seized

United States President Donald Trump has said that Washington will “run” Venezuela until a political transition can take place, hours after US forces bombed the South American country and “captured” its president, Nicolas Maduro.

Speaking during a news conference on Saturday, Trump said the US would “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition”.

“We don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in, and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years,” he said.

The Trump administration launched attacks on Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, and seized Maduro and his wife in the early hours of Saturday.

A plane carrying the Venezuelan leader landed in New York state on Saturday evening, according to US media.

Footage broadcast by CNN, Fox News and MS Now showed US officials escorting a person they identified as Maduro off a plane at the Stewart international airport, about 97 kilometres (60 miles) northwest of New York City.

Maduro’s capture took place after a months-long US pressure campaign against his government, which included US seizures of oil tankers off the Venezuelan coast, as well as deadly attacks on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean. The attacks were widely denounced as extrajudicial killings.

Washington had accused the Venezuelan leader, who has been in power since 2013, of having ties to drug cartels. Maduro had rejected the claim, saying the US was working to depose him and take control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.

During Saturday’s news conference, Trump said that “very large United States oil companies” would move into Venezuela to “fix the badly broken… oil infrastructure and start making money for the country”.

He added that his administration’s actions “will make the people of Venezuela rich, independent and safe”.

The Trump administration has defended Maduro’s “capture, saying the left-wing leader faced drug-related charges in the US.

These charges include “narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices against the United States”, US Attorney General Pam Bondi said.

“They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts,” she added in a post on X.

A Justice Department official told the Reuters news agency that Maduro is expected to make an initial appearance in Manhattan federal court on Monday.

‘Illegal abduction’

But legal experts, world leaders and Democratic Party lawmakers in the US have condemned the administration’s actions as a violation of international law.

“Attacking countries, in flagrant violation of international law, is the first step towards a world of violence, chaos, and instability, where the law of the strongest prevails over multilateralism,” Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva wrote on X.

Ben Saul, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, slammed what he called Washington’s “illegal abduction” of Maduro. “I condemn the US’ illegal aggression against Venezuela,” Saul wrote on social media.

A spokesperson for UN chief Antonio Guterres said he was “deeply alarmed” by the situation, describing the US’s actions as setting “a dangerous precedent”.

“The Secretary-General continues to emphasize the importance of full respect – by all – of international law, including the UN Charter. He’s deeply concerned that the rules of international law have not been respected,” Guterres’s office said in a statement.

Earlier on Saturday, Venezuela’s defence minister released a defiant statement in response to the US attacks, urging people to remain united.

“We will not negotiate; we will not give up,” Vladimir Padrino Lopez said, stressing that Venezuela’s independence is not up for negotiation. “We must maintain calm and [be] united in order to prevail in these dire moments.”

Uncertainty prevails

It remains unclear how exactly the US plans to “run” Venezuela, and how long the purported transitional period will last.

During Saturday’s news conference, Trump said that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had spoken with Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez.

“She was sworn in as president just a little while ago,” Trump told reporters. “She had a long conversation with [Rubio], and she said, ‘We’ll do whatever you need’. I think she was quite gracious, but she really doesn’t have a choice.”

Rodriguez appeared to contradict that in a news conference in Caracas later in the day.

“We demand the immediate release of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife. The only president of Venezuela is President Nicolas Maduro,” she said.

“We are ready to defend Venezuela. We are ready to defend our natural resources, which should be for national development,” she added.

Al Jazeera’s Latin America editor Lucia Newman, reporting from Chile, said that, if Rodriguez is “on board” with the US plan for Venezuela, as Trump and Rubio have suggested, “she certainly didn’t sound like it” during her address.

“She sounded like her typical, fiery self, very much on the side of… Maduro, demanding that he be released and saying that Venezuela would not be a colony of the United States,” Newman said.

The events of the day have brought “a rollercoaster of emotions” to “Venezuelans both inside and outside of the country”, said Caracas-based journalist Sissi de Flaviis.

“When we first heard that Maduro was taken out of the country, there was a mix of reactions,” she said. “A lot of people couldn’t believe it. Other people were pretty much celebrating. Other people were kind of on standby, waiting.”

After Trump’s news conference announcing US plans to run Venezuela, “there’s been a shock”, de Flaviis added.

“People are a bit concerned about what this will actually mean for us, what this will mean for the government and who is going to lead us in the next few days, months and years.”

Meanwhile, Harlan Ullman, a former US naval officer, told Al Jazeera that “the notion of America taking over Venezuela is going to explode in our faces”.

