The U.S. seized a 20-year-old oil tanker called The Skipper off the coast of Venezuela on Wednesday, three sources familiar with the matter told CBS News, after months of heightened tensions between the Trump administration and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

The M/T Skipper seized by U.S. Coast Guard, was a sanctioned crude-oil tanker previously identified as part of an oil shipping network supporting Lebanese group Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force, both U.S.-designated terrorist organizations.

They were really close,” one of the pilots told controllers of the encounter at approximately 26,000 feet. “We were climbing right into him.”

Venezuela’s foreign affairs minister denounced the seizure, calling it a “blatant theft” and “an act of international piracy.”

The vessel, known as "The Skipper," was seized by the U.S. Coast Guard and other U.S. agencies on Wednesday. It was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2022. According to a 2022 Treasury Department notice, the tanker was one of several vessels used for illicit oil shipments by a Gulf-based businessman named Viktor Artemov.

Using U.S. forces to take control of a merchant ship is unusual and marks the Trump administration's latest push to increase pressure on Maduro, who has been charged with narcoterrorism.

Ukrainian ‌drones ​hit a ‌tanker in the southern Russian ​port of Rostov-on-Don, killing and ‍injuring a number ​of people and ​sparking ⁠a fire, the city's mayor was quoted as saying early on Thursday.

An ABC News analysis of satellite imagery and tracking data shows the oil tanker seized by the U.S. off the coast of Venezuela may have manipulated its location data.