State oil giant Saudi Aramco said in a statement March 7 that it was cutting its official selling price (OSP) for April for all its crude grades to all destinations, amounting to unprecedented discounts of nearly 20 percent in key markets.

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The move is an overt bid to wrest market share away from Moscow, Saudi officials told The Wall Street Journal, after talks between Russia and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) failed to agree on production cuts amid a coronavirus-driven collapse in oil demand.

“It’s time for a good old-fashioned bloodbath, for which Russia deserves all the blame,” said Matt Reed, vice president at energy consultancy Foreign Reports, according to Foreign Policy.

While cheaper oil will translate into more affordable energy for consumers and businesses, it hurts producing countries and companies.

Citing Saudi officials and OPEC delegates, the WSJ reported that besides the price cuts, the kingdom was also planning to boost output to some 10 million barrels per day, placing further downward pressure on prices. After OPEC and Russia failed to agree on supply cuts on March 6, oil prices plummeted roughly 10 percent in international markets, falling the most since the 2008 global financial crisis.

The U.S. oil patch has already been shedding thousands of jobs and suffering through a surge of bankruptcies, and lower prices will exacerbate those problems.

Meanwhile, all major markets in the Middle East plummeted March 8 as investors weighed the impacts of an all-out price war.

Markets “are finding it difficult to cope with all these variables that have been happening over the past 10 days,” said Mohammed Ali Yasin, chief strategy officer at Al Dhabi Capital Ltd., in remarks to Bloomberg. “That’s why we see this panic-selling across the board taking certain markets to lows not seen even during the financial crisis.”