United States forces boarded a second oil tanker in a week in the Indian Ocean, claiming it was attempting to escape from what Washington has called a quarantine on tankers carrying sanctioned crude oil from Venezuela.
“Overnight, U.S. forces conducted a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding of the Veronica III without incident in the INDOPACOM area of responsibility,” the U.S. Ministry of War reported on X.
“The vessel tried to defy President Trump’s quarantine — hoping to slip away. We tracked it from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, closed the distance, and shut it down. No other nation has the reach, endurance, or will to do this,” the Pentagon went on to say. “International waters are not sanctuary. By land, air, or sea, we will find you and deliver justice. The Department of War will deny illicit actors and their proxies freedom of movement in the maritime domain.”
The seizure of the Panama-flagged Veronica III follows an earlier seizure of Aquila II, another tanker that the U.S. Department of War said had violated the tanker quarantine imposed by President Trump on Venezuelan oil exports.
The U.S. so-called oil quarantine amounts to a blockade on oil tanker traffic, which at the end of last year disrupted Venezuela’s oil industry to such an extent that state oil firm PDVSA had to start shutting down wells because it ran out of storage space for the crude it was producing.
In January, reports emerged saying PDVSA had found a way around the blockade, with tankers setting off in dark mode, according to data from TankerTrackers.com. Apparently, this has not been enough to keep the sanctioned oil flowing, as evidenced by the seizure of seven tankers by U.S. forces to date. Still, this is just a fraction of the total global so-called dark fleet, which numbers some 800 vessels, according to a U.S. Coast Guard official, cited by France 24.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
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