The U.S. Coast Guard has detained the oil tanker Olina near Trinidad and Tobago, Reuters and WSJ reported, citing sources and data from Vanguard.
Reuters specifies that the operation to seize the tanker is still ongoing.
The Olina tanker left Venezuela last week fully loaded with oil as part of a flotilla shortly after the US detained Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on 3 January, and the vessel returned fully loaded to Venezuela, the agency’s industry source said.
The journalists’ interlocutors said the tanker was falsely flying the flag of East Timor.
As The Bell notes, the Olina’s registration number matches that of the tanker Minerva M, which is under US, EU and UK sanctions as part of Russia’s “shadow fleet”.
In late December, the US Coast Guard attempted to detain the Panama-flagged tanker Bella 1, bound for Venezuela, in the Caribbean Sea. The crew, consisting of citizens of Russia, Ukraine and India, refused to obey the demands of the US military and changed course, after which the Coast Guard began its pursuit. The tanker’s crew members painted a Russian flag on its side. A few days after the incident, the vessel was renamed Marinera and entered into the Russian Maritime Register of Shipping.
U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance said after the vessel was seized that it was a “fake Russian tanker.””They were trying to pass themselves off as a Russian oil tanker to get around the sanctions regime,” he told Fox News.”
Following the seizure of the tanker, the Russian Transport Ministry released a statement saying the Bella 1 had been granted a temporary permission to sail under the Russian flag. The ministry said that in accordance with the norms of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, “on the high seas there is a regime of freedom of navigation, and no state has the right to use force against ships duly registered in the jurisdictions of other states.”