Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic puts his country’s status as continental Europe’s front-runner in getting vaccines into people down to one thing: looking east as well as west.
The Balkan country may look like an unlikely success story as the neighboring European Union gets mired in a fiasco over vaccinations. Yet Serbia’s history of balancing its geopolitical interests is paying off at a critical time.
Serbia has been an important bridge for China to gain a foothold in Europe, while the country is also a traditional ally of Russia and is aspiring to join the EU. Those relationships have allowed it to diversify vaccine sources and inoculate a bigger proportion of its population than any other nation in Europe after the U.K. Serbia has injected 6.4% of its 7 million people, more than twice the ratio in the EU.
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