The Venezuela Thread

[TruckDriver9]

US forces boarded (unclear if seized) one of the tankers that run away from Venezuela in the Indian Ocean.

When the @DeptofWar says quarantine, we mean it. Nothing will stop DoW from defending our Homeland - even in oceans halfway around the world.
Overnight, U.S. military forces conducted a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding on the Aquila II without incident in the INDOPACOM area of responsibility.
The Aquila II was operating in defiance of President Trump'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. By land, air, or sea, our Armed Forces will find you and deliver justice. You will run out of fuel long before you will outrun us.
The Department of War will deny illicit actors and their proxies the ability to defy American power in the global maritime domain.

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Edit/update
She was seized and is currently en route to Singapore

 

[It_Is_My_Time]

 

[TruckDriver9]

 

[LaAguilaNegra]

Very weird piece considering Russia's blossoming hydrocarbon trade with Israel. It's almost as if the Kremlin mouthpieces over at RussiaToday are running scared that renewed Venezuelan oil shipments will undercut the Russian market share in yet another state. Ergo the chuddy ALL CAPS e-chimpout clearly aimed at riling up their by now functionally lobotomized Western slop-consumers.

A US move to elbow Russia out of Israel's import top 3 chart is unlikely, although it would theoretically mean yet another dent in Russia's struggling hydrocarbon empire. Gazprom, the former pearl of Russia's floroushing fossil fuel trade, is ailing. In 2023 it made a 7 billion USD loss, in 2024 a 13 billion USD loss was noted. 2026 didn't exactly start off well either. China's renewed its emphasis on geostrategic risk spreading through hydrocarbon diversification, which followed the electricity price dispute and January 2026 halt on ROA. The US-India tariff deal has open clauses on India's need to first limit and then stop entertaining the Russian black market oil trade, the Russian shadow fleet and refineries are systematically targeted and of course the Europeans are by now importing a 10-15 percent share of its pre 2022 Russian gas import numbers.

Now it's apparantly Israel's turn - even though it really isn't, RT's article is pure ragebait for the intended chud target audience. They'll eat it up without a critical thought anyway, a propagandist's wet dream. IIMT was no doubt banging his desk reading the rageporn, Venezuela was for Israel errone we've cracked the enigma!!1! High fives over at the RT offices in Moscow, job well done yet again.

All of that is low brow nonsense of course and the fact that the Russia-Israel trade has grown with nearly 80 percent (2.16 billion USD to 3.86 billion USD) in the 2020-2024 time frame proves RT's hypocrisy. Russia is Israel's main refined fuel supplier (45 percent market share) and ranks top 5 as a crude oil supplier. That ranking is actually not doing justice. The top two Israeli crude oil exporters (Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan) both use Russia's oil infrastructure (Turkstream/ Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC)), and it's an open secret that the Russians are mixing in Ural crude on especially the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) to ditch sanctions. This happens at Novorossysk Port from where Russian tankers transport the oil to Israel. Surprisingly no RT articles on this issue so far, very weird I just checked.

https://oilchange.org/publications/an-update-on-the-origins-of-israels-fuel-supply/

Gazprom records the worst results in the company’s history | European Gas Hub

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