US seizes oil tanker off Venezuela

What happened

The U.S. intercepted and seized control of an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela Wednesday. The merchant ship has been under U.S. sanctions “for years” after transporting “sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said on social media. Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yvan Gil called the seizure “blatant theft and an act of international piracy” aimed at robbing Venezuela of its oil.

Who said what

“We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela — a large tanker, very large, the largest one ever seized, actually,” President Donald Trump told reporters Wednesday. Asked what will happen to the oil, he said, “Well, we keep it, I guess.” The ship was seized by FBI and Homeland Security agents with military backing, Bondi said. “Using U.S. forces to take control of a merchant ship is incredibly unusual,” The Associated Press said.

The operation was a “significant escalation in the U.S. pressure campaign against President Nicolás Maduro and his country’s oil-dependent economy,” The Washington Post said. The White House did not specify “the legal authority under which the vessel and its contents were seized.” It also wasn’t clear the U.S. “had the legal authority to keep the oil,” The New York Times said, but according to one official, a “federal judge issued a seizure warrant roughly two weeks ago because of the ship’s past activities smuggling Iranian oil, not because of links to the Maduro government.”

The tanker, identified as the Skipper by officials and maritime tracking firms, was sanctioned under its previous name, the Adisa, and was falsely flying the Guyana flag. Venezuela uses dozens of these “shadow” tankers to evade U.S. sanctions on oil exports, the backbone of its economy. The tankers “typically disguise their locations until long after departure” as they head to Malaysia or China, Venezuela’s top oil buyer, Reuters said. The U.S. is No. 2.

What next?

The vessel seizure was a “warning to other tankers waiting to dock and load up Venezuelan crude,” The Wall Street Journal said, citing a Pentagon official. It also “came just hours after Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado left the country on a boat, an escape that potentially gave the Trump administration an opening to take more aggressive action against the Maduro regime.” Machado arrived in Oslo last night, missing her Nobel Peace Prize bestowal ceremony by hours.

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