"Ukraine says it has ramped up its attacks on ships reportedly belonging to Russia's shadow fleet overnight alone. The military says it hit 14 vessels in the Sea of Azov with drones, including 12 tankers. According to the Ukrainian army, the vessels were being used to supply fuel to the Russian military and to transport oil and petroleum products in violation of international sanctions. That brings the total number of vessels Ukraine has struck in the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea to over to the within the past four days to 35. Let's bring in Kristina Harward here. She's Russia deputy team leader at the Institute for the Study of War. Welcome to the program. Kristina, what impact are these attacks having on Russia? Yeah, I think it's really absolutely fascinating to watch how this strike campaign is unfolding the past couple of weeks. And we have this new element that we see now in the past couple of days even. So really what's happening here is Russia is attempting to find ways to mitigate the problems that the Ukrainian strikes have caused in the past few months, including the wide scale gasoline crisis that we've seen in occupied Ukraine and throughout Russia. So Russia now is trying to somehow find another way to get gasoline to the peninsula of Crimea. And Ukraine is seeing that and they're going after that effort as well now. How do you explain this sudden rise in successful Ukrainian attacks on Russia's so-called shadow fleet? I mean, that fleet's been around a while. Ukraine has had drones for quite a while. Why is this happening now? Yeah, I mean, so I think there's probably a couple of different elements here, but I think one to really draw out is if we look back the past couple of months in 2026, but even going into the winter and potentially the fall of 2025, Ukraine has been conducting a very extensive campaign against Russian air defense systems as well as other infrastructure that support these systems like radars. So Ukrainians have really been blinding the Russians in really significant areas, including in Crimea and in occupied Ukraine. So that's really helped Ukraine create these corridors where their drones and other projectiles can fly through with a pretty high success rate of actually hitting the target. So I'm sure that's one of the elements that is helping Ukraine right now hit these vessels is that the Russian air defense umbrella is pretty degraded in the peninsula of Crimea. So how is Russia responding to these attacks? I mean, normally Russia doesn't just sit back. It throws something back in in return. Yeah, absolutely. So I think there's a couple of different things going on. First, we have seen Vladimir Putin come out and acknowledge these pretty directly that he really had no other choice. The consequences were so wide scale across his country. He had to acknowledge them."