Teenagers toyed with guns at a museum exhibit. Young men posed in front of posters of the country’s military leader. Over dinner in restaurants, families watched television monitors showing footage of drone strikes.

The event was billed as a national cultural festival in the West African nation of Burkina Faso. But it often resembled a mobilization campaign in the all-out war against the Islamist terrorists who have gradually occupied the country in recent years.

“The motherland or death,” Alaila Ilboudo, a spoken word artist, shouted onstage to the cheers of crowds at the festival, held in May in Bobo-Dioulasso, the country’s second largest city.

Burkina Faso has long been known for its international film festival and arts scene. But as extremists affiliated with the Islamic State and Al Qaeda have turned a swath of West Africa into the world’s epicenter of terrorism, Burkina Faso has been the hardest hit.

More than 8,000 people were killed last year in a conflict between extremists and the military, according to analysts. That is twice as many as in 2022. In a country of 23 million, nearly three million people have fled their homes, according to humanitarian groups, and 1.4 million children are expected to face hunger this summer, with aid corridors choked off by the extremists.

A recent trip across the country and interviews with civilians and analysts revealed a nation torn apart by escalating violence, perpetrated by both the Islamist fighters and the military in its brutal effort to defeat them.

The country is now led by the world’s youngest state leader, Capt. Ibrahim Traoré, a 36-year-old autocrat who seized power in a coup in 2022. He has enlisted Russian military advisers and drafted about 50,000 civilians to fight with his army, leading to a surge of human rights abuses against local populations. Nevertheless, the United States has provided more than half of the country’s humanitarian aid this year — $150 million.

Captain Traoré has silenced activists, lawyers and journalists through forced conscription, imprisonment and disappearances. “Either you fight or you disappear,” he said in a speech in May to draftees.

The military government has denied accusations of targeting civilians or specific ethnic groups in its campaign against the extremists. It did not respond to several requests for comment.

So far, Captain Traoré is losing the battle against the extremists, who freely roam the countryside and lay siege to dozens of towns and cities. In June, more than 100 soldiers were killed in an attack on a military base in Mansila, in eastern Burkina Faso. The Islamists claimed responsibility.

Only the capital, Ouagadougou, and a handful of other areas remain relatively secure.

‘Enemies from within’

Just to reach the cultural festival, which also showcased athletes, many participants had to put their lives at risk.

Germaine Poubéré, a lean 20-year-old wrestler from Soudougui, a village about 300 miles east, said she had to dodge ambushes by the fighters and talk her way through army checkpoints. Once at the festival, she defeated one adversary after another, only to lose in the final round against the national champion.

Between two contests, Ms. Poubéré recalled how she and her family had fled their village, which was under attack by militants, and how she spent the last year out of school. She has since moved back home, but she sometimes sleeps at school because the extremists still attack roads in her area.

“It requires so much courage,” she said.

At the festival, hundreds of soldiers were deployed to provide protection.

Captain Traoré himself was in town, exhorting people to support their military. He regularly urges citizens to turn in neighbors or others accused of collaborating with extremists.

At night, vigilantes gather outside to patrol the streets.

“There are enemies from within. We are on the front line,” said Rasmané Porgo as he kept watch at a roundabout near the festival.

Mr. Porgo, a father of five, believes Captain Traoré will succeed in stamping out the extremists. “Burkina Faso will be stable” in a few years, he said.

For now, much of the country remains unsafe.

Captain Traoré traveled back from the festival to the capital in an armored, nondescript vehicle squeezed in the middle of a speeding convoy of more than a hundred armored pickups and motorcycles. Heavily armed soldiers stationed along the road scanned the bush and ordered all other traffic off the road before he passed.

‘The terrorist Hydra’

In 2014, a movement led by artists, intellectuals and activists pushed out the president of Burkina Faso, who had clung to power for nearly three decades.

Islamist fighters were raging to the north in Mali, but Burkina Faso had been spared from the violence.

Western countries like France and the United States saw a relative haven of stability, sending weapons, special forces and advisers to Burkina Faso to help contain the extremists.

