U.S. military forces boarded a crude oil tanker “without incident” overnight in the Indian Ocean after pursuing it from the Caribbean, the Pentagon stated on Feb. 9, accusing the vessel of breaching a U.S.-enforced quarantine.

The War Department stated in a post on X that “military forces conducted a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding on the Aquila II” in the Indian Ocean after tracking it in response to the Trump administration’s “established quarantine of sanctioned vessels in the Caribbean.”

“It ran, and we followed. The Department of War tracked and hunted this vessel from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean. No other nation on planet Earth has the capability to enforce its will through any domain,” the department stated.

After capturing former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in a military raid last month in Caracas, Venezuela, the United States has escalated a blockade on vessels traveling to and from the South American country, which has some of the largest oil reserves in the world.

The Pentagon’s statement, which was reposted by War Secretary Pete Hegseth on X, did not say whether the ship was connected to Venezuela, which faces U.S. sanctions on its oil and relies on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains.

The U.S. military did not say why it had boarded the ship, which it has done previously with at least seven other sanctioned oil tankers linked to Venezuela. The Epoch Times contacted the War Department for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

The tanker, Aquila II, which is flying a Panama flag, was sanctioned by the Treasury Department in January, with the department linking the ship to Russia’s energy sector.

Since the ouster of Maduro in a surprise nighttime raid on Jan. 3, the Trump administration has signaled that it wants to control the production, refining, and global distribution of Venezuela’s oil products.

The administration has also been trying to restrict the flow of oil to Cuba, which faces strict economic sanctions by the United States and relies heavily on oil shipments from allies such as Mexico, Russia, and Venezuela.

An unidentified oil tanker sails on Lake Maracaibo, in Cabimas, Venezuela, on Oct. 14, 2022. (Issac Urrutia/Reuters)

The Treasury Department on Jan. 29 confirmed that it issued a general license to allow for the “exportation, reexportation, sale, resale, supply, storage, marketing, purchase, delivery, or transportation of Venezuelan origin oil, including the refining of such oil” by certain companies with some restrictions.

Some of the restrictions include “any transaction involving a person located in or organized under the laws of the Russian Federation, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Republic of Cuba, or any entity that is owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by or in a joint venture with such persons.”

Aside from restrictions targeting Venezuela, the Trump administration last week imposed a new round of sanctions targeting a shadow fleet of tankers accused of transporting Iranian oil in the midst of U.S.–Iran talks in Oman.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.