Ukrainian forces pressed deeper into Russia on Friday, trying to capitalize on their surprise cross-border offensive, as Moscow moved quickly to shore up its defenses against the largest assault on Russian soil since the war began.

After capturing several small settlements the last few days, Ukraine was battling to take full control of a town near the border and sending small units to conduct raids farther into the southwestern Russian region of Kursk.

At the same time, the Russian military announced it was sending more troops and armored vehicles to try to repel the attack. Russian television released videos of columns of military trucks carrying artillery pieces, heavy machine guns and tanks.

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The residents of the southeast Liverpool neighborhood of Edge Hill had spent Wednesday preparing for trouble.

Parents were called to pick up children early from nursery school. Shop owners pulled their shutters down over glass storefronts. And in the semidetached brick houses on and around Overbury Street, where generations of the same families have lived alongside newer arrivals, locals pulled their curtains as evening approached.

What they feared was another night of the anti-immigrant violence that had rocked the country in the week since a deadly stabbing attack nearby in Southport that was falsely rumored as being carried out by a migrant.

What they got, instead, was a night of near celebration by people opposed to the racism and anti-immigrant sentiments that drove the week of rioting in cities and towns across Britain.

People in Liverpool had been especially unnerved since an online list of what were said to be new far-right targets for protests included a local charity that works with asylum seekers. Neighbors texted neighbors to head to the streets to counter any racist rioters. Local unions and leaders of neighborhood mosques also put out the word, as did a nationwide collective called “Stand Up to Racism.”

So as helicopters circled overhead on Wednesday night, and police officers on horseback patrolled the streets, young women handed out snacks and water bottles in front of the boarded-up windows of the targeted charity. Another group set up a makeshift first aid area across the street in case of emergency, given the unbridled violence of the past riots. And a white-haired man with a long beard propped a megaphone next to a speaker on his metal walker and played peace songs.

People carried signs reading “Not in our city,” and “Will trade racists for refugees.”

“They all had one thing in mind; it was to not let this hate get a foothold,” said Ewan Roberts, who manages Asylum Link Merseyside, the charity that was on the target list.

And then, the far right was a no-show.

In some ways, the gathering of hundreds of antiracism demonstrators was not unexpected in Liverpool, a multicultural city with proud working-class roots.

But similar protests were staged in cities across England on Wednesday night as thousands of people angered by the earlier violence decided to make their voices heard. That violence had included rioters trying to set fire to a hotel in the city of Rotherham while asylum seekers and other guests were inside. Some rioters pummeled police officers so hard they had to go to the hospital. A fire was set in a community library on the northern outskirts of Liverpool over the weekend.

Some of the Liverpool residents who turned out in force Wednesday were especially angry that what set off the spasm of violence was a lie about the deadly knife attack that was promoted again and again online.

The teenager accused of killing three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class was not — as online agitators claimed — a migrant straight off one of the small boats that bring impoverished people across the English Channel to Britain’s shores. The suspect was born in Wales, to parents who the BBC says came from Rwanda, and the police have not disclosed a motive.

“They are using a tragedy to promote this hate,” said Jasmine Galanakis, 27, who put her young daughter to bed in their home up the street and then joined the crowd on Wednesday evening. “So many people in this community come from different backgrounds, and it’s ignorance driving this. It’s just an excuse for hate, and we won’t stand for it.”

Liverpool, in England’s north, has long been a stronghold of the Labour Party and has a proud working-class tradition. The city’s dock workers have a history of organized action, and particularly after World War II, diversity flourished, making the city among the country’s most multicultural.

The threats in this sliver of Liverpool had been made against Asylum Link Merseyside, the charity that Mr. Roberts manages. He and the staff decided to shut its doors temporarily at the start of the week and bring in carpenters to board up the windows and doors to minimize damage if the building was attacked.

As he watched people gather peacefully in the streets, he said he was moved by the diversity of those who came out to express their support for asylum seekers.

It was especially affirming after years of railing by the former Conservative government against the number of asylum seekers — and its attempt to deport them to Rwanda despite a Supreme Court ruling that the policy was illegal.

Nazehar Benamar, 42, and her cousin Wafa Hizam, 22, who grew up in Liverpool, both said they felt it was important to be there. But they also said they were angry about the violence that erupted in the city center a few days earlier.

