In early November, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly backed the Stop Harboring Iranian Petroleum (Ship) bill, which targets foreign ports, refineries and vessels handling Iranian oil.

If passed into law, the Ship bill would impose sanctions on foreign ports that knowingly accept shipments of Iranian petroleum products, and on refineries that knowingly process petroleum originating from Iran.

It would also sanction vessels that transport or offload Iran-origin petroleum, including by ship-to-ship transfer.

The UK government had changed laws a month earlier allowing it to designate ships by IMO number for the first time. This was the only Sovcomflot tanker targeted.^{1) 2)}

Jeremy Domballe, an expert at S&P Global Market Intelligence, suggested sanctioning ships could have stronger effects in stopping their operations than sanctioning shipowners, who can transfer ownership of tankers to non-sanctioned firms.