Escalation-Mad Trump's Coast Guard Seizes "Russian" Ship 5,500 km From US Coasts
Today’s latest Trump escalation brings us the capture of an alleged-to-be Russian oil tanker by the US Coast Guard, operating approximately 5,500km from the US coasts they’re meant to be “guarding”, somewhere between Iceland and the UK.
In truth, no one seems to quite know who the ship actually belongs to. It was named the Bella-1 and was “allowed” to re-flag itself under the Russian flag days ago, before it began sailing—apparently—toward Murmansk, according to some sources.
Statement from Russia on this count:
On December 24, 2025, the tanker Marinera received temporary authorization to sail under the Russian state flag, issued in accordance with Russian law and international legal norms.
Today, at around 15:00 Moscow time, U.S. naval forces boarded the vessel on the high seas, outside the territorial waters of any state. Contact with the ship was subsequently lost.
Under the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the high seas are governed by the principle of freedom of navigation. No state has the right to use force against vessels lawfully registered under the jurisdiction of another state.
Meanwhile, this statement from the US indicates the US does not consider the ship to be Russian:
The USA states that it does not consider the tanker “Marinera” to belong to Russia and that it does not belong to any country. The USA continues to claim that it believes it has the right to seize all tankers involved in transporting Venezuelan oil.
Karoline Leavitt even called it “a Venezuelan shadow fleet ship that was deemed stateless after flying a false flag”.
In fact, the whole “shadow fleet” charade is a big shell game, with ships owned by various front companies switching flags like changing underwear, though this ship was said to have Russians as well as Chinese and possibly other nationalities on board.
Senator Markwayne Mullin said the United States is not concerned about Russia’s reaction to the seizure of its oil tanker.
The tanker, by the way, was empty, as proven by photos showing its extremely shallow draft. It appears to have never quite reached Venezuela, where it was presumably meant to pick up oil.
The operation to seize the ship was aided by the UK, and according to British OSINT accounts, involved an almost comically disproportionate amount of aerial assets:
UPDATE: Operation "Seize Marinera / Bella 1"
(This list will likely be updated again as more information comes to light)
We know of RAF involvement & I've detailed the US aircraft we know have flown into the area and those we suspect were involved!
The airborne operation to seize the tanker Marinera is being supported by a U.S. Air Force Boeing KC-135T Stratotanker refueling aircraft, a U.S. Air Force Boeing P-8A Poseidon patrol aircraft, and a British Boeing Poseidon MRA1. Operating nearby is an entire chain of U.S. special-mission aircraft, including the Pilatus U-28A Draco.
That seems a lot of resources to expend for just an empty ship—it’s more likely the US was really trying to send a message, or Trump’s ego needed another PR boost like a hit of Epinephrine to keep the Epstein files on the backpage.
The most revealing part of the spectacle is that the US remains loudly bragging about how viciously they will continue to enforce the sanctions which are choking the life out of Venezuelans:
Listen carefully below to the heartless neocon shill as he gloats over the devastation that the US is causing the Venezuelan people:
US gonna hurt and starve all Venezuelans unless they abide
"The lights are literally going to go off. They're not going to be able to pay policeman or firefighters or teachers... unless they begin to cooperate with Pres. Trump"
In fact, a few months ago the Lancet released a peer-reviewed report showing that US economic sanctions have resulted in over 500,000 annual deaths since the 1970s:
From the report:
Economic sanctions imposed by the USA or the EU were associated with 564,258 deaths (95% CI 367 838–760 677) annually from 1971 to 2021, higher than the annual number of battle-related casualties (106 000 deaths). This finding aligns with a previous Article in The Lancet Global Health showing the lethal effects of aid sanctions—economic sanctions specifically targeting development assistance in low-income or middle-income countries (LMICs)—which resulted in a 3·1% increase in infant mortality and a 6·4% increase in maternal mortality annually between 1990 and 2019.
Why is this particularly wanton now, more than ever? Because the Neocon Don, Donigula continues to unctuously boast about how the recent Venezuelan operations are all about “helping the Venezuelan people”:
Ain’t that a joke.
How do you “benefit” people while simultaneously choking the life out of them? It is no different than Donigula’s hypocrisy concerning Ukraine, wherein he cries crocodile tears over the supposed “30,000 a month killed” and claims his efforts to stop the war were all about “saving lives”, while at the same time smarmily boasting about how much of a killing—pun intended—US weapons industries make by selling bombs to Ukraine.
This is the travesty of American imperial moralizing: just empty and performative emotional gesticulations for the purposes of global conquest.
On X I had espoused my opinion regarding the recent Venezuelan “cash bonanza” that Donigula has promised will enrich everyone—it is nothing more than the tariff scam 2.0:
“How much you want to bet the "Venezuelan cash bonanza" will just be another "tariffs 2.0", where "trillions" of phantom profits are celebrated that no one will ever see...just another phony psyop to put feather in Donigula's cap.”
"The money from the sale of Venezuelan oil will be accumulated in US accounts, the US Department of Energy announced.
These funds will be spent "in the interests of the American and Venezuelan peoples" and only at the discretion of the US authorities.
The ministry claims that it has already started selling Venezuelan oil on the global market."
Granted, that doesn’t mean tariffs are entirely a scam, I’m all for them. The scam proceeds from the Trump administration’s constant lies and exaggerations about who exactly the tariffs are benefiting, and what precisely is the actual financial windfall from them. Outlets have calculated maybe $80B in tariff profits total, while Trump has baselessly claimed “trillions” have been reaped:
And even the $80B is totally moot given that just the defense budget alone was increased by dozens of billions under Trump, which means the tariffs funded nothing towards the public good or society at large—with the US’s public debt again increasing as always; it’s about honesty and transparency, not partisanship.
