Ukraine’s attacks on Russian oil and gas sites are unprecedented, experts saypublished at 16:03 BST
16:03 BST
Image source, EPAImage caption,
Queues were seen at petrol stations in parts of Russia last month – like this one in the city of St Petersburg
By Benedict Garman
BBC Verify has spoken to four experts to get their take on the impact of Ukraine’s strikes on Russian oil and gas infrastructure.
Samuel Bendett, from the Centre for Naval Analyses, says these attacks are unprecedented. “The entire situation is essentially without precedent for Russia, since the last time its energy infrastructure was targeted this way was in World War Two,” he said.
“Ukrainian strikes have caused multiple waves of fuel shortages in Russia,” said John Hardie, deputy director of the Russia Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
But he said shortages are being seen away from the front line: “I’m not aware of a large impact on fuel supplies to Russian forces.”
Sergey Vakulenko, an oil and gas industry specialist at Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, told us the attacks are “part of exhaustion and wearing-down warfare, a war strategy aimed at making the population miserable… to make the population desire a quick peace more than anything else and make any sort of peace more acceptable to the population on each side”.
And John Kennedy, from defence think tank RAND Europe, agreed the campaign is designed “to ensure that the Russian population feels the growing cost of the war.” He said: “Coupled with Western economic pressure, Russians now face an objectively worse outlook than at any time since the 1990s.”