Ukraine’s attacks on Russian oil and gas sites are unprecedented, experts say published at 16:03 BST16:03 BST Image source, EPA Image caption, Queues were seen at service stations in parts of Russia last month, such as 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 attacks on Russian oil and gas infrastructure. Samuel Bendett, of the Center for Naval Analysis, says these attacks are unprecedented. “The whole situation is essentially unprecedented for Russia, as the last time its energy infrastructure was attacked in this way was in World War II,” he said. “The Ukrainian attacks 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 the shortages are being seen from the front lines: “I’m not aware of a major impact on fuel supplies to Russian forces.” Sergey Vakulenko, an oil and gas industry specialist at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, told us that the attacks are “part of a war of exhaustion and attrition, a war strategy aimed at making the population miserable… to make the population want a quick peace more than anything else and to make any kind of peace more acceptable to the population on each side.” And John Kennedy of the defense think tank RAND Europe agreed that the campaign is designed “to ensure that the Russian population feels the growing cost of the war.” He said: “Along with Western economic pressure, Russians now face an objectively worse outlook than at any time since the 1990s.”