Oh wait, actually Donigula just announced the increase of the defense budget by a whopping $500B to a record-setting $1.5T:
Don’t worry, I’m sure Venezuelan oil revenues will cover that!
Vox’s new piece has an interesting angle on that:
It reveals something I mentioned last time, that American oil companies actually may not be hankering to get into the VZ market because Venezuela’s oil is even more expensive than US shale to extract, and the world is experiencing an oil glut, not a shortage:
Read that again: “Trump’s official plans for Venezuela’s oil sector would be a headache (if not a disaster) for most of America’s fossil fuel industry.”
Rather than put Russia out of business like they had envisioned, the flooding of the market with VZ oil would put US frackers out of business, Vox writes.
Now some in the pro-Russian space are losing their mind over the oil tanker seizure, accusing Russia of ‘spinelessness’ if it does not declare war and launch nukes at the US, or something of the like. It’s still too early to judge Russia’s response: it takes time to plan a potential symmetrical retaliation.
Recall that last year Russia seized an Estonian ship in a tit-for-tat measure in the Baltic:
As I said, it’s too early to judge and Russia may yet have a reciprocal response.
As for now, though, many forget that Russia has been causing various major US assets in Ukraine to go up in flames. Last year we saw several US factories destroyed in Russian strikes:
And just in the past two days alone, again major US assets were said to be hit. In Dnipro, the US-owned Oleina sunflower oil plant was ripped by a drone attack.
Confirmed by Reuters:
The factory belongs to Bunge corporation headquartered in St. Louis.
The night before that, some less-corroborated rumors claim another US-owned grain terminal was hit, by the name of Olimpex, with various unsourced rumors like the following:
"NATO officers and an elite detachment of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were destroyed in the Odessa region. This was stated in his telegram channel by the coordinator of the Nikolaev underground Sergey Lebedev.
According to Lebedev, four strikes have already been carried out in Ilyichevsk (Chernomorsk) since 14.30 today. "There have already been about twenty ambulances," he noted. The strike was on a base with basekipazhny boats, how many of them were destroyed is still unknown."
-EA Daily
Larry Johnson reported on both, writing:
Russia also launched a massive missile attack on the American-owned marine terminal Olimpex, which is considered the largest in the Odessa region. This is the second time this year that Russia hit the terminal (I wrote about it in July). This terminal is one of the largest grain export facilities in the country, with an annual throughput capacity of up to 5 million tons. However, Ukraine was moving more than grain through Olimpex. According to witnesses, even though this facility was protected by Patriot air defense systems, the Russian missiles hit the terminal unimpeded. The subsequent explosions turned out to be so powerful that a supermassive mushroom cloud arose over Odessa, which indicates that this marine terminal contained numerous warehouses filled with NATO weapons.
Some images of damage in elsewhere in the Odessan ports from the same night of strikes:
A drone strike on a cargo vehicle parking lot in Ilichivsk, Odessa region, on January 7, 2026.
During the attack, trucks were hit on the territory of the container terminal of the “Chornomorsk” sea trade port.
In fact, Johnson even reports that a third American corporation called Flextronics was also hit:
Furthermore, in western Ukraine, in the Transcarpathian region, Russian kamikaze drones, together with ballistic missiles, caused critical damage to the Flex plant, which also belonged to American investors. Flex Ltd. (formerly Flextronics), a Singaporean-American company headquartered in Austin, Texas, operates a major manufacturing site in Mukachevo (Zakarpattia Oblast, western Ukraine), which opened in 2012. This facility specializes in civilian electronics production (e.g., household appliances like coffee machines, printer components, and injection-molded plastics). It employs thousands and was significantly damaged in a previous Russian missile strike on August 21, 2025, injuring workers and sparking international commentary as an attack on US-owned infrastructure.
If true, this represents three major American assets blown to smithereens in only two days’ time—so don’t let concern trolls tell you that Russia is simply taking it on the cheek without any reciprocation at all. In fact, as far as we know the seized ship was not even Russian and was merely allowed to switch to the Russian flag last minute in the hopes of escaping.
In other news, the European ensemble of failures held another mutual therapy session which resulted in the signing of an agreement to station troops and build military bases in Ukraine after the event of a ceasefire—which pretty much ensures that no ceasefire will ever come…and maybe that was the plan all along.
Here you can hear Starmer openly announce the plan to build “military hubs” inside Ukraine:
You may recall that the threat of NATO troops and military assets in Ukraine was literally the reason behind Russia’s invasion to begin with, so we can only imagine Russia’s reaction to these latest baffling developments.
Of course, the weaselly Starmer again had no answer to the natural question which follows any such pro-Ukrainian chest-pounding:
Notice his squirrelly answer revolves around illegitimacy and a transition to ‘democracy’, which implies a lack of legitimate elections. Interesting, that, given the fact that Zelensky is also precisely illegitimate and hasn’t held any elections after his legal mandate had long run out.
One thing is clear, the US and Europe have created a twisted tangle of contradictions that are spiraling out of control. It seems more and more likely that the Venezuela issue will not turn out even remotely favorable to Trump’s idealized vision, and will require new ‘adventures’—Greenland, naturally, comes to mind—to paper over the large-scale failure. Similarly for Europe, its massive tangle is getting heavier and heavier to bear, with slimy Eurocrat leaders now veritably drowning in the daily lies and hypocrisies they’re forced to spew to keep the fragile house of cards upright just a little while longer.
And now with the Greenland issue, the two sides are even careening toward an inevitable clash that will be a sight to behold, and may beget the final unraveling of this whole terminal escalation phase of the Western Order’s demise:
#BREAKING: Denmark has issued a major warning, saying it would shoot first and ask questions later if United States military troops move to invade Greenland
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