“Liverpool is a very multicultural city, but as a person of color, you are always aware of racism and prejudice,” said Ms. Benamar, who is Muslim and wears a hijab. She recalled how as the only nonwhite child in her class, she had been subjected to racial slurs. She said she was saddened that racism and Islamophobia were still so potent so many years later.

“People are being terrorized by fear about this violence,” she said. “Today especially, I could feel it.”

Still, on Wednesday night she was reassured to see members of her local mosque standing alongside university students and retirees. The people of Liverpool had come together to show “what we are made of here,” she said.

What united many of them was the feeling that working-class people are in life’s struggles together. As the evening light turned golden and night slowly set in, one young woman raised a sign that read, “The Enemy of the Working Class Travels By Private Jet Not Migrant Dinghy,” to applause from many standing nearby.

Matty Delaney, 33, who lives just outside Liverpool, said he had heard on Instagram about the demonstration against racism and thought it was important to deliver a clear message to those who had rioted, particularly as a young, white, working-class man.

“We’ve got more in common with an Indian nurse, with a Black bricklayer than we do with the Elon Musks, the Nigel Farages, the Tommy Robinsons, of the world — all these people who are stoking violence,” Mr. Delaney said.

Mr. Musk, the billionaire owner of the social media platform X — where disinformation about the initial attack had been allowed to swirl — threw himself into the fray this week by saying, “Civil war is inevitable” and accusing the prime minister, Keir Starmer, of not protecting “all communities” in Britain.

Mr. Farage, the leader of the populist anti-immigration Reform U.K. party, initially stoked conspiracy theories that drove the riots, before coming out against the violence. And Mr. Robinson, an anti-Islam agitator who founded the English Defense League — originally a street movement, which now spreads Islamophobic and xenophobic views mostly online — was among the far-right figures who pushed for their supporters to take to the streets after the stabbing attack.

By Thursday morning, the rhythm of daily life had returned to Overbury Street. At St. Anne’s Church, next door to the charity for asylum seekers, a local family gathered for a funeral. Discarded placards from the night before lay on the ground nearby.

The staff of the charity was also regrouping, and Mr. Roberts said they were trying to figure out when to reopen. While he said he felt an overwhelming sense of relief that the center had not faced violence, it was difficult to know what would come next.

Speaking of the rioters, he said, “They are trying to damage trust between the community and new arrivals, more than the buildings or infrastructure.” But, he added, “What last night told me was we are a greater value in the community, more than we actually understood, and it was wonderful to see that.”

For now, his staff planned to send a letter of thanks to the community. But they also planned to reinforce the wooden boards that protect the center’s windows, just in case.

The authorities in Vienna have arrested a third teenager in connection with a foiled terrorist attack on a Taylor Swift concert in the city this week.

They said that they believe that the man, an 18-year-old Iraqi citizen living in Austria who is connected to the main suspect, was not part of the plan but had been in touch with the plotters and had recently sworn allegiance to the Islamic State.

Ms. Swift was scheduled to stage three concerts in Vienna from Thursday through Saturday, but all three performances were canceled after the authorities arrested two teenagers over a plan to attack the sold-out, 50,000-seat stadium. Chancellor Karl Nehammer of Austria said the plot had been designed to leave a “trail of blood.”

Since arresting two other teenagers on Wednesday, the authorities have been racing to investigate the planned attack, although after what the police said was a full confession by the main suspect, they said there was no longer an imminent danger.

The police are looking into a network of people around the main suspect, a 19-year-old Austrian citizen of North Macedonian descent who they said had radicalized himself online and sworn allegiance to the Islamic State.

Citing privacy rules, the authorities have declined to name the suspects publicly, but they said that both teenagers arrested on Wednesday were born in Austria and held Austrian citizenship.

On Friday, the interior minister, Gerhard Karner, announced that he was starting the process of revoking the Iraqi man’s residency permit, under a special provision designed to deal with dangerous refugees or immigrants, because of his recent pledge of allegience to the Islamic State.

The police have said that while he was not part of the plot, the man was in the same “social environment” as the main suspect and that he had contact with him.

During a raid on the main suspect’s house on Wednesday, the police said, officers found chemicals used to make bombs, as well as explosives, timers, machetes, knives and a functioning police siren, which investigators believe he planned to use to gain access to or move around the area around the stadium.

