Trump’s Vise Around Venezuela Ramps Up the Pressure on Moscow

By Noah Rothman

Friday, January 09, 2026

 

The “ghost fleet” is not exactly a state secret. It has long been known to the public and policymakers alike that Moscow uses an armada of aging ships with shadowy maintenance records and an obscure chain of custody to transit illicit goods all over the world — including weapons and energy exports.

 

“Since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the shadow fleet — which previously mostly transported goods to and from Iran and Venezuela — has exploded in size,” the Atlantic Council observed in December 2024. In the Joe Biden era, “Western governments’ efforts to reduce the shadow fleet through sanctions on individual vessels have only been marginally effective.” In the first year of his second term, the Trump administration observed a similarly lethargic approach to interdicting these vessels and seizing their cargoes. No longer.

 

In the week following the raid on Caracas in which Nicolás Maduro was captured and extradited to the United States, the Trump administration has kicked its fight against Venezuela’s illicit oil shipments into high gear. In the process, the Trump administration’s efforts have humiliated and materially constrained the Kremlin. Given the administration’s simultaneous efforts to throttle Russian oil revenue, we cannot say that Moscow’s discomfort is an unintended consequence of the administration’s campaign against the Chavista regime in Venezuela.

 

In a predawn raid on Friday morning, U.S. forces boarded and commandeered a Venezuelan tanker that was “attempting to evade U.S. forces,” according to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. It was only the fifth ship in the “ghost fleet” recently seized by U.S. forces.

 

On Wednesday, the U.S. military pulled off an even more daring raid, simultaneously boarding two ghost ships — one in the Caribbean and another in the North Atlantic as it raced toward Russian waters. That last ship had become the object of intelligence analysts’ fascination before the U.S. Coast Guard captured it. U.S. assets had chased it for days, and it was reportedly being escorted by a small fleet of Russian navy vessels, including a submarine.

 

That Russian military presence was surely designed to deter U.S. action. It didn’t. Indeed, even the presence of Russian nationals on board the ship failed to dissuade American military planners. Those Russian nationals were detained and swiftly deported back to the motherland.

 

The American campaign aimed at hobbling the clandestine transit of illicit materials between sanctioned anti-Western powers is ostensibly aimed at Venezuela, but it’s Russia that is hardest hit. And that is no accident.

 

On Thursday, the government of Iraq approved a plan to nationalize a Russian-owned oilfield as Baghdad seeks to avoid being caught up in sanctions targeting Moscow’s petroleum exports. Lukoil, the Russian firm that controls the West Qurna 2 oilfield, had until January 17 to avoid U.S. Treasury-imposed penalties on Russia’s overseas assets, but the Kremlin’s lethargic behavior as the deadline approached convinced Baghdad to move first. “Production remains steady at around 465,000 to 480,000 barrels per day,” said one Iraqi official of the field’s output — a number that indicates West Qurna 2 contributed to about 5 percent of Russia’s total crude production. That’s hardly insignificant.

 

And all of this occurs against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s declining patience with Moscow. To hear Senator Lindsey Graham tell it, this time, Trump’s change of heart is sincere.

 

“After a very productive meeting today with President Trump on a variety of issues, he greenlit the bipartisan Russia sanctions bill that I have been working on for months with Senator [Richard] Blumenthal and many others,” the South Carolina senator revealed Wednesday. A White House official subsequently confirmed that the president now supports legislation imposing even deeper sanctions on Moscow and, most importantly, the countries that ignore Western sanctions and purchase Russian oil anyway.

 

If passed, the bill would oblige the U.S. to impose a 500 percent duty on all goods imported from any country that continues to purchase Russian oil, petroleum products, or uranium. The so-called “secondary sanctions” bill “would give President Trump tremendous leverage against countries like China, India, and Brazil to incentivize them to stop buying the cheap Russian oil that provides the financing for Putin’s bloodbath against Ukraine,” Graham continued. He said that, with Trump’s support for the bill established, the GOP-led Congress could vote to pass the legislation as early as next week.

 

According to the Financial Times, the Kremlin is fit to be tied over Washington’s assault on its multi-billion-dollar, decades-long investment in the Chavez regime led by Maduro and the development of its energy sector. But, owing to Vladimir Putin’s desire to keep Trump on side amid the Kremlin’s effort to conquer Ukraine, Putin has kept his powder dry.

 

That is not to say that Russia hasn’t made its anxieties known. For only the second time in Russia’s war in Ukraine on Thursday, Moscow deployed the hypersonic Oreshnik missile armed with multiple-independent reentry vehicles — each of which is designed to carry a nuclear warhead but was armed instead with a conventional payload — against Ukrainian targets. This time, the missile struck targets in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, just on the other side of NATO-aligned Poland’s border with Ukraine.

 

The move is designed to communicate the Kremlin’s displeasure to the West, but it’s just the latest episode of Russian nuclear saber-rattling. Putin hopes it will get our attention. What is certain, though, is that we have his.