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During the “Phoney War,” the French and British General Staffs developed projects to interrupt the supply of raw materials to Nazi Germany in order to force that country into signing a peace agreement. One of these projects, designed between January and April 1940 and named Russia Petroleum Industry (RPI), aimed to target the Soviet petroleum industry in the Caucasus. The USSR, by virtue of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact signed in August 1939, supplied the Reich with no less than 900,000 tons of oil. This air operation would assign bombers over an entire month to strike at scattered and diverse targets: first, refineries and reservoirs, then oil pipelines and railroads. The French air crews would take charge of Batoum (currently in Georgia) and Grozny (Chechnya) while Royal Air Force units would target Baku (Azerbaijan). This plan, nonetheless, was technically far from rigorous. It did not take into account the consequences of involving the Soviet giant against France nor the damage inflicted on French aircraft by the Russian anti-aircraft defense. The RPI project was not set in motion for diplomatic reasons and due to lack of money at a time when France was facing defeat in May-June 1940.