The United States is preparing to intercept more ships carrying Venezuelan oil following the seizure of a tanker this week, increasing pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, six sources familiar with the matter said Thursday.
The seizure was the first interdiction of a cargo or tanker from Venezuela, which has been subject to U.S. sanctions since 2019. The move comes as the United States carries out a large-scale military buildup in the southern Caribbean and U.S. President Donald Trump campaigns for Maduro’s ouster.
The latest U.S. action has put shipowners, operators and shipping agencies involved in shipping Venezuelan crude on alert, with many reconsidering whether to leave Venezuelan waters in the coming days as planned, shipping sources said.
Further direct U.S. interventions are expected in the coming weeks, targeting ships carrying Venezuelan oil that may also have carried oil from other countries targeted by U.S. sanctions, such as Iran, according to the sources familiar with the matter who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the subject.
Venezuela’s national oil company PDVSA did not respond to a request for comment. The Venezuelan government said this week that the U.S. seizure constituted “theft.”
Asked whether the Trump administration planned further vessel seizures, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters she would not talk about future actions but said the United States would continue to implement the president’s sanctions policy.
“We will not stand idly by and watch sanctioned ships sail the seas with black market oil, the profits from which will fuel the narcoterrorism of rogue and illegitimate regimes across the world,” she said.
The United States has drawn up a target list of several other sanctioned tankers for possible seizure, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.
The US Departments of Justice and Homeland Security had been preparing the seizures for months, according to two of the sources.
Fall in oil exports would hurt finances
A reduction or halt in Venezuelan oil exports, the main source of revenue for the Venezuelan government, would strain the Maduro government’s finances.
The U.S. Treasury announced Thursday that it had imposed sanctions on six supertankers that, according to internal PDVSA documents and vessel monitoring data, recently loaded crude in Venezuela, as well as four Venezuelans, including three close to the country’s first lady, Cilia Flores. It is unclear whether the newly sanctioned vessels are among those now targeted for interception.
Wednesday’s seizure comes after the United States in recent months carried out more than 20 strikes against what it considers drug trafficking ships in the Caribbean and Pacific, killing more than 80 people. Experts say the strikes could be illegal extrajudicial attacks, while the United States says it is protecting Americans from drug cartels it calls terrorist organizations.
New ship seizures could aim to tighten the financial screws on the Venezuelan president, according to a source briefed on US policy in Venezuela. Maduro claimed the U.S. military buildup was aimed at overthrowing him and taking control of the OPEC country’s oil resources.
President Donald Trump said the United States had seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, but provided few other details other than calling it the “largest ever seen.”
The new U.S. tactic focuses on the activities of the so-called shadow fleet of tankers that transport sanctioned oil to China, the biggest buyer of crude from Venezuela and Iran. A single ship often makes separate crossings on behalf of Iran, Venezuela and Russia, the sources said.
The seizure of the tanker, named Skipper, caused at least one shipper to temporarily suspend the voyages of three freshly loaded shipments totaling nearly six million barrels of Venezuela’s flagship export grade, Merey sources said.
“The cargoes had just been loaded and were about to start sailing to Asia,” said a trade official involved in the trading and shipping of Venezuelan oil. “Now the trips are canceled and the tankers are waiting off the coast of Venezuela because it is safer to do so.”
Oil tankers under surveillance
U.S. forces were monitoring oil tankers at sea and some ships in Venezuelan ports, either under repair or loaded, and waiting for them to enter international waters before acting, one of the sources said.
Before the seizure of the Skipper ship, previously sanctioned for its oil trade with Iran, US forces had increased surveillance of waters near Venezuela and neighboring Guyana, another source said.
At the White House, Leavitt said the seized ship was scheduled to sail to a U.S. port, where the government intends to seize its oil cargo through a formal legal process.
The timing of new seizures will depend in part on how quickly arrangements can be made for ports to receive seized vessels to unload oil cargoes, one of the sources said.
Most of the ghost fleet vessels carrying sanctioned oil are old, their ownership is opaque, and they sail without first-rate insurance coverage. This would make many ports reluctant to receive ships.
Another ship, the Seahorse, which is under sanctions from the United Kingdom and the European Union over its trade ties with Russia, was monitored in November by a U.S. warship and briefly detained before sailing to Venezuela, one of the sources said.
While the Venezuelan government described the U.S. seizure as “an act of international piracy,” legal scholars said it did not fall under such a definition under international law.
“Because the capture was approved and sanctioned by the United States, it cannot be considered piracy,” said Laurence Atkin-Teillet, a specialist in piracy and the law of the sea at the British Law School in Nottingham. “The term hacking in this context appears to be a rhetorical or figurative usage rather than a legal usage.”
