The US military forces boarded yet another sanctioned tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking the vessel from the Caribbean Sea.
The US military forces boarded yet another sanctioned tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking the vessel from the Caribbean Sea. The news was confirmed by the Pentagon on Sunday. The US Department of Defence maintained that the operation was targeting illicit oil connected to Venezuela.
In the span of a few months, several tankers fled the
Venezuelan coast after the United States conducted a massive raid on the country’s capital, capturing its draconian President
Nicolas Maduro. The defence department said in a post on X that US forces boarded the Veronica III, conducting “a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding”.
“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,” the Pentagon said in the post on Sunday. It is pertinent to note that 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.
We defend the Homeland forward. Distance does not protect you.
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 vessel tried to defy President Trump’s… pic.twitter.com/Tran3cLR9g
— Department of War 🇺🇸 (@DeptofWar) February 15, 2026
About the case
The video shared by the Department of Defence showed US troops boarding the tanker. According to the website of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Veronica III is a Panamanian-flagged vessel under US sanctions related to Iran. The vessel left Venezuela on 3 January, the same day of Maduro’s capture.
The tanker was carrying nearly 2m barrels of crude and fuel oil, TankerTrackers.com posted on Sunday on X. “Since 2023, she’s been involved with Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan oil,” the organisation wrote in the post.
The Trump administration has been seizing tankers as part of its efforts to take control of Venezuela’s oil. The Pentagon did not say whether the Veronica III was formally seized and placed under US control. In an email to The Associated Press, it said that it had no additional information to provide beyond its post.
With inputs from The Associated Press.
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