US military forces boarded another sanctioned tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking the vessel from the Caribbean Sea in an effort to target illicit oil connected to Venezuela, the Pentagon said Sunday. Several tankers had fled the Venezuelan coast, including the ship that was boarded in the Indian Ocean overnight, the AP reports. "The vessel tried to defy President Trump's quarantine," the Pentagon said. The Defense Department posted on X that US forces boarded the Veronica III to conduct "a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding."
Venezuela had faced US sanctions on its oil for several years, relying on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains. Trump ordered a quarantine of sanctioned tankers in December to pressure President Nicolás Maduro before Maduro was seized in January during an American military operation. The Veronica III is a Panamanian-flagged vessel under US sanctions related to Iran, according to the website of the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control. It left Venezuela on Jan. 3, the same day as Maduro's capture, with nearly 2 million barrels of crude and fuel oil, TankerTrackers.com posted Sunday on X.
"Since 2023, she's been involved with Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan oil," the organization said. Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, told the AP in January that his organization used satellite imagery and surface-level photos to document that at least 16 tankers left the Venezuelan coast in contravention of the quarantine. The Trump administration has been seizing tankers as part of its broader efforts to take control of the Venezuela's oil. The Pentagon did not say in the post whether the Veronica III was formally seized and placed under American control. Last week, the US military boarded a different tanker in the Indian Ocean, the Aquila II. The ship was being held while its ultimate fate was decided by the US, according to a Defense official.
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