The police are currently in the process of forensically analyzing electronics and other items found in the search of the main suspect’s house.

The concert cancellations affected about 200,000 Taylor Swift fans, some of whom had traveled to Europe from other continents to see her perform as part of her Eras Tour. Ms. Swift has not commented publicly on the cancellations.

A 15-year-old boy who was held for questioning on Wednesday about the plot has been released and is being treated as a witness, the police said. They said that they had determined he was not part of the plot but that he knew many of its details and had helped corroborate some key elements of the main suspect’s confession.

Just as she was boarding her flight at Boston Logan International Airport headed for a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna, Mary DePetris excitedly checked the online fan group, Swiftie Nation.

Austrian authorities had discovered a terrorist plot targeting Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in the city, she read. On Wednesday, just before takeoff, organizers canceled all three shows. Ms. DePetris, 47, stepped onto the plane and broke the news to some of her fellow passengers.

“Half the plane was crying,” Ms. DePetris said. “It’s not just about the shows, it’s the community coming together and feeling safe at her concerts, and Swifties letting their guard down. And this just shifted all of that,” she said. “How can we do that now that we feel we are targeted?”

As the estimated 200,000 people who had been expected to worship at Ms. Swift’s proscenium in Vienna grappled with crushing disappointment, wasted money and a measure of fear at narrowly avoiding danger, a sea of fans flooded the baroque city looking for ways to shake it off.

They traded Eras merchandise in the shadow of the vacant stadium, or dissolved into tears when they caught the strains of Ms. Swift’s stanzas drifting from the doorways of sympathetic gift shops or churches. Some hung handmade friendship bracelets — a treasured Swiftie talisman inspired by a song lyric — on a tree on Corneliusgasse, a central Vienna thoroughfare whose name echoes the title of Ms. Swift’s song “Cornelia Street.” There, hundreds hugged, cried and commiserated in the middle of the road.

Tempering the dejection for many was a feeling that a missed concert was far from the worst outcome possible. On Thursday, Austrian authorities released information on the two teenagers they say planned to attack, outlining a picture of a terrorist assault designed to kill as many people as possible with machetes and explosives, plotted by the pair who had become radicalized by Islamic extremism on the internet.

One had recently started a job for a events service provider that was working at the Ernst Happel Stadium, where Ms. Swift was scheduled to play, according to Franz Ruf, a senior Austrian security official. The suspect, who the authorities did not name but said was 17 years old, was arrested there on Wednesday.

“I feel grateful to be alive,” said Charlotte Keller, 34, a human resources manager from Rome outside the stadium on Thursday.

Ewald Tatar, a manager at Barracuda Music, which organized the Austrian leg of the Eras Tour, said in a news conference that the decision to cancel the concerts was made together with Ms. Swift’s management, based on the information received from authorities.

“Although it was not an everyday decision, it was definitely the right one,” Mr. Tatar said, citing the fact that one of the suspects was an arena employee as a deciding factor. According to Barracuda’s website, all tickets would be automatically refunded within the next two weeks.

In an essay for Elle magazine from 2019, Ms. Swift said her “biggest fear” was the potential for an attack on one of her concerts. “After the Manchester Arena bombing and the Vegas concert shooting, I was completely terrified to go on tour,” she wrote, referring to terrorist attacks at concerts in those cities in 2017 that killed a total of 82 people and wounded hundreds of others.

Ms. Swift wrote at the time that she worried about keeping “3 million fans safe over seven months,” during her Reputation Tour. Her Eras tour will be three times as long, with more than 150 shows over two years that one company estimated could generate $4.6 billion in North America alone.

Ms. Swift has not yet commented publicly on the situation.

Inside the 16th-century Lutheran City Church in Vienna on Thursday, a group of teenagers from the Czech Republic sat in a pew, inconsolable. A sign outside said, “Dear Swifties, we sympathize,” and Ms. Swift’s song “August” blasted through the sanctuary: “I can see us lost in the memory,” she sang. “August slipped away into a moment in time …”

The girls sang, too. And they sobbed.

“We came here carefree,” said one, Katherine Penkavova, 18. “And now we face danger,” she added. The girls leaned their heads down on the back of the pew. “At least we can sing our feelings here,” Ms. Penkavova said.

