US military boards another oil tanker in Indian Ocean after tracking it from the Caribbean

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. 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.

Venezuela had faced U.S. sanctions on its oil for several years, relying on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains. President Donald Trump ordered a quarantine of sanctioned tankers in December to pressure then-President Nicolás Maduro before Maduro was apprehended in January during an American military operation.

The Defense Department said in a post on X that U.S. forces boarded the Veronica III overnight, conducting “a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding.”

“The vessel tried to defy President Trump’s quarantine — hoping to slip away,” the Pentagon said. “We tracked it from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, closed the distance, and shut it down.”

The Veronica III is a Panamanian-flagged vessel under U.S. sanctions related to Iran, according to the website of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

Video posted by the Pentagon shows U.S. troops boarding the tanker.

The Trump administration has been seizing tankers as part of its broader efforts to take control of the Venezuela’s oil. The Pentagon’s post did not state whether the Veronica III was formally seized and placed under U.S. control.

Last week, the U.S. 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 United States, according to a defense official who spoke last week on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing decision-making.