President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov expressed gratitude Russia for the assistance provided to the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. The head of Turkmenistan said this, speaking today at an informal summit of CIS leaders in St. Petersburg.

- To date, this pandemic has not been registered in Turkmenistan. Thanks to the Russian Federation, we were one of the first to register “Sputnik V” and “EpiVacCorona” with which our population is currently vaccinated. Just the other day we received “Sputnik Light”, which is already being marketed as a booster vaccine”, Berdimuhamedov said.

According to the State News Agency of Turkmenistan, the Turkmen leader also came up with a number of initiatives, proposing new areas of cooperation in the field of scientific medicine. In particular, speaking about the threats to biological security in the CIS space, President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov proposed once again to revise and sign a single document in this area, noting that Turkmenistan and the Russian Federation have already signed such a document.

In addition, focusing the attention of the meeting participants on the fact that Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan are arid zones with different clinical manifestations than in Russia, the leader of the nation emphasized the need to study the coronavirus genome based on the characteristics of this zone.

Thanking for the assistance provided to everyone, President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov stressed that if Russia centralized its methodological instructions and manuals specifically for the study of both bacteriology and virology, then unified approaches would be developed in these issues.