A Russian bucket brigade helps toads and frogs cross the road to get to a spawning site

A NATURE RESERVE NEAR SESTRORETSK, Russia (AP) — It happens every spring along a section of road north of Russia's second-largest city of St. Petersburg: Volunteers, many in yellow vests, patrol near the Sestroretsk Bog nature reserve.

They serve as crossing guards for thousands of toads and frogs, who are trying to navigate toward their spawning sites.

There usually isn’t much traffic, but even the relatively low number of vehicles still would kill up to 1,000 toads each year, said Konstantin Milta, senior herpetology researcher with the St. Petersburg Zoological Institute.

“On large highways, the death rate is monstrous. Sometimes the surface of the road can be covered with a layer of dead animals,” Milta told The Associated Press.

On this section, a large reddish-orange sign that features one of the amphibians warns motorists: “Attention! Slow down! Toads are crossing the road.”

When the volunteers find one of the creatures, they pick it up, put it in a plastic bucket and make a record before depositing it in the grass on the other side.

“So cute!” one of the volunteers said, referring to how the toad clung to her pink glove.

In the Sestroretsk Bog reserve, “toads migrate from the forest to the bay in the spring, reproduce in the reed beds in the coastal strip, lay eggs, and then, somewhere in mid-May, they leave the water and migrate back to the forest,” Milta said.

“So they cross this road twice,” he added.

Members of this bucket brigade have been volunteering their time since 2016, said Viktoria Samuta, head of the environmental education section of the Directorate of Protected Areas of St. Petersburg.

Depending on the weather, the work begins in mid-April and continues for a month or longer, she said, with more than 700 volunteers take part every year.

Last year, Samuta said, volunteers helped move thousands of specimens.

“It is very good that in recent years there have been more and more people ready to help living beings,” she said. “Our mission is, precisely, to make people love our nature more and more, and be willing to help it.”

Volunteer Diana Kulinichenko called it a nice break from her studies.

“I’ve been whining all semester that I want to go to the forest," Kulinichenko said. "And here’s the forest, the toads, you help the toads, you’re in the forest, you breathe clean air. And I just really want to volunteer, so after this I’ll be looking for where else I can do it.”

A volunteer holds a toad at the Sestroretsk Bog natural reserve outside St. Petersburg, Russia, on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

A fence keeps frogs off a road until volunteers can move them across safely in the Sestroretsk Bog natural reserve outside St. Petersburg, Russia, on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

A volunteer helps a frog cross the road in the Sestroretsk Bog natural reserve outside St. Petersburg, Russia, on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

A frog sits in the water in the Sestroretsk Bog natural reserve outside St. Petersburg, Russia, Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

Frogs safely reach a spawning area in the Sestroretsk Bog natural reserve outside St. Petersburg, Russia, on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

Frogs leap to get into the water in the Sestroretsk Bog natural reserve outside St. Petersburg, Russia, on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

A fence keeps frogs off a road until volunteers can move them across safely in the Sestroretsk Bog natural reserve outside St. Petersburg, Russia, on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

A volunteer carries frogs across a road in the Sestroretsk Bog natural reserve outside St. Petersburg, Russia, on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

A frog crosses a road to get a spawning area in the Sestroretsk Bog natural reserve outside St. Petersburg, Russia, on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

Frogs sit near a road fenced off by volunteers who help them move across safely in the Sestroretsk Bog natural reserve near St. Petersburg, Russia, on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States carried out a lightning military strike on Venezuela early Saturday, capturing President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and spiriting them out of the country. President Donald Trump said the U.S. is “going to run” Venezuela until a transition of power can occur and the U.S. will tap the country's vast oil reserves as part of a rebuilding effort.

American officials say Maduro and his wife will face narco-terrorism charges in U.S. courts.

The overnight operation left Venezuela reeling, with its leadership uncertain and details of casualties and the impact on its military still to emerge. Countries across the region and the wider world were absorbing the destabilizing implications of the apparently unilateral U.S. action.

Here’s what we know — and what we don’t.

Explosions rang out and low-flying aircraft swept through Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, early Saturday. At least seven blasts were heard in an attack that lasted less than 30 minutes. The targets appeared to include military infrastructure. Smoke was seen rising from the hangar of a military base in Caracas and another military installation in the capital was without power.

Venezuelan ruling party leader Nahum Fernández told The Associated Press that Maduro and Flores were at their home within the Ft. Tiuna military installation outside Caracas when they were captured.

Venezuelan officials said people had been killed, but the scale of casualties was unclear.

The attack followed months of escalating pressure by the Trump administration, which has built up naval forces in the waters off South America and since early September has carried out deadly strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the eastern Pacific and Caribbean. Last week the U.S. struck Venezuelan soil with a CIA drone strike at a docking area alleged to have been used by drug cartels.

Trump said during a news conference Saturday the U.S. would run the country and gestured to officials arrayed behind, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and said they’d be the ones doing it “for a period of time.”