It was a short-lived era.

Militants crept from Mali into Burkina Faso’s north and began staging attacks in 2015, destabilizing the once-peaceful country.

Since he seized power in 2022, Captain Traoré vowed to eradicate what he calls “the terrorist Hydra,” referring to the extremists who have multiplied across Burkina Faso and neighboring countries.

He initially promised to be only an interim leader for a few months until an election could be held. But in May, religious, military and political leaders named him “Supreme leader of the armed forces” and empowered him to lead the country for five more years.

Captain Traoré has ignored calls by Western and West African partners to respect human rights and to abide by the rule of law in his effort to quell the fighters. He has accused the United States and European countries of threatening Burkina Faso’s sovereignty, and last year ordered French special forces based in the country to leave.

On a trip to St. Petersburg last summer Captain Traoré said that President Vladimir V. Putin felt “like family.”

‘Nowhere is safe’

As Amadou, a schoolteacher in eastern Burkina Faso, reached his classroom one morning earlier this year, he said that he saw pro-government, civilian militia fighters searching for people of his ethnic group, the Fulani. His legs shaking, he escaped on his motorbike, he said.

Many ethnic Fulanis are caught between the Islamist fighters, who often invade their villages and recruit them, and the military and civilian militias, which accuse them of being extremists.

Amadou, like many people approached by The New York Times in Burkina Faso, asked that only his first name be used for fear of his safety. He said that he had fled his village years ago because he and his family had refused to follow orders from Islamist fighters that women fully cover themselves and follow their prayer rules.

But now, pro-government militia fighters routinely round up Fulanis with no explanation, he said. “It feels as if nowhere is safe,” Amadou said. “That at any time I can be detained, or worse, because I’m Fulani.”

Soldiers and civilian militia fighters have committed massacres of civilians accused of cooperating with extremists — killings that have gone unpunished, rights groups say.

Women and children have been killed by soldiers, too, according to Fulani representatives and researchers, who have warned the country is approaching a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

“The targeting of civilians has reached mass killing levels,” said Héni Nsaibia, a senior analyst with the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.

Torn families

As the Islamists move closer to some villages and cities, they are tearing families apart.

Under armed guard, a 44-year-old farmer named Zeinabou fled the besieged city of Djibo in April with six of her children. Djibo had been a refuge for Zeinabou and her family after they ran away from extremists attacking their village in 2018.

But Djibo is no longer safe. Zeinabou said she risked abduction or death just by growing peas or millet in nearby fields. She and her husband eventually decided that she would leave for the capital while he stayed behind in Djibo with his second wife and other children.

Now in a Ouagadougou neighborhood sheltering with more than 1,300 people, Zeinabou said she hopes to find work braiding hair to feed her family. For now, though, they rely on people’s generosity.

She said that she has barely been able to talk to her husband and children back in Djibo. But, she added, “We couldn’t think of another option” but to leave.

More than 10,500 athletes from some 200 countries will participate in the Olympic Games in Paris, but only 15 of them will be from Russia. They will compete without the accompaniment of the Russian flag or its national anthem.

Back in Russia, the competition will not be shown on television for the first time since 1984. And state TV is paying little attention to the Games, other than to point out flaws in the Games in commentary that smacks of sour grapes.

News segments, for instance, have reported on the cleanup of the Seine, which they concluded would inevitably fill up with sewage again. And media commentators expressed disgust that a drag queen carried the Olympic torch — which is antithetical to Russia’s increasing emphasis on what it calls “traditional values” and its crackdown on L.G.B.T.Q. expression.

It’s quite a comedown for Russia, a traditional Olympic powerhouse that for years used the competition as a way to project power and foster national pride, and often finished first in the final medal count. And it represents the price the country is paying for its invasion of Ukraine two years ago and the daily mayhem it inflicts there.

Banned from participating because of the war, Moscow has chosen to spurn the Games in return. It is framing them as part of the same narrative that President Vladimir V. Putin has used to stoke nationalism at home: that Russia is engaged in an existential standoff with a Western alliance bent on the country’s humiliation.

