What began with the United States’ attack on Venezuela has now gone global.

Not content with the rendition of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, amid a firestorm of destruction in Caracas, the Trump administration has followed with the military seizure of two tankers carrying Venezuelan oil. The first, the Sophia, was in the Caribbean. The second, the Marinera, was thousands of miles away, in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic near Iceland.

The tanker was Russian-flagged, causing some to read this move as an assault on Moscow’s sanctions-evading “shadow fleet.” But while the Kremlin is unlikely to be impressed, Washington’s target was Venezuelan resources. It also seems plausible that with Ukraine negotiations ongoing, Trump may offer the Russian leadership concessions elsewhere, to encourage it to overlook the tanker incident. According to a former White House aide, Moscow has offered a quid pro quo on Venezuela and Ukraine before.