The White House has dramatically escalated its confrontation with the Kremlin by capturing a sanctioned oil tanker that was otherwise being accompanied by Russian military vessels.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the seizure in an X post Wednesday. U.S. military forces intercepted the vessel, currently known as the “Marinera” after a hasty name change, in North Atlantic waters just south of Iceland, where it was previously being escorted by a submarine and other naval assets dispatched by the Kremlin.
Noem said the seizure of the Marinera came at the same time as the capture of another sanctioned oil tanker, the “Sophia,” in waters off the northern coast of South America. “The world’s criminals are on notice,” she wrote. “You can run, but you can’t hide.”
The New York Times reports the U.S. Coast Guard encountered “no resistance or hostility” from the boat’s crew, and that there were “no Russian vessels in the vicinity” at the time of boarding, citing two U.S. officials with knowledge of the operation.
U.S. forces had been pursuing the Marinera for at least two weeks as part of an ongoing blockade of sanctioned ships near the Venezuelan coast.
Having apparently fought back against efforts to board the ship earlier in December, the tanker, originally named the “Bella 1,” reportedly headed out into the open waters of the Atlantic, where it underwent a name change and altered registration to become, nominally, a Russian boat.
Despite demands from Russian officials to cease their pursuit, the Wall Street Journal reports that U.S. military and Coast Guard vessels continued following the ship across the ocean toward Iceland, where it was then joined by what the newspaper describes as a Russian “submarine and other naval assets.”
Both the Marinera and the Sophia form part of a global “dark fleet” used to ferry oil from otherwise sanctioned countries, including Russia, Venezuela and Iran, of which the U.S. has in recent weeks apprehended two other boats, the “Skipper” and the “Centuries.”
Russia’s dispatch of the submarine and other seacrafts come just days after Trump launched a lightning invasion of Venezuela to capture the country’s long-ruling despotic leader Nicolas Maduro, himself a Russian ally, and his wife Cilia Flores, who now face narco-trafficking charges at a New York federal court.
That attack, decried by critics as an all-out assault on the rules based international order, appears to have marked a stark shift in the Trump administration’s foreign policy outlook, with the president and his allies now threatening a military takeover of Greenland despite the arctic state technically being a territory of Denmark, otherwise a NATO ally.
Given the MAGA leader’s mounting aggression toward friend and enemy alike, Putin’s decision to send advanced naval assets to accompany the tanker will be received in many diplomatic circles as a rebuke to the U.S. president, not least after Trump’s comments about the Russian tyrant aboard Air Force One Saturday amid ongoing talks toward a prospective end to the conflict in Ukraine.
“I’m not thrilled with Putin,” Trump told reporters. “He’s killing too many people.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
