A plane carrying one million doses of Sinopharm’s Covid-19 vaccine arrived in Serbia, making it the first European country to receive the Chinese vaccine for mass inoculation programmes, Reuters reports.

President Aleksandar Vucic was accompanied by Beijing’s ambassador to the Balkan country at Belgrade’s airport as containers carrying the vaccines were unloaded from an Air Serbia plane.

“I would like to thank President Xi Jinping and [the] Chinese leadership for sending us one million doses of the vaccine,” Vucic, who has helped forge close ties with China in recent years, told reporters.

He said Serbia’s medical regulator was expected to approve the Sinopharm vaccine in the next few days, allowing vaccinations with the doses to start within a week.