“No one wants to recognize the real reason for the increased barriers to Russia’s participation,” said Dmitri Navosha, a Belarusian who co-founded a prominent sports website in Russia but has left the country and opposes the invasion of Ukraine. “The reason is the war.” And in Russia, he said, “this fact is simply hidden and interpreted as ‘the West doesn’t like Russia, so they don’t let us go anywhere.’”

Still, the Kremlin and its supporters insist the decision to bar Russia is borne of American hypocrisy.

“So now we mix sports and politics?” Dmitri V. Gubernyev, a well-known Russian sports announcer, said in an interview. “Americans, who went to Iraq and later acknowledged the mistake,” he added, implying that the United States was never sanctioned in the sports world for waging wars. “And who invaded Vietnam, acknowledged later — not by you and me, but by Biden — as a mistake?”

In 2017, the International Olympic Committee suspended Russia’s team from participating until the end of 2022 because of a doping scandal. Even so, it sent some of the largest contingents to the Games — 335 in Tokyo three years ago — where Russian athletes participated and won medals under a “neutral” designation.

In 2022, the I.O.C. banned Russian athletes again in the wake of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The suspension also extends to athletes from Belarus, Russia’s neighboring vassal state, whose leader, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, has supported Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Last year, the I.O.C. decided to allow individual Russian athletes to participate if they met strict requirements for participation.

Russian and Belarusian athletes and personnel “who actively support the war” or are contracted to their country’s military or national security agencies are ineligible to participate.

The I.O.C. also ruled that no Russian or Belarusian state official could be accredited for the Games. Many media representatives from both countries were also prohibited from attending, further irritating the Kremlin.

Russian sports organizations, commentators and general society are divided over participation in these circumstances.

The head of Russia’s Olympic Committee, Stanislav Pozdnyakov, has maligned the athletes who chose to participate, in part because about half of them are based outside of Russia. He called them “foreign agents,” a derogatory designation for people the authorities consider to be working against the national interest.

The Russian Olympic Committee has also made payouts of more than 200 million rubles, or $2.3 million, to at least 245 athletes who could not or chose not to compete, the body’s director general told RIA Novosti.

There was a public pressure campaign inside Russia to persuade athletes to withdraw. At least 20 Russian athletes who qualified and met the criteria for competing rejected the invitations — either because their federation decided not to participate or out of solidarity with other team members who were not greenlit by the Olympic committee.

In a statement, the Russian Wrestling Federation said that it “would not allow the spirit of the Russian team to be broken.” The group said it would rather none of its athletes participate than only a few who qualified.

The judo team also complained that “of the 17 judokas who received the Olympic rating, the I.O.C. allowed only four to participate in the Olympics.” It refused to let those who qualified to compete under what it called “humiliating conditions.”

The Kremlin has left the thorny decisions on who should participate to the federations and their athletes.

“Each athlete makes such decisions independently,” said the Kremlin spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov. “As for those who had the opportunity and did not go, each federation has its own circumstances, agreements, collective opinions and decisions. This needs to be respected.”

Ukraine has actively lobbied against some athletes who are participating. For instance, it called for the I.O.C. to exclude the Russian gymnast Angela Bladtseva, 18, from trampoline jumping. Kommersant, a Russian business daily, reported that Ukrainian officials had complained because Ms. Bladtseva competed in the Russian city of Krasnodar last year against a background with the pro-war symbol “Z” and the slogan “We do not abandon our own.” She will participate in the Paris Games.

The war has caused other divisions over Russia’s Olympic participation. Military bloggers, who are generally full-throated supporters of Russia’s army, have criticized St. Petersburg for offering cash awards to athletes who earn medals, calling it a form of betrayal.

“We are literally collecting pennies to help the front throughout the country, while they are paying traitors,” wrote one blogger with 257,000 followers on Telegram, using a slur for L.G.B.T.Q. people to refer to those who proposed the payments.

