll is more than double the widely reported fatality figure provided by the Russian government’s coronavirus task force and which is used by John Hopkins. That figure, which now stands at 99,000, does not take into account deaths that are determined at a later date following an autopsy to have been coronavirus-related.
The Rosstat data released on April 2 shows that 29,493 more Russians died in February compared with the same month last year, a possible reflection of the monthly coronavirus death toll.
February had one more calendar day last year compared with this year.
Russia is one of the few countries that has developed a vaccination proven to be highly effective at preventing the coronavirus, putting it in a good position to slow its own death toll.
However, many of its citizens have been hesitant to receive a shot of the home-grown Sputnik V vaccine.
As of last week, less than 5 percent of the Russian population had been vaccinated.
Some have blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for the vaccine’s slow acceptance inside the country.
The Kremlin said Putin received his vaccination on March 23, months after the start of the rollout and behind closed doors.
Global coronavirus statistics are murky and some countries, such as China and Iran, are believed to be underreporting deaths.
China, where the coronavirus pandemic originated, has officially reported less than 5,000 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins.
News agencies last year reported that crematories in some cities in China, the world’s largest country by population, were so busy due to the pandemic that they were operating around the clock.
Moldovan President Maia Sandu has said that almost 700 doses of COVID-19 vaccines intended for health-care workers and the critically vulnerable have instead been diverted to public officials and family members, including employees of the Defense Ministry and regional authorities,
“A first dose of Pfizer-BioNTech has been given to 688 people in the ‘relatives’ category,” Sandu told Moldova’s Jurnal TV on March 31.
Moldova, one of Europe’s poorest countries, has lagged behind the rest of the continent in the vaccination campaign and welcomed donations from friendly governments.
The first batch of 14,400 doses of Pfizer vaccines from the global COVAX scheme arrived in Moldova last month. So far, the country of 4.5 million has received 110,970 doses of various vaccines.
Sandu said Health Ministry data showed that doses went to hundreds of ineligible people from the Defense Ministry, regional officials’ relatives, and even doctors’ families.
“This is shameful and it discourages our efforts to obtain more vaccine donations from abroad,” Sandu said.
Moldovan President Maia Sandu (file photo0
The Defense Ministry in a statement on April 1 rejected the accusation, calling it an “erroneous data interpretation,” and arguing that the people inoculated under the “other personnel” category in the Health Ministry records are actually health workers from military units.
Moldova’s Health Ministry said on April 1 that it would check information that regional authorities and their relatives were jumping the queue.
Ninel Revenco, an official at the national vaccination campaign, said the health ministry had established a commission to investigate possible violations.
“The Health Ministry launched an investigation to determine if there were irregularities in the vaccination process. For this, the lists of all vaccinated will be checked,” Revenco told a news conference, without providing details of violations.
Local media reported that out-of-order vaccinations occurred in the northern town of Edinet and in Cantemir in the southern part of Moldova.
Moldova started vaccinations on March 2 and so far around 40,000 medical workers and doctors have received a first shot.
The country sandwiched between EU member Romania and Ukraine has reported 230,241 coronavirus cases and 4,960 deaths so far.
With reporting by Reuters, RFE/RL’s Moldovan Service, unimedia.md, and news.yam.md
