When Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced plans to step down on Wednesday, he vowed that his departure would clear the way for a new leader who could bring change to Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

The party has managed to keep a stranglehold on power despite deep public dissatisfaction over political scandals and economic stagnation — and despite repeatedly steering away from candidates popular with the public.

Here are five politicians likely to figure in the party’s deliberations over whom to promote to prime minister next month.

Taro Kono

Mr. Kono, 61, is a popular and somewhat unconventional figure who could significantly shake up Japan’s governing party.

Mr. Kono, a graduate of Georgetown University, is Japan’s digital minister. He came within a hair’s breadth of becoming prime minister in 2021, narrowly losing a runoff vote to Mr. Kishida despite a surge of public support for his more progressive stance on issues like legalizing same-sex marriage.

However, Mr. Kono’s outspoken nature, left-leaning views and popularity on social media have not endeared him to the party’s conservative elders.

As digital minister, Mr. Kono has gone to war against Japan’s reliance on outdated technologies like fax machines and floppy disks.

While Mr. Kono has not formally indicated he would run in this year’s election, for months he has told government officials that he was strongly considering it.

Shigeru Ishiba

Mr. Ishiba, 67, is the only candidate who has officially declared his intention to run in the upcoming L.D.P. election. Before Mr. Kishida’s decision to step aside, several polls showed Mr. Ishiba as the public’s favorite to become prime minister.

Through much of his career, Mr. Ishiba has been criticized by fellow lawmakers for his abrasive, populist style. Still, he is popular, known for what some describe as a “nerdy” enthusiasm for manga, trains and pop songs from the 1970s.

In recent months, Mr. Ishiba has argued for policies that would help rein in the inflation squeezing Japanese households and tackle widening income disparities in Japan that he asserts are the foundation of the country’s declining birthrate.

In a book published this month, Mr. Ishiba said that Japan should revise the pacifist clause of its Constitution to permit it to retain military forces.

Mr. Ishiba has held several senior positions, including those of defense minister, agriculture minister, and L.D.P. secretary general. He ran for the leadership four times in the past, narrowly losing to Shinzo Abe and Yoshihide Suga in 2012 and 2020.

Toshimitsu Motegi

Mr. Motegi, 68, is the secretary of the Liberal Democratic Party, and he served as economy minister from 2012 to 2014 and foreign affairs minister from 2019 to 2021. He was first elected to Japan’s House of Representatives in 1993 after working for the consulting firm McKinsey. He is a graduate of the University of Tokyo and Harvard’s school of public policy.

Known for his short-tempered, commanding personality, Mr. Motegi has been nicknamed “Moteking.” Following tough negotiations with the United States on a new trade pact in 2019, local news media also began referring to him as “Japan’s Trump whisperer.”

Like other prominent candidates, Mr. Motegi has called on the Bank of Japan to raise interest rates to stabilize the yen. He also champions deregulation, including a complete lifting of Japan’s longstanding ban on ride-sharing services, and the use of government subsidies to support economic growth and lift incomes.

Sanae Takaichi

Ms. Takaichi, 63, is Japan’s economic security minister, and has served as the minister of internal affairs and communications. She came in third in the party’s runoff in 2021, and if elected this time, she would be the party’s first female leader.

She has positioned herself as a right-wing champion, supporting policies like requiring married couples to share a surname.

Ms. Takaichi argues that Japanese atrocities during World War II have been overstated, and she regularly visits Yasukuni Shrine, a memorial in Tokyo honoring Japan’s war dead that is a flashpoint for historical sensitivities in China and South Korea. She has criticized past L.D.P. prime ministers as being indecisive leaders.

Shinjiro Koizumi

Mr. Koizumi, 43, would represent another potential candidate of change if the party chooses him.

He is the son of a former prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, and holds a master’s degree in political science from Columbia University. Mr. Koizumi was one of the youngest lawmakers to join Japan’s cabinet when he was appointed environment minister by late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2019.