The scant Russian presence this year feels like a repetition of the 1980s, said Mr. Navosha, the founder of the sports website. The United States led a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, leading to a Russian boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Games.

“We have a very clear historical parallel that directly indicates where Russia is now — exactly where the Soviet Union was in 1980,” he said. “A direct, undisguised confrontation with the Western world, in which sport became an instrument of the confrontation.”

There is one notable difference, he added. In 1984, the Soviet Union organized its own Olympic-style competition, Druzhba-84, or the Friendship Games. The event was portrayed as evidence that the socialist way of life “provides more favorable facilities for the human beings’ all-round physical and spiritual development.” Athletes from about 50 countries participated.

This time around, a version known as Druzhba-24, was scheduled to take place in September by Mr. Putin’s decree. Organizers allocated money and planned competition in more than 30 summer sports, but it was postponed until at least next year, Mr. Navosha said, a sign that not enough countries were on board to compete.

“We understand that Russia’s circle of allies is much smaller now than it was back then, and it is too small to hold their ersatz Olympics,” said Mr. Navosha.

Mr. Gubernyev, the announcer, said he was in favor of all athletes who qualified competing, even if he believed the conditions were unfair. He added that he, like other Russians who love sports, would find a way to watch the games.

But he warned that the exclusion from Paris would foster resentment in a generation of athletes, and Russians in general against the West: “A person does sports to win an Olympic medal.”

“Against the background of these decisions, another round of confrontation will be born,” he added. “Because there are people who really want to broaden their horizons, see Europe and show the world what they can do. That wasn’t given to them, so their response will wind up being, ‘Go to hell.’”

Alina Lobzina and Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.

In the video, the Chinese graduate student stared straight into the camera as she spoke. She wore a mask, but in a bold move, made clear who she was by holding up her identification card. Then she issued an explosive accusation: A prominent professor at a top Chinese university had been sexually harassing her for two years.

Shortly after the woman posted the video on her Chinese social media pages on Sunday, it drew millions of views and set off an online outcry against the professor she named, Wang Guiyuan, then the vice-dean and Communist Party head of Renmin University’s School of Liberal Arts in Beijing.

The next day, Renmin University fired Mr. Wang, saying that officials had investigated the student’s allegations and found that they were true.

The swift response by the university reflected the growing pressure that Chinese academic institutions have come under to curb sexual harassment on campus. In recent years, several schools have been accused of not doing enough to protect their students from tutors and professors who preyed on them.

At the same time, in denouncing the professor, the university and commentaries in state media that followed studiously avoided describing his conduct as sexual harassment. Instead, they depicted it as a moral failing, using language that feminist activists and scholars say points to a strategy of deflection that turns the attention away from victims.

“If they have to avoid saying ‘sexual harassment,’ it’s very hard to imagine that they take sexual violence seriously,” said Feng Yuan, an academic and the founder of an anti-domestic violence help line in Beijing.

In her video, the graduate student, who identified herself as Wang Di, said that Mr. Wang, her doctoral supervisor, had demanded in 2022 to have sex with her, then abused her physically and verbally after she refused.

“Because I rejected him, he retaliated over the past two years, threatening that I would not graduate,” she said in the hourlong video. She included audio clips of what she described as recordings of his attempts to force himself on her. She also said she had text messages that backed up her claims.

Renmin University responded by saying it had verified the student’s allegations and dismissed the professor, whom it identified only by his last name, Wang. In a statement, the school said the professor had “seriously breached the party discipline, school rules and the professional ethics of teachers.”

Mr. Wang, the professor, did not reply to an email seeking comment. Ms. Wang, the student, also did not respond to a request for comment.

The university also said he had been expelled by the Communist Party, and the local police department said it was investigating the situation. An online commentary about the case in the People’s Daily, a Communist Party mouthpiece, hailed the quick action, saying: “Black sheep cannot remain in the herd and the reputation of top schools cannot be destroyed.”

Feminist activists said that school administrators were often more concerned about protecting the reputation of the school than the rights of the victim. Schools in China have long encouraged students to keep quiet about such allegations. In this case, the activists said, administrators may have had little choice but to take action, given the evidence that the student had collected and the widespread scrutiny on the school.

