NYT: Sanctioned Venezuelan tankers evade US blockade

At least 16 oil tankers hit by US sanctions appear to have attempted to evade a major American naval blockade on Venezuela’s energy exports over the last two days, partly by disguising their locations or turning off transmission signals, The New York Times reports.

For weeks, the ships had been docked in Venezuelan ports, but by January 3, following the US capture of President Nicolás Maduro, all had disappeared from those locations. Four of the vessels were tracked sailing east about 30 miles offshore while using fake ship names and misrepresenting their positions, a deceptive tactic known as “spoofing.”

These departures were made without authorization from Venezuela’s interim government, sources told The Times, in what appears to be an early act of defiance against interim President Delcy Rodríguez. The other 12 tankers were not broadcasting signals and could not be located in new imagery.

President Trump imposed a “complete blockade” on sanctioned Venezuelan tankers on December 16, described by Secretary of State Marco Rubio as one of the largest “quarantines” in modern history, successfully “paralyzing” the regime’s revenue, while exempting Chevron shipments to the US Gulf Coast.

So far, US forces have confronted three tankers attempting to trade Venezuelan oil: Skipper, seized on December 10 en route to China; Centuries, halted and boarded on December 20; and Bella 1, now renamed Marinera, which remains pursued. A US official told The Times that “the quarantine is in effect focusing on sanctioned shadow vessels transporting sanctioned” Venezuelan oil.

Analysts note that tankers are using deception and saturation to evade the blockade. “The only real way for oil-laden tankers to break through a naval blockade is to overwhelm it with outbound vessels,” said Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com. Techniques include painting decommissioned vessel names on hulls and spoofing locations.

The ships moving without authorization were linked to oil traders Alex Saab and Ramón Carretero, both under US sanctions. Fifteen of the 16 vessels moving on January 3 were also sanctioned for hauling Iranian and Russian oil. David Tannenbaum, a former US Treasury sanctions compliance officer, said, “They would have to make a decision about what is less risky — to flee while they may see a chance to escape or stay and risk future boardings or incursions by US forces.”

Among the vessels, the Aquila II posed as Cape Balder in the Baltic, Bertha as Ekta in Nigeria, and Veronica III as DS Vector, while Vesna, under the alias Priya, was spotted hundreds of miles from Venezuela, traveling northeast without crude to allow faster movement.

By Vafa Guliyeva