The White House isn’t ruling out further action against Venezuela — including seizing more ships — after the U.S. Coast Guard seized a large oil tanker on Wednesday off the country’s coast.
The posture leaves the door open for more aggressive action to stymie the country’s oil industry, its largest source of revenue.
The Treasury Department also announced Thursday afternoon that it would target six shipping companies and six individual vessels with new sanctions for operating deceptive shipping practices and funding the Venezuelan government run by Nicolás Maduro, whom the Trump administration does not recognize as the legitimate president.
“We’re not going to stand by and watch sanctioned vessels sail the seas with black market oil, the proceeds of which will fuel narco-terrorism of rogue and illegitimate regimes around the world,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a briefing Thursday.
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She also sidestepped a question from Fox News reporter Peter Doocy on whether the operation was still about combating the flow of drugs into the U.S.
“The Trump administration is focused on doing many things in the western hemisphere,” Leavitt said. She later noted that the vessel was captured because it was sanctioned and that the administration was committed to enforcing sanctions policy.
The crude oil vessel seized Wednesday, named The Skipper, was sanctioned by the Treasury Department in 2022 for its alleged role in smuggling oil to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group backed by Iran. Viktor Sergiyovitch Artemov, a Russian oil magnate, controls the boat.
The Venezuelan government called the seizure an “act of international piracy,” with Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly showing support for the country and Maduro in a statement on Thursday.
Trump told reporters on Wednesday that the U.S. planned to keep the oil. Leavitt later confirmed that the U.S. intends to impound the crude after the proper investigative process is followed.
The seizure follows substantial military buildup over a three-month period in the region, during which U.S. forces conducted over 20 lethal strikes on vessels suspected of drug trafficking, many off the coast of Venezuela, resulting in dozens of fatalities.
The centerpiece of the buildup is the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group, which includes the largest aircraft carrier in the U.S. fleet. The strike group officially entered the Caribbean Sea in mid-November as part of Operation Southern Spear. By that point, nearly a dozen Navy ships, plus roughly 12,000 U.S. sailors and Marines, were operating in the wider Caribbean–Venezuela theater.
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