The city tried its best to dry the floods of tears.

Listings of palliative events popped up almost immediately. Vienna’s Albertina museum and municipal pools offered Swifties free entry, while Austria’s national railway offered refunds on unused train tickets. A dance party called “Shake It Off” invited fans to come dressed in their sparkly concert best. A restaurant offered free flutes of pink sparkling wine for every crushed concertgoer.

For some the concerts had meant more than a silly, good time, including Eliya Briand, 22, and her sister Naomi, 24, who arrived in Vienna on Thursday from Netanya, just north of Tel Aviv, seeking a reprieve from Israel’s war in Gaza. Now thousands of miles from home, the sisters felt they were facing the same fear.

“It has been a really, really difficult year, and this concert was sort of an escape from the reality at home,” Eliya said.

Her sister Naomi said they had come “from war, from terror — and now we meet it again.” She added, “For this concert to be canceled because of that specific reason, it hurts a lot more.”

Some, like Teng Yilin, 22, were making the most of the situation — while blinking back the occasional tear. Ms. Yilin flew in for a single day from Shanghai to live her dream of seeing Ms. Swift live. She arrived before dawn on Thursday and was scheduled to leave around midnight. She got the news about the cancellation on the plane, but didn’t believe it until she saw people crying when she landed.

Wandering Vienna lost in grief before dawn, Ms. Yilin and her boyfriend were taken in by a group of Swifties, some of whom had come from as far away as South Africa. They bought her beers, she said, and the bar owner played Taylor Swift songs.

“At the beginning, it was sad, but after a few hours we were laughing,” Ms. Yilin said. “I’m heartbroken,” she added. “But I think it was still a good night.”

It was still too early to assess the economic fallout from the canceled concerts. The Austrian Hotel Association offered its members legal guidelines to manage an expected influx of cancellations, but Oliver Schenk, a spokesman for the organization, said that he had received conflicting reports.

“It is not yet possible to say how high the financial loss is for the companies,” he said.

Outside the stadium on Thursday, there was no coveted Eras merchandise for sale. Vendors began to pack up tubs of uneaten wurst and untapped kegs of Austrian lager.

Stefan Schneider, 48, the owner of Arena Cocktail Catering, said he had spent 10,000 euros, about $11,000, on hotel rooms for 60 staff members he brought in from Germany for the three-day event, plus another 10,000 euros in cocktail ingredients. The event would have accounted for 30 percent of his yearly income, if all had gone well, he said. He added that he had no insurance.

“It’s a disaster,” Mr. Schneider said, but looming larger than that was his fear that other concerts could be under threat. “It’s a problem. You have thoughts, what about the next event? What about disaster after disaster?”

Next week, the singer’s global tour is scheduled to begin a run of five sold-out shows at Wembley Stadium, a 90,000-seat arena in London. A spokesman for London’s Metropolitan Police said in a statement that there was “nothing to indicate that the matters being investigated by the Austrian authorities will have an impact on upcoming events here in London.”

With all the tickets for the London gigs snapped up and further tour dates fixed through December, it was unlikely that the disappointed Swifties in Vienna would get to see the singer soon.

And without a concert to prep for, they flooded the city.

The Spanish Riding School tours appeared sold out on Thursday, and braceleted people queued for tickets to Schönbrunn Palace. Mozart and Taylor Swift songs competed for earspace across its winding streets. Alex Januschke, a waiter at Cafe Tirolerhof, said he had spent the afternoon managing tables of disconsolate fans.

“My advice?” he said. “See the city!”

Melissa Eddy contributed reporting from Berlin, Christopher F. Schuetze from Leipzig, Germany, and Alex Marshall from London.

When Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, landed in Paris this week, the Summer Olympics were naturally on the schedule. He watched the U.S. men’s basketball team rally against Serbia, attended track and field events and is to lead the American presidential delegation at the closing ceremony on Sunday.

But Mr. Emhoff, the first Jewish spouse of an American vice president or president, also used his trip to focus on an issue that is far more sobering and also deeply personal: a surge of antisemitism in the United States and around the world since the war between Israel and Hamas erupted in October.

“It is a poison coursing through the veins of democracy and democratic ideals,” Mr. Emhoff said on Friday at a commemoration of a deadly 1982 attack on a storied Jewish deli in Paris. Six people were killed in that attack, including two Americans, and 22 were wounded.