During his stint as environment minister, Mr. Koizumi gained global recognition for promoting renewable energy and criticizing Japan’s continued use of fossil fuels. At a United Nations summit in 2019, Mr. Koizumi said that taking on big issues like climate change needed to be “fun,” “cool,” and “sexy, too.”

While Mr. Koizumi has not indicated he plans to enter the running for leadership, he is seen as a favored candidate of former Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga. This week, Mr. Koizumi told reporters that the upcoming party election would be a chance to change the Liberal Democratic Party and restore the public’s trust.

Families fleeing invading Ukrainian troops sought shelter from strangers. Russian parents feared that their children might be sent into battle for the first time.

And in a televised crisis meeting on Monday, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia flipped through a white legal pad, reading aloud from handwritten notes, suggesting that his aides did not have the time to type up a speech for him as they usually do.

Ukraine’s surprise incursion into a sliver of Russia’s Kursk region last week has not shifted the overall course of the war, but it has already struck a blow well beyond the few hundred square miles of Russia that Ukraine now controls: It has thrust a Russian government and society that had largely adapted to war into a new phase of improvisation and uncertainty.

Mr. Putin has said nothing about the incursion since meeting with security and regional officials, a tense gathering in which the president at one point berated the Kursk governor for revealing the depth and breadth of Ukraine’s advance into Russia. Near the border, where, the authorities say, more than 130,000 people have fled or been evacuated, regional officials appeared unprepared for the crisis — prompting grass-roots aid initiatives to jump in.

To opposition-minded politicians, including some of the few remaining inside Russia, Ukraine’s incursion has offered a rare chance to puncture the Kremlin’s narrative that Russia is steadily heading toward victory — even if it was far from certain that Russians would blame Mr. Putin for their ills. One opposition figure, Lev Shlosberg, in the western city of Pskov, compared the state of Russian society to magma gathering beneath a volcano in which it was unclear when or how it would burst to the surface.

“Current events are, of course, intensifying the crisis,” Mr. Shlosberg said in a phone interview. “But we don’t know where and how this energy of dissatisfaction will go.”

In the city of Kursk, about 50 miles from the border where Ukraine invaded, the politician Yekaterina S. Duntsova described meeting people at a shelter who were so disoriented by having to flee that “they hope that this is all some kind of dream.”

Ms. Duntsova, in a phone interview, said one woman told her she had been at the shelter in a university dormitory since “the first day of the war.” It turned out she was referring to the start of Ukraine’s incursion last week.

“So what was happening before then?” Ms. Duntsova recalled replying. “Before then,” the woman told her, “we were living our lives.”

Ms. Duntsova, a journalist, tried to run against Mr. Putin in Russia’s presidential elections this year on an antiwar platform, but was barred from the ballot. Now, she is spearheading a volunteer effort to aid displaced Kursk residents while warning that the embarrassment of Ukraine’s incursion cannot be expected to lead to political change in Russia because few people would dare to speak out.

“Silence is salvation,” she said, shortly after an air raid siren wailed in the background. “We live according to Orwell.”

To Russians opposed to the war, helping people who are fleeing the fighting has become one way to feel as if they are taking action without risking arrest. Some posted on the social messaging app Telegram offering their homes to the displaced. In the city of Oryol, about 80 miles north of Kursk, a tailor named Anastasia, 36, said she had helped find housing for two families.

“When you live in a nightmare, it’s really important to see that there are also people around you who are helping,” said Anastasia, who asked that her last name be withheld for her safety. “It helps you not to go crazy.”

Still, there were signs of public jitters stemming from uncertainty over the involvement of young conscripts in the fighting. Since the start of the war, Mr. Putin has pledged that conscripts — Russian men as young as 18 are required to serve in the military for a year — would not be sent into the Ukraine war zone. But battles on Russian territory could be a different matter, and an exiled Russian investigative news outlet, Important Stories, reported on Wednesday that it had identified 22 conscripted soldiers who had gone missing in Kursk.

