MOSCOW, June 5 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A US military plane carrying 150
donated ventilators to help coronavirus patients landed in Moscow on
Thursday in the second such delivery to Russia, the US embassy said.
The plane brought the number of US-manufactured ventilators sent by
the United States to Russia to 200, after the first delivery arrived
two weeks ago.
US ambassador John Sullivan was at Vnukovo airport to meet the plane
along with a representative of the Moscow hospital that will
distribute the ventilators.
The aid supplies, worth $5.6 million, are a “donation to the Russian
people,” embassy spokeswoman Rebecca Ross tweeted, saying the
ventilators are “the highest quality in the world”.
Russian Ambassador to Washington Anatoly Antonov told Russian TV on
Wednesday that “we value the American aid very highly”.
The move follows an embarrassing debacle over a shipment by Moscow
of Russian ventilators along with other medical equipment to New York
on April 1.
The ventilators were never used and are unlikely to be after the
same model was implicated in two fires in Russian hospitals.
Five patients died in a Saint Petersburg hospital on May 12 and one
died in a Moscow hospital on May 9 in fires that are suspected to have
been caused by faulty ventilators.
Russia has the third-largest number of confirmed coronavirus cases
after the US and Brazil at 441,108, while it has reported 5,384
deaths, significantly fewer than many other countries with major
outbreaks.
Russia says the low proportion of deaths is due to mass testing and
classing cause of death on the basis of autopsy, while critics accuse
it of under-reporting virus deaths. — NNN-AGENCIES
