JUST IN: Crude Oil Price Hit Eight-Year High Of $103 Per Barrel After Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine

Crude oil prices hit $103 per barrel for the first time in almost eight years after Russia launched wide scale military operation in Ukraine.

THE WHISTLER can report that benchmark crude price, Brent Crude sold at $103.59 per barrel in the early hours of Thursday. This is the first time Brent Crude is rising above $103.59 since August 2014.

West Texas Intermediately Crude is selling at $98.27 per barrel for the first time since August 2014 when it sold for $89.

The surge in crude prices early Thursday came in the wake of a wide scale military operation in east of Ukraine.

President Vladimir Putin confirmed he had approved a “special military operation” in the Donbas region of Ukraine.

The full-scale attack targeted the Boryspil airportand in the capital, Kyiv, and its key buildings.

Also explosions were reportedly heard in Kharkiv, Kramatorsk, Dnipro, Mariupol, Odesa, and Zaporizhzhya.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared martial law in response to Russia’s military operations.

The looming sanctions on Russia from the United, United Nations and the EU are fueling shocks in the different markets that Moscow participates actively in like oil and gas.

Russia pumps nine million barrels of oil per day out of the global oil production of about 96 million barrels per day.

The federal government had on Wednesday expressed concern over the rising international prices of crude oil, saying the increase is not good for the country.

Speaking on the rising crude oil prices in an interview with Bloomberg Television, the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Mr. Timipre Sylva, maintained that Nigeria’s comfort zone in terms of oil prices was between $70 and $80 per barrel.

Although Sylva did not particularly explain why higher oil prices were bad for Nigeria, he stated that at the moment, Nigeria was not gaining anything from the soaring prices.

The minister stated, “I’m hopeful the prices will move around, maybe $80, maybe $70. We are hoping it will come down to somewhere around $70 to $80, which will be sustainable for us to the end of the year.

“We are working hard on that (production increase). What happened to us was the fact that we had to cut back at the time, and, of course, in such a way you can’t really cut back mathematically.

So, you want to cut back 100,000 barrels that you shut out, maybe we’ll shut down about 200,000 to 300,000 barrels. So at the end of the day, we over-complied because we just couldn’t achieve it mathematically.

“In trying to cut down, we cut down too much. And now to come back, it’s not been easy for us to get the wells back to production.”