Conscripts in Kursk who had retreated from the border after Ukraine’s attack were now being “sent to the defense of Kursk again,” said Grigory Sverdlin, the head of an organization that helps Russians seeking to avoid military service. He said his group, Idite Lesom (Get Lost), had received more than 20 appeals for help from conscripts or their relatives.

The use of conscripts is especially sensitive for Mr. Putin because their families could form a potent antiwar force, as they did during the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Russia’s war in Chechnya in the 1990s. In Ukraine, by contrast, Russia’s force has mainly been made up of well-paid contract soldiers whose families receive large payments if the men die, as well as prisoners who have been promised freedom if they survive.

Beyond the potential involvement of conscripts, analysts predicted that the effort to drive Ukrainian troops out of Kursk could eventually hinder Russia’s offensive in eastern Ukraine. Ruslan Pukhov, the director of the security research group CAST based in Moscow, said the need to shift some of Russia’s invasion force to Kursk could, in turn, threaten Russia’s strategy of a slow-moving advance across the front line in Ukraine.

“The first days of the Ukrainian operation in the Kursk region should be assessed as very successful, although its ultimate goals remain unclear,” Mr. Pukhov said. “In moral terms, the Russian Federation has taken a powerful blow.”

Russia retains an advantage in the war in terms of personnel and domestic resources, but Ukraine’s incursion underlined Kyiv’s ability to use its nimble forces and Western weaponry to steal some of Russia’s initiative. In the televised meeting on Monday, Mr. Putin blamed the West for “fighting us with the hands of the Ukrainians,” repeating his frequent depiction of the war, which he started with a full-fledged invasion, as a proxy campaign against Russia by the West.

State television has continued to play down the crisis, treating it as a natural disaster or a terrorist attack. Russian forces are “driving the enemy out of our land,” the anchor on the prime-time newscast on Channel One intoned on Tuesday, adding that “the main task now is to help civilian victims.”

But on Telegram, popular pro-war bloggers have criticized Russian officials for hiding the scale of the problem. One noted dryly that despite the Russian Defense Ministry’s regular reports claiming hundreds of “destroyed” Ukrainian soldiers, “the enemy reported to be killed is, nevertheless, continuing to capture our territories.”

Amid the mixed messages from war supporters on television and online, analysts predicted that members of the Russian public could respond either by rallying around the flag over the shock of the incursion or by criticizing the state for failing to protect them.

Aleksei Minyailo, an opposition activist based in Moscow who studies Russian public opinion, said that previous Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s border regions had done more to harden pro-war opinions. But this time, he added, the sense of confusion in the wake of the Kursk incursion could cut into the Kremlin’s message that “everything is going well; we are winning.”

“This screw-up very much breaks this propaganda narrative,” said Mr. Minyailo, the co-founder of a research project, Chronicles, which has been polling Russians in recent months.

Mr. Putin has been mum on how he plans to respond, other than declaring in his meeting on Monday that re-establishing control of the Kursk region was a priority. Some in Russia said they expected Mr. Putin to strike back in some unexpected form of his own, further escalating the violence of the war.

“A red line that seemed to be untouchable has been erased,” Mr. Shlosberg, the opposition politician, said, referring to Ukraine’s foray into Russian territory. “Now Putin has a chance, a reason, to think about what line he should cross.”

Anatoly Kurmanaev, Milana Mazaeva and Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.

The parade of cars rolled through Kabul from morning until night, clogging the streets in end-to-end traffic. Crowds of Taliban and their supporters lined the routes, chanting “God is great!” and “Long live the mujahedeen!” One truck dragged an American flag, a red X drawn across its stars and stripes.

Outside the old U.S. embassy, young children — maybe 6 or 7 years old — wearing military fatigues stood on the top of a gray Toyota pickup, clutching small white Taliban flags. A dozen others crammed into the back of the truck, white flags draped over their shoulders. Yet more flags were stapled onto wooden poles, waving in the air.

“Our way is jihad!” a man shouted through a loudspeaker from the passenger seat. The children responded: “Long live jihad!”

