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Ukraine's Health Minister, Maxim Stepanov, has unexpectedly travelled to India due to the failed delivery of ordered vaccine doses, Stepanov announced on Facebook early on Friday.

In his post Stepanov said he wanted to negotiate additional supplies to the 12 million doses ordered from India.
Ukraine's vaccination campaign was due to start last week, but the country has not received any jabs from the program of the World Health Organization (WHO) nor those it ordered from Indian and Chinese manufacturers.

Kiev originally planned to vaccinate its 41 million inhabitants by the end of the year.
The country has however banned the use of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine due to the conflict over the Crimean peninsula, which was annexed by Russia in 2014.

According to official figures, some 1.3 million coronavirus infections were registered in Ukraine since the beginning of the pandemic and around 25,000 people have died from Covid-19.