On a chilly Monday morning, the first day of March, airport workers in Košice, Slovakia, unloaded crates marked “Sputnik V” and stamped with the accompanying boast “the first registered COVID-19 vaccine,” from a military cargo plane that had just landed from Russia.

Slovakia’s Prime Minister Igor Matovič, a media mogul in office for only a year who had earned a reputation as a showman while heading the anticorruption Ordinary People and Independent Personalities party, staged a press conference in front of the plane to unveil the surprise that he’d negotiated in secret with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government: 200,000 doses of Sputnik V — with another 2 million doses on