With August in Afghanistan come weeks of celebrations marking the anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal — the last American planes peeled off the runway at Kabul’s international airport on Aug. 30, 2021 — and the Taliban’s return to power.

The month has become a time of victors and vanquished, the swell of white flags marking conquered territory, just as past empires planted their own banners. It is also a time of heightened emotions, seeming to amplify the gulf between those who support the Taliban’s conservative rule and those who embraced the liberal ideals of the U.S.-backed Afghan government.

The country remains deeply divided over fundamental questions of what principles it should be governed by, and what ideals it should hold. The only point of consensus seems to be that three years into Taliban rule — with its extreme version of Shariah law — it is here to stay.

As ordinary Afghans have adjusted to their new reality, so too have Taliban fighters. Once scrappy insurgents crafting homemade explosives and plotting ambushes from mountain hide-outs, they now serve as traffic cops, security guards and government bureaucrats. Many can count on one hand the number of times they have fired their weapons in the past three years, each one a celebration of sorts — the Eid holiday or a winning match for Afghanistan’s national cricket team.

Among the Talibs who have come out on the streets to celebrate, there has been a palpable itch for a return to jihad and martyrdom — the only way to live an honorable life, many say, and a guiding belief instilled in them since they were children in Taliban-run madrassas.

“In these three years, we are fixing the roads, helping other people, but we want to continue the jihad,” Panjshiri Shinwari, 27, said on Wednesday when the celebrations commenced. A Taliban fighter who joined the movement during the U.S.-led war, he now works for the government’s intelligence agency, the General Directorate of Intelligence.

He and a group of friends had joined the celebrations at Mahmood Khan Bridge, which stretches over the Kabul River, now a dry channel of weeds and sewage.

“I want to go to Palestine,” Mr. Shinwari continued. “We are all ready to continue our jihad in Palestine!”

“No, it’s Pakistan’s turn,” another young Talib, Ashiqullah Naziri, 19, piped in.

“Our first enemy is Pakistan. They destroyed our country,” he added, referring to the support that Pakistani authorities gave to American troops in Afghanistan. “We can’t just leave them alone after that!”

As they spoke, a swell of young Talibs converged around them. Most wore cargo pants, American-made combat boots and black long-sleeve T-shirts with a faded logo of what looked like an American commando stamped on its shoulder. The Talibs’ embrace of the style of American soldiers is just one of the many ways the country has been turned on its head since the takeover.

“For jihad!” one of them yelled. The crowd cheered.

The anniversary celebrations span the country. In Kandahar, the Taliban’s southern heartland, a convoy of armored cars from the emir’s special protection force paraded through the city on Wednesday. In Helmand Province, another stronghold, a procession of motorcycles carrying the Taliban’s flag rode through the capital. And at Bagram Air Base, once America’s largest military post in Afghanistan, a procession of repurposed American tanks, armored vehicles and helicopters took over the runway.

In Kabul, the celebratory convoy of cars — a mix of government-owned and private vehicles — crawled around the city’s main squares. Many had large flags hanging out of all four windows, a version of the Shahadah, or the Muslim profession of faith, embossed on the white fabric. As the summer breeze picked up, the flags grew taut and the Arabic words decipherable.

At the Mahmood Khan roundabout, a Taliban policeman sat in the passenger seat of his forest green Ford Ranger, singing a tarana — a religious chant with a melody but no musical accompaniment — into a loudspeaker. A group had surrounded his vehicle, small flags tucked into the folds of their black turbans.

“The candle of success and freedom came back to our country! The sun of freedom came again to our sky!” the man sang. “Congratulations to all Afghans, independence has come again!” The Talibs in the crowd held their cellphones in the air, taking videos during the song.

But for other Afghans in the city, its lyrics rang hollow.

“It is a black day for Afghans,” said Esmatullah, 25, a doctor who is among Afghanistan’s Hazara ethnic minority, which was persecuted by the Pashtun-dominated Taliban during their first time running the country, in the 1990s. “I felt like a migrant today, like I was not in my country,” he added.

