7.1.2026
The United States has seized two sanctioned oil tankers linked to Venezuela in back-to-back actions in the North Atlantic and the Caribbean, officials said Wednesday.
U.S. European Command announced the seizure of the merchant vessel Bella 1 for “violations of U.S. sanctions” in a social media post. The U.S. had been pursuing the tanker since last month after it tried to evade a U.S. blockade on sanctioned oil vessels around Venezuela.
Then, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem revealed that U.S. forces also took control of the tanker Sophia in the Caribbean. Noem said in a social media post both ships were “either last docked in Venezuela or en route to it.”
Noem said that both ships are part of a large “ghost fleet” of sanctioned vessels that carry oil from Russia, Iran and Venezuela in defiance of Western sanctions, mostly to customers in Asia.
The two seizures come just days after U.S. military forces conducted a surprise nighttime raid on Venezuela’s capital of Caracas and captured then-President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, whom President Donald Trump’s administration has accused of partnering with drug traffickers.
Since that raid, officials in Trump’s Republican administration have said that they intend to continue to seize sanctioned vessels connected to the country.
“We are enforcing American laws with regards to oil sanctions,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on NBC on Sunday. “We go to court. We get a warrant. We seize those boats with oil. And that will continue.”
The U.S. military seized the Bella 1 and subsequently handed over control of it to law enforcement officials, said a U.S. official, who spoke to The Associated Press on Wednesday on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations.
Russia’s Ministry of Transport confirmed the boarding in a statement and noted that “no state has the right to use force against vessels duly registered in the jurisdictions of other states,” citing the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Bella 1