Vladimir Putin on Tuesday said that all Russian vaccines against Covid-19 were effective.

The Russian president added that the country would soon register a third shot against the virus, as reported by the RIA news agency.

The former KGB officer said Moscow was ready to cooperate with other countries on vaccine development but urged against politicising the process.

It comes just a day after Pfizer Inc and BioNTech said their experimental COVID-19 vaccine was more than 90 per cent effective.

Mr Putin announced in August that the country was the first to develop a vaccine that offered “sustainable immunity” and said his daughter had been given the jab as part of early-stage trials.

The Russian leader said the vaccine, called Sputnik V, would be rolled out to the wider populace later this year, despite the fact that Phase III trials have not yet finished.

However unlike Sputnik V, the Pfizer vaccine is based on the results from Phase III trials, leading to criticism from the international scientific community.

Dr Ohid Yaqub, senior lecturer at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex, told The Sun in August: “I would hope that other countries are not drawn into such pork-barrel vaccine nationalism.

“The less that vaccine development looks like this, the better.

“Decision making should published, open to scrutiny, and free from flag-waving.

"It's unprecedented to completely skip a Phase 3 trial like this in modern medicine." 

Russia on Tuesday reported 20,977 new coronavirus infections and 368 deaths. At 1.87m its overall case tally is the fifth largest in the world, behind the United States, India, Brazil and France.