Esmatullah, who asked to be identified only by his first name for fear of retribution for speaking against the government, is trying to avoid the celebrations. He said they served as a reminder not of Afghanistan earning its freedom, but of being conquered by Pashtuns.

Still, for many ordinary Afghans who suffered at the hands of foreign and Afghan republic soldiers, the anniversary is not so much a celebration of the current government as it is of the end of two decades of war.

“War is gone, death is gone,” said Barakatullah Azizi, 23.

Mr. Azizi’s three brothers all joined the Taliban during the war, he said, while he worked as a shopkeeper in Kabul to earn money for his family. One of his brothers, Mansour Azizi, was killed nine years ago in an ambush by Afghan republic soldiers.

His brother’s death haunted him for months, he said. Every day, when he saw republic soldiers in the capital, he wondered which of them had killed his brother, and from whom he should seek revenge.

Now, he says, he walks through the city streets at ease.

“There is peace,” he said. “That’s what we are celebrating.”

Safiullah Padshah contributed reporting.

A court in Russia sentenced a dual citizen of Russia and the United States on Thursday to 12 years in prison on accusations that she committed treason by donating money — about $50 — for Ukraine’s armed forces.

The court, in the city of Yekaterinburg, claimed to have found that the funds donated by the woman, Ksenia Karelina, 32, “were subsequently used to purchase tactical medicine, equipment, weapons and ammunition” for Ukraine.

The prosecution nearly always gets its way in treason cases in Russia’s stage-managed judicial system, but her lawyer, Mikhail Mushailov, said he would still appeal to try to get her sentence reduced.

“I was not surprised by the prison sentence or the way the trial was conducted,” Mr. Mushailov said by telephone from Yekaterinburg.

The conviction of Ms. Karelina, also known as Ksenia Khavana, was the latest in a series of treason and other cases by Russia against citizens of Western countries. The surge in such cases in recent years has raised concerns that the Kremlin views the accused as valuable assets to be traded for high-profile Russians held by the United States and other countries in the West.

Mr. Mushailov said that in addition to appealing Ms. Karelina’s sentence, he would be “taking all the legally required actions” to make her part of any future prisoner exchange between Russia and the West.

Russian investigators accused Ms. Karelina of donating $52 to Razom for Ukraine, a New York-based nonprofit that sends assistance to Ukraine, according to Perviy Otdel, a group of Russian lawyers who specialize in cases involving accusations of treason and other politically charged issues.

A Razom for Ukraine spokeswoman said on Thursday: “We are a New York-based nonprofit providing humanitarian aid and assistance to Ukraine. We do not provide weapons to Ukraine’s military.”

Ms. Karelina, who is from Yekaterinburg and lives in Los Angeles, pleaded guilty, according to Mr. Mushailov and the court.

He has not disclosed further details about the case, because it is classified.

Ms. Karelina, whose trial began on June 20, was arrested in February while visiting Yekaterinburg, an industrial city about 850 miles east of Moscow. Her case was heard by the same judge who presided over the trial of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was freed this month in a prisoner swap after receiving a 16-year sentence in July.

That prisoner swap was the largest between Russia and Western countries since the Cold War. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, his ally, released 16 prisoners, including Mr. Gershkovich, the Russian American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva and Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine. They were exchanged for a convicted assassin and seven other Russians, including hackers and spies.

But Russia still has several Americans in its prisons. One is Marc Fogel, a history teacher who worked for almost a decade at the Anglo-American School of Moscow. In 2021, when trying to enter Russia, Mr. Fogel was arrested and accused of smuggling drugs after customs officers found a small amount of medical marijuana in his luggage. His relatives have said it was to treat severe pain.

In June 2022, Mr. Fogel, a native of western Pennsylvania, was sentenced to 14 years in prison for drug smuggling. In Russia, people convicted of murder have often received shorter sentences.

Another American in Russian custody is Michael Travis Leake, a rock musician who was sentenced last month to 13 years after prosecutors accused him of organizing a drug-trafficking ring.

