Serbia will invest however much is necessary to start domestic production of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine by the end of the year, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic told Reuters on Friday, noting that an "initial agreement" had been reached with Russia's President Vladimir Putin.

A team of Russian experts are expected to visit Serbia next week for talks on local production of the Sputnik V vaccine by the end of the year.

Vucic said that an initial agreement had been reached with Putin on launching the procedure, which he described as “complicated and difficult.”

Serbia’s aim is not just to product Sputnik V for its own purposes but to export it to countries in the region.

“We currently do not have the (production) capacities (for Sputnik V) but we will build them. The cost is not important, we will invest that,” said Vucic.

With over 530,000 vaccinations, Serbia has inoculated about 7.5% of its total population and globally ranks fourth in the rate of inoculation per 100 people, after Israel, Britain and the United States.

As part of a state campaign promoting vaccination, citizens registered on the health ministry’s e-system can choose which vaccine they want between Pfizer Inc-BioNTech, the Chinese Sinopharm or Russia’s Sputnik V.

According to the latest epidemiological data released on Friday, 14 people died in Serbia in the past 24 hours as a consequence of coronavirus and of the 11,854 samples tested, 1,968 new cases were identified.

There are currently 3,987 COVID patients in hospital treatment and 126 on ventilators.

Since the outbreak of the epidemic in Serbia, a total of 2,675,996 samples have been tested for coronavirus, resulting in 404,668 positive cases. The official death toll is 4,099, which is a death rate of 1.01 per cent.