The United States military has captured a Venezuela-linked oil tanker far from the Americas, in the Indian Ocean, as part of Washington’s effort to enforce a US-ordered oil blockade on Venezuela. The Pentagon said the operation shows that the United States is determined to enforce its restrictions on Venezuelan oil even “halfway around the world.”

The Pentagon said on Monday that its forces seized the tanker Aquila II after it tried to avoid US sanctions. The ship was taken as part of a campaign by US President Donald Trump to stop Venezuela’s oil exports. Critics have called the campaign “theft” and international piracy.

According to the Pentagon’s statement, US forces had been tracking the ship for many miles. “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 Pentagon said.

The US military tracked the ship from the Caribbean Sea all the way to the Indian Ocean, the Pentagon added. In footage shared by the US defence department, heavily armed American soldiers were shown raiding the tanker from a helicopter.

In the statement, the Pentagon said, “No other nation on planet Earth has the capability to enforce its will through any domain.” The statement continued, “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 tanker was registered in Panama and had left Venezuelan waters in early January. It was carrying about 700,000 barrels of crude oil when it was seized, according to records from Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA.

The United States began seizing Venezuelan oil ships in December. This seizure in the Indian Ocean comes after the US military’s capture of Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, last month, an action that has drawn wide international attention.

Under pressure from the possibility of more US strikes, Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodriguez, who was previously Maduro’s vice president, signed a law last month to open the country’s mostly state-controlled oil industry to foreign investment.

Despite this change, US forces have continued to intercept and seize oil ships linked to Venezuela.

President Donald Trump and his aides have been open about their plans to take control of Venezuelan oil. They have repeatedly said the US will benefit from it. At a White House meeting with oil executives in January, Trump said, “One of the things the United States gets out of this will be even lower energy prices.”

Since the removal of Maduro from power, Venezuela has sent tens of millions of barrels of oil to the US as part of an energy deal.

Rodriguez said last month that Venezuela received $300 million from those oil sales to the United States. Several media outlets later quoted US officials saying that Caracas received $500 million in full payment for the oil.

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Politico in an interview published on Monday that he plans to visit Venezuela soon. Wright said he wants to “start the dialogue” with Caracas about the future leadership of PDVSA, Venezuela’s state oil company.