As the United Kingdom celebrates giving at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine to 15 million people and the EU surpasses 23 million doses distributed, several other European countries have not yet managed to put a single shot in arms.

Kosovo, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina are still waiting to receive their first vaccine shipments, while rollouts in Albania and Northern Macedonia have so far been limited to a few hundred people.

The Western Balkan countries are key allies and possible future members of the European Union, but they have been left out of the bloc’s immediate vaccine supply plans.

The EU has secured more than 2.3 billion doses of various coronavirus vaccines and said it expects to share some of those with others. It also set aside €70 million ($85 million) for the Western Balkan region to purchase some of these doses in the future, but since its own rollout has been slow and delayed, those countries are still waiting.

And as relatively wealthy countries — at least in the global context — they are also not a top priority for programs designed to help the world’s poorest countries access vaccines.

They have joined the COVAX program, which is aiming to make access to vaccines more equitable across the world, but the scheme’s limited supply means its primary focus is on the 92 low and middle-income countries that can’t afford vaccines without funding and the Western Balkan countries are not among those. As self-financing COVAX members, they are set to receive 850,000 doses of a combination of coronavirus vaccines — but when these might arrive is unclear.

“The constant tragedy of the Western Balkans is that they are on the fringe,” said Allison Carragher, a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe, a global policy think tank. “They’re all aspirational EU members, so they looked at the EU program first, but that has been mangled and delayed by supply chain issues.”

Many see the EU’s omission of Western Balkan countries as a missed opportunity. “This is a small region in terms of population, which means that with a small investment in vaccines, the EU would have gained a lot in terms of soft power and influence in the region,” said Alba Cela, the executive director of the Albanian Institute for International Studies. The fact that the EU didn’t do this is “allowing for other actors to play a role,” she added.

Engjellushe Morina, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relation said that this feeling of being left behind could have serious implications for the region’s security.

“Europe has really neglected the region for such a long time and it makes the region vulnerable to other external actors,” she said, “This is where Russia comes in. This is where China comes in. This is where Turkey comes in, and they have filled in the void in different aspects.”

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