The Chinese authorities have tried to avoid addressing the harm that had been done to the victim, said Lu Pin, a prominent Chinese feminist activist. “It is not a question of rights, it is not a question of safety, but a problem of violating morality and the politics of the party-state,” she said. This was to avoid being seen as encouraging students to seek legal redress, she said.

The avoidance of the term “sexual harassment” has been a feature in past cases as well. In 2023, Southwest University in Chongqing fired a professor after a doctoral student said he had pressured her into having sex with him. In the university’s announcement, it described the teacher as having had an “improper sexual relationship” with a student, a term that scholars like Ms. Feng say is problematic because it implicates the victim as well.

Even though sexual harassment by university teachers of students is officially described as a breach of professional ethics, the tendency within academia was to downplay the issue, said Lao Dongyan, a law professor from Tsinghua University, in a post on Weibo.

Yet “the environment around me seems to collectively assume it a trivial matter, or even an inevitable love affair for the men,” she wrote in the post, which has been liked nine million times.

That Ms. Wang had to resort to going public with her complaint at the cost of her privacy reflected how weak reporting mechanisms on campus can be, Ms. Lu said.

After the university’s response, Ms. Wang posted a statement online saying she was satisfied by the school’s response and appreciative of its concern for her well-being. Her original video was no longer available, though it was not immediately clear who took it down.

The Ukrainian authorities detained a suspect on Thursday in the killing of Iryna Farion, a divisive far-right Ukrainian politician who was shot dead by a gunman last week in the western city of Lviv, a crime that shocked the nation.

Ihor Klymenko, Ukraine’s interior minister, said in a statement that there was “sufficient evidence” that the suspect, whom he identified only as an 18-year-old man, had killed Ms. Farion. He said the suspect had been arrested in his hometown, Dnipro, a large city more than 500 miles east of Lviv in eastern Ukraine.

Mr. Klymenko added that a preliminary investigation suggested that the suspect had worked with others to plan the killing. He added that the suspect, while preparing for the killing for at least two months, had “rented at least three apartments in Lviv.” Mr. Klymenko did not rule out the possibility of Russian involvement.

Ms. Farion died on Friday after an unknown assailant shot her in broad daylight near her home in Lviv. Witnesses told Ukrainian news outlets that the killer fired a single shot and quickly fled.

For nearly a week, the Ukrainian police had been searching for a suspect who had appeared on surveillance cameras and was described as a man in his 20s. Mr. Klymenko and President Volodymyr Zelensky said hundreds of security agents and investigators had been deployed to find him.

“They checked every corner along the gunman’s escape route” and searched about 250 acres of forest, Mr. Klymenko said of the police. “Eventually, the suspect was tracked down.”

The killing last Friday of Ms. Farion, a former lawmaker and award-winning linguist, sent chills through the country, where there had been no high-profile killings since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Given Mr. Farion’s controversial profile, some Ukrainians feared that her death would polarize Ukrainian society.

Ms. Farion was a highly divisive figure in Ukraine. She belonged to Svoboda, a hard-line nationalist party, and some Ukrainians despised her for her denunciation of Russian-speaking fighters in the Ukrainian army. Ukraine is a bilingual country, and many Ukrainians speak Russian, especially in eastern regions closer to Russia.

In November, the Ukrainian security services opened a criminal investigation into Ms. Farion’s statements. She was also fired from Lviv Polytechnic National University, where she taught.

Ms. Farion remained a respected linguist, and several thousand mourners attended her funeral on Monday in Lviv. Supporters described her as a true patriot and a pioneer of current efforts to promote the use of Ukrainian, once banned by the Soviet authorities.

Political analysts and officials said it was crucial to conduct a swift and transparent investigation to keep rumors from spreading.

Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, the head of the Ukrainian Parliament’s committee on freedom of speech and a liberal politician, wrote on Facebook last week that the killing could increase distrust of the Ukrainian police and pit rival political parties against each other. Like other Ukrainian officials, he suggested that Moscow might have been behind the killing in an attempt to sow divisions.