“When Trump says, ‘We’re going to run the country’: We’re not capable of running America, how are we going to be able to run Venezuela?” Ullman said.

“I do not believe that we have a plan for dealing with Venezuela,” he added. “A country is extraordinarily complex. We lack the knowledge, understanding and all the logistics to do this.”

Finnish authorities have seized a Turkish-owned cargo vessel suspected of damaging an undersea telecommunications cable running from Helsinki to Talinn, Estonia. This marks the first incident involving suspected sabotage of critical undersea infrastructure in the region since the creation of a NATO task force nearly a year ago to defend those cables, a NATO official told us.

The situation began early Wednesday local time after the Finnish Elisa telecommunications company “detected a fault in its telecommunications cable between Helsinki and Tallinn,” according to the Finnish Border Guard. The cable runs for about 40 miles between the two nations under the strategically important Gulf of Finland, which is bordered by Russia, Finland and Estonia and leads to the Baltic Sea. The damage occurred somewhere in Estonia’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), officials claim.

“Elisa reported the matter to the Border Guard’s command center. The Border Guard immediately began investigating the damage to the critical underwater infrastructure.”

The Border Guard’s offshore patrol vessel Turva and a helicopter found the suspect ship, a St. Vincent Grenadines-flagged general cargo vessel named Fitburg, inside Finland’s exclusive economic zone, officials explained. The vessel is “suspected of causing the damage to the cable through its operations,” the Border Guard added.

The vessel was enroute from St. Petersburg, Russia to Haifa, Israel, according to the MarineTraffic ship tracking site.

“The vessel’s anchor chain was found to be in the sea,” the Border Guard noted, adding that it “asked the vessel to stop and raise the anchor chain.” 

The Fitburg was then ordered to move to Finnish territorial waters, where Finnish authorities “took possession of the vessel as a joint operation.”

“Finnish authorities have inspected the vessel suspected of causing the cable damage in the Gulf of Finland,” Finnish President Alexander Stubb stated on X. “Finland has prepared for various security challenges and we respond to them in the manner required by the situation.”

Responsibility for the case has since been transferred from the Gulf of Finland Coast Guard to the Helsinki Police Department. 

“The police have been in contact with the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Prosecutor General has issued a relevant indictment,” the Border Guard stated. “The police are currently investigating the events under the criminal charges of suspected aggravated damage, suspected attempted aggravated damage and suspected aggravated interference with telecommunications.”

The Fitburg is owned and operated by the Turkish Albros Shipping & Trading company, according to BalticShipping.com. We reached out to the company for more details about the incident and will update this story with any pertinent details provided.

As of Wednesday evening local time, Finnish authorities had yet to offer a motive for the cable damage and did not assign any blame beyond the ship itself. However, the damage occurred amid growing concerns about Russian hybrid warfare against NATO nations. That is just below the threshold of armed conflict and comes at a time of mounting tensions between Moscow and the alliance as the war in Ukraine drags on.

Almost exactly a year ago, Finnish authorities seized the Russian-linked oil tanker Eagle S, accusing it of dragging its anchor on the sea floor to break an underwater cable running from Finland to Estonia. The ship was later found to be full of spy equipment. You can see the Eagle S being seized in the following video.

Police in Finland say Eagle S crew detained as Estlink-2 cable damage probe continues

That incident and a spate of others led NATO to stand up Baltic Sentry on Jan. 14. It is an effort “to deter any future attempts by a state or non-state actor to damage critical undersea infrastructure there,” according to NATO in a statement at the time.

Baltic Sentry has deployed warships and aircraft from several nations to help deter sabotage incidents. In addition, a U.K.-led 10-member consortium of northern European nations called the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) reactivated an AI-based system to track suspicious ships in these waters.

A NATO official we spoke with on Wednesday declined to comment on the specifics of today’s telecommunications cable break. However, he did reiterate that Baltic Sentry was created to keep incidents like this from happening

“Since Baltic Sentry began in early 2025, and before this current incident, still under investigation, there have been zero incidents of maligned damage to sea cables in the Baltic Sea,” a NATO official told us Wednesday morning. 

“Baltic Sentry plays a role in our deterrence efforts along with expedient responses when suspicious incidents occur,” the official added. “In this case, NATO is supporting Finland with analysis and information exchange from our NATO shipping center to assist Finland with their response.”

“These incidents are more broadly actioned beyond just regional navies and militaries,” the NATO official noted. “As in the case of the current incident, this is a national and local police investigation led by national authorities.”

There is still much we don’t know about this incident. However, regardless of whether this was intentional or not, the episode again highlights the precarious nature of important undersea cables.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com