America chases down the shadow fleet serving Venezuela

IT WAS A slow-motion naval chase. Last month in the Caribbean the US Coast Guard attempted to board the Bella 1, an oil tanker used to smuggle oil in defiance of American sanctions. The attempt failed. Weeks later the Bella 1 turned up in the Atlantic with a new name (the Marinera) and a new flag (Russian). A Russian submarine was en route to protect it. But on January 7th American forces pounced before the Russians could arrive, rappelling onto the ship near Iceland and seizing it by force. The same day, thousands of miles away, American forces also seized another tanker, the M Sophia, in Caribbean waters. The raids are the latest assertion of American power to follow the abduction of Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president, on January 3rd.

The Bella 1 has a long and complicated history. It is owned by a newly formed Russian company. In 2024 America placed it under sanctions for its involvement in a company alleged to be a front for Hizbullah, a Lebanese militant group. The ship has moved more than 20m barrels of Iranian oil and 5m of Venezuelan oil to China since late 2020, believes Kpler, a data firm, with the profits funding Hizbullah and Iran’s elite Quds Force, both of which America regards as terrorist groups. Marco Rubio, America’s secretary of state, has said that America is maintaining an oil embargo on Venezuela to force the post-Maduro regime to submit to its will.

The Bella 1 is not thought to have been carrying any oil. In August last year it was spotted in Iran, where it is thought to have loaded Iranian oil at Kharg island, though it broadcast false location data to suggest it was further south. It unloaded that oil in the Gulf of Oman, perhaps onto another ship, and headed to the Caribbean, turned around after America seized another tanker in December, and then tentatively moved back towards Venezuela again, presumably to pick up oil. After America’s coastguard confronted it, it made a run for it—the Americans lacked the specialist crews to board a tanker—and vanished again from tracking sites. When it showed up in the mid-Atlantic, it veered north, probably to get to Murmansk, a northern Russian port.

Plane-tracking hobbyists watched, meanwhile, as a surge of American military flights headed to Britain, presumably ferrying the forces and equipment needed for a heli-borne seizure. America is thought to have used P8 sub-hunting planes to track the tanker, as well as AC-130 gunships to provide muscle in the area. Russian state television showed images of a helicopter approaching the tanker. The Pentagon’s European Command said that the operation had been carried out by units from the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the coastguard, with the Department of Defence in support.

In legal terms the Bella 1 is probably fair game. It claimed to be flying the flag of Guyana, but this appeared to be a ruse. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the corpus of law that applies to maritime affairs, a “stateless” ship can be boarded in international waters. Some time in late December the ship’s crew painted a Russian flag on the side of the ship and it was entered into Russia’s maritime registry. Article 92 of UNCLOS frowns on this sort of chicanery: “A ship may not change its flag during a voyage or while in a port of call, save in the case of a real transfer of ownership or change of registry.” Even so, Russia’s government protested to America about the seizure.

The raid bodes badly for several other chameleon-like ships. Over the past six months more than a dozen tankers, most of them under American sanctions, and some of them stateless, have switched their affiliation to Russia, presumably in order to deter a seizure, according to Windward, a company that analyses maritime data. That trend picked up in December, as America tightened its quarantine on Venezuela, prior to the raid that captured Mr Maduro.

The raids have had little impact on global oil markets. The price of Brent crude, a global benchmark, was down by 0.5% on the previous day’s close on January 7th. Venezuela supply is minuscule in the global context and few observers believe that America will go after Russia’s shadow fleet more broadly. But it suggests that America is serious about keeping up the pressure on the new rulers in Caracas. “They tried to seize the tanker and it evaded them,” says Matthew Wright of Kpler. “They did not want to set a precedent.” In recent days 16 tankers carrying Venezuelan oil have attempted to break out of the American blockade by sailing out en masse. One of those, the M Sophia, was the other ship nabbed by America on January 7th.

Donald Trump, America’s president, has said that his aim in Venezuela is to ensure that America has access to the country’s oil in order to push prices down. On January 6th he declared that the country, which is now run by Mr Maduro’s deputy, would be “turning over” up to 50m barrels of oil, worth around $2.8bn, to America. That oil would be sold, he said, with the proceeds “controlled by me…to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!” On January 7th Chris Wright, America’s energy secretary, went even further. “[I]ndefinitely, going forward,” he said, “ we will sell the production that comes out of Venezuela into the marketplace.” And, perhaps, every drop grabbed on the high seas. ■