On Thursday, the Ukrainian police said they were examining unverified claims linking the killing to a Russian neo-Nazi group.

Prince Harry’s marathon quest against Britain’s tabloids produced a “monumental victory” in the courts, he said in a TV interview that will air Thursday, but it was a “central piece” of the bitter rift between him and other members of the British royal family.

Speaking for the first time since winning hundreds of thousand of pounds in damages from Mirror Group Newspapers over his claims that it had wrongfully invaded his privacy, Harry, 39, said that he had been vindicated by the judge’s ruling, even if the price to his relations with his family was high.

“I’ve made it very clear that this is something that needs to be done,” Harry said in excerpts released by ITV News, part of an hourlong documentary about the phone-hacking scandal. But he added, “It would be nice if we, you know, did it as a family.”

Harry, the younger son of King Charles III, did not explain exactly how his legal battle had further ruptured relations with his father or brother, Prince William. In his memoir, “Spare,” he attributed the rift to multiple causes, including his family’s treatment of his wife, Meghan Markle, a biracial American former actress.

But Harry’s determination to sue the tabloids put the royal family in an awkward position. In his lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers, Harry disclosed that William had settled claims that the publisher hacked his cellphone for a “huge sum of money.”

The settlement, Harry said, grew out of a “secret agreement,” under which the family deferred legal claims against the publisher to avoid having to testify about embarrassing details from their intercepted voice mail messages.

Asked by the ITV interviewer, Rebecca Barry, whether his decision to go ahead with litigation contributed to the breakdown, he said that was “a central piece to it.” He added, “It’s a hard question to answer because anything I say about my family results in a torrent of abuse from the press.”

“I believe that, again, from a service standpoint and when you are in a public role, that these are the things that we should be doing for the greater good,” Harry said. “But, you know, I’m doing this for my reasons.”

When Ms. Barry asked how his family’s decision to handle disputes with the tabloids privately had played out, he left little doubt of his views, even as he conceded the personal price of his more public approach.

“I think everything that’s played out has shown people what the truth of the matter is,” said Harry, looking grave but composed.

“For me, the mission continues” he added, while acknowledging, “it’s caused, as you say, part of the rift.”

Harry also addressed claims that his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, had been driven to paranoia by the relentless intrusion of the tabloid press. Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997, after a high-speed pursuit by photographers.

“Still today,” Harry said, “the tabloid press very much enjoy painting her as being paranoid.”

“But she wasn’t paranoid, she was absolutely right of what was happening to her,” he added. “And she’s not around today to find out the truth.”

In 2021, after the BBC issued a belated apology for a sensational 1995 interview with Diana that had been arranged under deceitful terms, William accused BBC employees of making “lurid and false claims about the royal family, which played on her fears and fueled paranoia.”

More than two decades after the explosive revelations that the tabloids routinely hacked the cellphones of celebrities and other public figures, Harry has become one of the last people still fighting the publishers in court.

He and other plaintiffs recently lost an effort to draw Mr. Murdoch, 93, into a hacking lawsuit against his company, News Group Newspapers. The judge, Timothy Fancourt, observed that he understood the plaintiffs wanted “to shoot at ‘trophy’ targets” but concluded that Mr. Murdoch was not relevant to their claims.

The judge noted, however, that the trial was already set to air allegations of a cover-up by “trusted lieutenants” of Mr. Murdoch, including his son James; Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News U.K.; and Will Lewis, a former News executive who is now the publisher of the Washington Post. (All three have denied the allegations.)

In the case against Mirror Group Newspapers, Justice Fancourt ruled that Harry had been a victim of “widespread and habitual hacking” by the company and awarded him 140,600 pounds, or about $181,000, in damages. In a later settlement of the remainder of his claims, Harry won at least £400,000, or about $515,000, in additional damages.

That case featured dramatic testimony from Harry, who told the court that the editors and journalists had “blood on their hands” because of the lengths to which they went to ferret out news about him and his family.