A microstate surrounded by Italy, San Marino feared being left behind in Europe’s inoculation campaign. Now it has jumped ahead, with the Sputnik vaccine sent by an unlikely, faraway friend.

By Jason Horowitz

SAN MARINO — On the ground floor of the only hospital in San Marino, a tiny, independent republic perched high above the surrounding Italian countryside, nurses prepared Covid-19 vaccine doses from glass vials labeled in Cyrillic script, flicked needles and sought to put nervous residents at ease.

“Have you started speaking Russian since you got your first shot?” one nurse asked, coaxing a smile from Erica Stranieri, 32, as he injected Russia’s Sputnik vaccine into her arm.

San Marino, an ancient enclave within northern Italy, topped with crenelated medieval battlements on a mountain near the Adriatic coast, is best known — to the extent it is known at all — as one of the smallest countries on Earth.

But the pandemic has given it a new, tragic distinction: one of the world’s highest death rates from the coronavirus.

Just six weeks ago, San Marino risked becoming the last country in Europe to start inoculating its people. It had counted on an agreement with Italy to furnish it with vaccines, but they never materialized. With tensions rising and doctors threatening to stop working, the desperate government turned to Russia and found a warm embrace.

San Marino has long had close ties to Russia, and readily accepted more than 7,000 doses of the Sputnik vaccine, which has not been authorized by European or Italian drug regulators. For San Marino, it seemed like the natural thing to do.

AUSTRIA

SWITZ.

Venice

ITALY

Milan

Adriatic

Sea

EMILIA-ROMAGNA

Rimini

SAN MARINO

Ligurian

Sea

MARCHE

50 miles

By The New York Times

Russians have been drawn for years to this nation of just 33,000 people, often flying directly from Moscow to the Italian beach town of Rimini only 10 miles away. More than 100,000 Russian tourists visit San Marino in a typical year, so many that most stores started hiring Russian-speaking salespeople.

“Pronto. Da,” the Ukrainian manager at one sunglass store answered the phone in Italian and Russian. She sold 15 pairs of designer sunglasses to a group of glamorous Russian regulars who browsed under Matryoshka dolls sent back from clients in Russia.

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