About 200 UK soldiers have started to deliver petrol to the country's filling stations as part of the government's effort to resolve a fuel crisis.
In line with "Operation Escalin", most personnel are being deployed in London and the southeastern portion of the UK, which are still in the grip of the worst fuel shortages.
Soldiers were earlier spotted at a BP Oil Terminal in the town of Hemel Hempstead undergoing tanker driver training after the Ministry of Defence approved the request for assistance in the government's drive to resolve the supply gridlock.
This comes as Prime Minister Boris Johnson is under pressure to "act now" to tackle "panic buying" by thousands of Britons at petrol stations across the country, leaving them dry.
Last week, Johnson tried to reassure drivers about fuel supplies, saying that people should be "confident" and to go about their business as normal.
"We now are starting to see the situation improve; we're hearing from [the] industry that supplies are coming back on to the forecourt in the normal way", BoJo said, adding that a "slightly misleading" account of a shortage of truck drivers had triggered an "understandable surge in public demand".
Chancellor Rishi Sunak, for his part, warned that shortages of goods caused by the fuel crisis could continue until Christmas, adding that the country is seeing "real disruptions in supply chains".
In an interview with the Daily Mail, cited by The Sun, he stressed that the government is "determined to do what we can to try to mitigate as much of this as we can".
24 September 2021, 10:27 GMT
UK motorists started panic buying fuel on 23 September after several national energy companies announced they had problems with fuel supplies due to a dearth of heavy goods vehicles (HGV) drivers.
The government pledged to issue at least 5,000 temporary visas to foreign lorry drivers to solve the issue with the supply chain.