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The Belarusian-born sprinter Kristina Timanovskaya set off the biggest political crisis of the Tokyo Games after her delegation tried to forcibly send her home for publicly complaining that the head coach had signed her up for the wrong Olympic event.

Three years later, she has left behind Belarus and its sporting community — whose leadership mirrors the wider repression in the country — and finally been able to compete in the Olympic events she had been training for over her whole career, the 100- and 200-meter dashes, for her new home, Poland.

“As soon as I arrived in Poland, I had no other goal but competing in the Paris Olympics,” she said in an interview in the Olympic Village. “It was so important for me to go and run my own distance.”

Ms. Timanovskaya, whose name is also transliterated as Krystsina Tsimanouskaya, is one of the few lucky ones. Only one other Belarusian athlete, the high jumper Maryia Zhodzik, was able to change her citizenship to compete for Poland.

Many others who dared to speak out against the leader of Belarus’s autocratic government can only watch on the sidelines while Belarusian athletes who stayed quiet or showed loyalty to the president compete in Paris.

For months in 2020, citizens of Belarus, a country of 9.2 million people, protested by the thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands. They were contesting the validity of election results that showed a victory by the president, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, who took control in 1994 and has led with an increasingly authoritarian bent since. After Mr. Lukashenko arrested or exiled opposition leaders, prominent athletes banded together to oppose his rule, continuing to protest along with ordinary citizens.

Ms. Timanovskaya attended protests and even posted about them on Instagram. When someone from a sporting federation called her threatening to remove her from the Olympic delegation, she said she was ready to have her name withdrawn from the participant list. But then the person mentioned her parents and her brother, who was in college at the time, suggesting that they might run into trouble at work and school. She deleted the post.

“They found everyone’s pressure points,” Ms. Timanovskaya said.

More than 35,000 people were detained. Dozens of athletes, including some who had won multiple Olympic medals for Belarus, were forced into exile. Out of favor with the government, they have found themselves unable to compete in the Olympic Games.

Instead, Belarus is represented in Paris by 17 athletes who are participating under a designation of “neutral.” Russian athletes have the same arrangement; both Russia and Belarus, a close ally, are banned from the Olympics because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“The moral of this story is that you must keep silent, you have to support the dictatorship, then you can go to the Olympics,” said Andrei Gnyot, 42, a co-founder of SOS BY, a group of opposition-minded athletes forged during the protests. “If you oppose the dictatorship, you lose everything and can’t even count on international support because they don’t want to hear you and don’t want to talk to you.”

In 2016, the Belarus Olympic Committee proudly shared the news that Stepan Popov had become the first sambo wrestler to win an award from the international organization Fair Play, for carrying his injured opponent off the mat.

Today, he lives in exile in Poland, where, without a team to compete for, he makes a living as a taxi driver.

“Today, athletes in Belarus are either propagandists or extremists,” Mr. Popov said in a video recently shared to social networks.

Dozens of organizations and hundreds of individuals in Belarus, including Olympic athletes, have been designated “extremists” for their opposition to Mr. Lukashenko. Liking or subscribing to the athletes’ pages on social networks can carry a criminal penalty. There are 1,388 political prisoners in the country, according to the human rights watchdog Viasna. The organization’s founder shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, but it is considered an “extremist group” in Belarus.

Sports are so important in Belarus that Mr. Lukashenko headed its Olympic committee from 1997 until February 2021, when his son Viktor, now 48, took the reins.

“Sport is our ideology,” the elder Mr. Lukashenko is quoted as saying on his official website. “Raising the national flag, singing the national anthem in honor of our athletes enhance Belarus’s image internationally but most importantly make millions of Belarusians feel proud for the motherland.”

Though Belarus’s athletes in Paris are classified as neutral, competing without the presence of their flag, national anthem or state officials, their national Olympic committee is still behind all of the decisions about who participates.

Among the members of the Belarusian Olympic delegation is Ivan Litvinovich, 23, a trampoline gymnast who won a gold medal in Paris, as he did at the Tokyo Games.

The exiled athletes resent him because in 2022 he filmed a video campaigning for a referendum that would help Mr. Lukashenko consolidate even more power and pave the way for nuclear weapons to be stored in Belarus again.

The advertisement implied his support for the desired outcome: constitutional amendments helping Mr. Lukashenko to remain in power until 2035.

The successful vote was held just days after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia invaded Ukraine, with Mr. Lukashenko aiding the effort by allowing him to use Belarus as a staging ground.

As a result, Belarus was initially banned from the Paris Olympics because of the war, just as Russia was. But the International Olympic Committee decided last year that athletes from both countries could participate as “neutral” if they met the qualification criteria, including that they were not members or active supporters of the military.

“The result is those athletes who sat in Belarus either quietly kept silent or even supported the regime, they’re going to the Olympics right now,” said Aliaksandra Herasimenia, a three-time Olympic medalist in swimming and a former 100-meter freestyle world champion who was a founder of the Belarusian Sport Solidarity Foundation. “And those athletes who spoke out against the regime, who dared to go out, don’t have the opportunity to do so. Where is the justice? Is this the fairness that everyone claims it to be?”

Starting in 2020, Ms. Herasimenia, Mr. Gnyot and many others started lobbying the I.O.C. and Western sports governance bodies to find a way to allow qualified Belarusians who risked their futures to stand for many of the same values enshrined in the Olympic Charter to compete.

In an email to The New York Times, the I.O.C. did not answer whether it had received messages from advocates of the spurned athletes and reiterated its eligibility policies.

“We wrote and tried collectively,” Ms. Herasimenia said. “They don’t even answer, they just don’t react at all,” she said of the I.O.C. “If they answer, it is very dry, in short, formulaic replies.”

She said she was happy for the two athletes who received Polish passports.

“Nowadays, there are many Belarusians, well-known artists and athletes, who no one here needs,” she said. “They’re just trying to get a job at a store, a cafe or something else. And their talent is buried in the ground.”

Ms. Herasimenia, 39, now teaches swimming classes to children as well as the occasional master class. She was sentenced in absentia to 12 years in prison by a Belarusian court, along with her fellow B.S.S.F. founder, Aleksandr Apeikin.

Mr. Popov, the sambo wrestler, left the country and was sentenced to 10 days in jail last October along with his parents and brother, who had stayed behind in Belarus. The punishment was because they had been following social media pages deemed “extremist” by the government. Because they couldn’t show up for work, they were fired from their jobs as sambo coaches at a school.

Three months ago, Ms. Timanovksaya learned that a criminal case had been opened against her, and her parents’ house was searched. She has not been able to see them since seeking asylum in Poland.

And Mr. Gnyot is under house arrest in Serbia. He was detained in October on an Interpol warrant after he came to film an advertisement for the Tele2 telecommunications company. A Serbian court ruled that he could be extradited to Belarus, which he said would be a “death sentence” because of the number of activists who have died or disappeared in jail. (Belarus is the only country in Europe where the death penalty is still legal, and last month a court sentenced a German citizen, Rico Krieger, to death, though he ended up being part of a multinational prisoner swap this month.)

Mr. Gnyot, a journalist by profession, spent months in detention before being released to house arrest pending an appeal.

Ms. Timanovskaya said she felt very lucky to be able to continue competing.

“So many athletes want to keep doing sports, they want to compete on the international stage and they simply don’t have this opportunity,” she said. “No one is particularly interested in this, and there is no one who can help them.”

Above the small city of Vinhedo, Brazil, on Friday, a passenger plane was falling from the sky. Residents began filming.

Those videos show the horrifying moment when an 89-foot-long plane, carrying 61 people and slowly spinning in circles, plummeted to earth. A moment after the plane disappears from view near a gated community, an enormous black plume of smoke rises from the spot.

One video then shows a house on fire, a swimming pool full of debris and a group of men peering over a scene of carnage in a yard: a shredded fuselage, twisted metal and, several yards in front of the cockpit, a body.

VoePass Flight 2283 crashed Friday toward the end of a scheduled two-hour flight from Cascavel, Brazil, to São Paulo. VoePass, a small Brazilian airline, said all 57 passengers and four crew members died in the accident.

The airline and Brazilian officials said they did not know why the plane had crashed.

The plane, an ATR 72, had all systems operating correctly when it took off, the airline said. The pilots did not signal any emergency, officials said. The aircraft, a twin-engine turboprop plane, was built in 2010 and was in compliance with Brazilian regulations, they added.

The plane crashed in a grassy area in a residential community, but it did not land on any residences, and no one on the ground was injured, officials said.

“It fell next to a house, on a lot,” Dario Pacheco, Vinhedo’s mayor, told the Brazilian news channel Globo. “Just next to it, the resident said he woke up to a noise and left running, and that all the people around also left, fearing an explosion.”

Globo, Brazil’s main television network, interrupted Olympics coverage to broadcast aerial images that showed firefighters spraying a smoking gash in the ground, next to the mangled remains of a plane. Two buildings, which appeared to be residences, were only feet away.

In the final minute of the flight, the plane’s transponder reported that it was falling between 8,000 and 24,000 feet per minute, according to FlightRadar24, a provider of flight data. The plane had been flying at 17,000 feet just before it dropped from the sky, the company said.

VoePass used the same plane to fly from São Paulo to Cascavel earlier on Friday, according to FlightRadar24 data.

FlightRadar24 said that in the area where the plane lost control, there was an active warning for severe icing. The formation of ice on a plane during flight can be a dangerous scenario, making an aircraft heavier and reducing its lift. Most aircraft have anti-icing systems designed to prevent or reduce the formation of ice.

VoePass, formerly known as Passaredo, is a small Brazilian airline that operates a fleet of 15 ATR aircraft to serve midsize cities around Brazil. It transported about 500,000 passengers last year, representing just less than 0.5 percent of the Brazilian market.

ATR is a joint venture of two European aerospace manufacturers, Airbus and Leonardo. There are more than 800 ATR aircraft flying around the world, accounting for just under 3 percent of the active global fleet of passenger planes, according to Cirium, an aviation data company. The aircraft are most popular in Asia and Europe, though Brazil is a leading operator of ATR planes.

ATR said in a statement that it would cooperate with investigators looking into the accident.

Icy conditions have contributed to crashes of other turboprop planes in the past, including older generations of ATR 72 aircraft.

In 1994, an ATR 72 operated by American Eagle crashed in Indiana, killing all 68 people on board. A federal investigation faulted the company for not disclosing enough about the plane’s vulnerability to ice, leading ATR to add more ice-removing equipment to the aircraft.

But aviation safety experts regularly warn against drawing conclusions about such episodes before investigations have concluded. Airplane crashes are complex and almost always the result of multiple points of failure. And early suspicions about the causes of crashes often prove incorrect.

“The investigation is very premature,” Marcelo Moreno, Brazil’s chief plane crash investigator, told reporters, batting away questions about icing. “Anything we might speculate at this moment, which may eventually be confirmed in the future, is still very premature.”

Lito Sousa, a Brazilian aviation expert, said that it’s too soon to draw conclusions, but icing may have been a factor. “There is no accident or an air crash that is caused by a sole factor,” he said. “We need a chain of events for something bad to happen. So in that case, ice may have played a role.” He added that while ATR aircraft had been prone to icing problems in the past, the manufacturer has worked to combat the problem.

Many residents of Vinhedo, a city of 80,000 people an hour’s drive from São Paulo, said they heard the loud rumbling of the plane as it fell from the sky.

João Matos, 45, said he was arriving home, close to the crash site, when he heard the plane falling. “I saw it coming down, rotating like a screw,” he said. “It was about 100 meters away, and that’s when it fell near my neighbor’s house, on its belly and exploded.” He said he grabbed his son and ran.

Helen Erlemann, a 19-year-old student who lives close to the crash site, said she was in her bedroom when she heard a loud crash. “I looked out the other window,” she said. “And I saw a ton of smoke rising.”

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, at an event on Friday, asked for a minute of silence for the victims. “We just have to mourn and care for the families, care for the people who are now going to be very nervous,” he told reporters later. “Lots of sadness in the air.”

In Cascavel, where the plane took off, there were a few people coping with shock and relief. Adriano Assis told Globo he had a ticket for Flight 2283 but the gate agent would not let him board because he arrived at the gate too late.

“I fought. I put a little pressure on her. I said, ‘Miss, put me on this plane. I have to go. I have to go,’” he said, still at the airport. When he later learned that plane had crashed, “I thanked God,” he said. “I’m shaking.”

Victor Moriyama contributed reporting from Vinhedo, Brazil, and Ana Ionova contributed from Rio de Janeiro.