Perviy Otdel, the legal group, said that Ms. Karelina’s case revolved around $52 donated to Razom for Ukraine, a New York-based nonprofit group that sends assistance to the country.

According to Ms. Karelina’s profile on VK, a Russian social network, she became a United States citizen in 2021. Her profile, which identified her as a student at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, said that she had graduated from Ural Federal University in Yekaterinburg in 2014.

The number of state treason cases in Russia has been growing steadily since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. Last year, about 50 people were accused of the offense, according to Perviy Otdel, including high-profile critics of the Kremlin and a student accused of photographing Russian Army formations in his town.

Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.

After a long shift last Thursday, a junior doctor went to sleep in a seminar room at the Kolkata hospital where she worked. The next morning, her colleagues found her dead, her body showing signs of rape and extreme physical brutality.

The killing, at R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital, has stirred angry protests over entrenched misogyny and violence against women and led thousands of doctors to walk out of major public hospitals across India to demand a safer working environment.

Attacks on doctors in hospitals are common in India. Last month, doctors in New Delhi went on strike after an assault on a hospital by dozens of people, many of them relatives of a woman who died during surgery after giving birth.

In the days after the killing of the junior doctor, a 31-year-old physician trainee whose name may not be published under Indian law, intense anger boiled over into nationwide outrage. On Wednesday night, thousands of women protested on the streets of Kolkata, the largest city in West Bengal.

Outrage among doctors has also continued to build, with many government hospitals suspending all but emergency treatment as medical workers protest to demand better protection from such violence.

After protests by doctors, the head of R.G. Kar Medical College stepped down from his position, but hours later he was reassigned to another hospital by the state government. On Tuesday, a top court in Kolkata asked him to go on leave.

As the women marched, in another part of the city a mob stormed the R.G. Kar hospital, attacking protesting doctors and ransacking its emergency area. Videos from the clash showed the police using batons and firing tear gas.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the rising discontent on Thursday during an event to mark the anniversary of India’s independence, without directly mentioning the killing in Kolkata. As a society, he said, Indians should “seriously think about the kind of atrocities which are taking place against our mothers, sisters, daughters.”

“There is anger about that in the country. Common masses are angry. I am feeling that anger,” Mr. Modi said. “Our nation, our society and our state governments need to take that seriously. Crime against women should be investigated more urgently.”

During the initial investigation, the police arrested Sanjoy Roy, a volunteer at a police post within the hospital.

However, Subarna Goswami, an official with the Federation of Government Doctors’ Associations, a nationwide doctors’ organization, said evidence described in a postmortem report “indicates a strong possibility of the involvement of multiple persons.”

Unsatisfied with the investigation, doctors have accused the police of a coverup.

The chief of the Kolkata police, in response to protesters accusing officers of shielding other suspects, said the police had never indicated that there was only one person responsible in the case.

As the protests continued, a top court in Kolkata transferred the murder case from the local police to the Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s premier federal investigations agency.

The protesting doctors are demanding a more stringent law to protect them from violence, including by making any attack on a doctor an offense with no bail. In 2019, a draft bill was floated among lawmakers by the government but never gained traction. Federal health ministry officials have now assured doctors they would consider introducing separate legislation in Parliament specifically prohibiting violence against them.

In India, about 75 percent of doctors say they have experienced violence, and a majority of them feel stressed by the profession, according to a 2019 study in The Indian Journal of Psychiatry. Shashi Tharoor, a lawmaker, alluded to this data in urging stronger protection for medical workers before the Indian Parliament, a doctors’ association said.

Many doctors’ organizations have said their members will not return to work until the law to curb attacks on doctors is passed in both houses of Parliament.

Shreya Shaw, a postgraduate medical student at R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital, said she could no longer work night shifts, and that it was deeply unsettling to watch doctors who were protesting peacefully being attacked by mobs inside the hospital on Wednesday night.

“We can’t do emergency, night duties anymore,” she said. “We can’t rely on the hospital security, we cannot rely on the police.”