Trump claimed the American presence was already in place, though there were no immediate signs of this. He suggested the U.S. would use revenues from oil sales to pay for running the country.

“We’re going to get reimbursed for everything that we spend,” he said.

Trump claimed that Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez had been sworn in as president shortly before he spoke to reporters and added she had spoken with Rubio.

“She is essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again. Very simple,” Trump said.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said on social network X that Maduro and Flores had both been indicted in the Southern District of New York and “will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.”

Maduro was indicted in March 2020, during Trump’s first term, but the indictment against Flores was not previously made public.

In the indictment made public on Saturday, Maduro is charged with narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.

U.S. authorities accused Maduro of leading a “a corrupt, illegitimate government that, for decades, has leveraged government power to protect and promote illegal activity, including drug trafficking.” The indictment alleges the drug trafficking “enriched and entrenched Venezuela’s political and military elite.”

Authorities estimate that as much as 250 tons of cocaine were trafficked through Venezuela by 2020, according to the indictment. The drugs were moved on go-fast vessels, fishing boats and container ships or by plane from clandestine airstrips, authorities allege.

Trump said Maduro and his wife are aboard a U.S. warship and will face prosecution in New York.

Trump gave some details of the operation during a Saturday morning interview on “Fox and Friends.”

He said a few U.S. members of the operation were injured but he believed no one was killed.

He said Maduro was “highly guarded” in a presidential palace akin to a “fortress” and the Venezuelan leader tried to get to a safe room but wasn’t able to get there in time.

Trump said U.S. forces practiced the operation ahead of time on a replica building, and the U.S. turned off “almost all of the lights in Caracas,” although he didn’t detail how they accomplished that.

Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, also offered some details of the operation, saying some Venezuelan civilians and members of the military were killed.

The U.S. does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, and the legal implications of the strike under U.S. law were not immediately clear.

The Trump administration maintains that Maduro is not the legitimate leader of Venezuela and claims he has effectively turned Venezuela into a criminal enterprise at the service of drug traffickers and terrorist groups.

Mike Lee, a U.S. senator from Utah, said on X that the action “likely falls within the president’s inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution to protect U.S. personnel from an actual or imminent attack.”

But some Democrats were more critical.

Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, said in a statement, “President Trump’s unauthorized military attack on Venezuela to arrest Maduro — however terrible he is — is a sickening return to a day when the United States asserted the right to dominate the internal political affairs of all nations in the Western Hemisphere.”

Maduro’s government accused the United States of an “imperialist attack” on civilian and military installations and urged citizens to take to the streets.

Armed individuals and uniformed members of a civilian militia took to the streets of a Caracas neighborhood long considered a stronghold of the ruling party. But in other areas of the city, the streets remained empty hours after the attack. Parts of the city remained without power, but vehicles moved freely.

Venezuela’s neighbor Colombia sent troops to the border and anticipated an influx of refugees.

Latin American leaders were sharply divided over the strikes. Trump’s right-wing ally President Javier Milei of Argentina celebrated the operation, while leftist Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva condemned American actions and warned of the sharp repercussions of past American interventions in Latin America.

Cuba, a supporter of the Maduro government and a longtime adversary of the United States, urged the international community to respond to what President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez called “the criminal attack.”

Russia’s Foreign Ministry said the attack and capture of Maduro would be “an unacceptable infringement on the sovereignty of an independent state.”

U.S. allies in Europe — critical of Maduro but mindful of international law — offered muted responses as they scrambled to understand the scale and implications of the attack.

European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said the bloc “has repeatedly stated that Mr Maduro lacks legitimacy and has defended a peaceful transition. Under all circumstances, the principles of international law and the U.N. Charter must be respected. We call for restraint.”

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he had not spoken to Trump about the attack and stressed that “the U.K. was not involved in any way.” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Spain was “conducting a thorough monitoring of the events in Venezuela” and called for “de-escalation and responsibility.”

Lawless reported from London. Associated Press Writer Danica Kirka in London contributed to this story.

FILE - President Nicolas Maduro acknowledges supporters alongside first lady Cilia Flores during his closing election campaign rally in Caracas, Venezuela, July 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara, File)

Pro-government armed civilians patrol in La Guaira, Venezuela, Saturday, Jan. 3, 2026, after U.S. President Donald Trump announced that President Nicolás Maduro had been captured and flown out of the country. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix)

Supporters of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro embrace in downtown Caracas, Venezuela, Saturday, Jan. 3, 2026, after U.S. President Donald Trump announced that Maduro had been captured and flown out of the country. (AP Photo/Cristian Hernandez)

Men watch smoke rising from a dock after explosions were heard at La Guaira port, Venezuela, Saturday, Jan. 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix)

Smoke raises at La Carlota airport after explosions and low-flying aircraft were heard in Caracas, Venezuela, Saturday, Jan. 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix)