On a recent summer day in Kuwait, as the temperature soared above 110 degrees, four Indian migrant workers stood by the side of a road with their belongings stuffed into bags.

Suresh Kumar, 52, and his roommates had just been evicted as the authorities swept their neighborhood for building code violations after a fatal fire in June that killed 49 migrant workers, the vast majority of whom were Indian. The four men said they had shared a 172-square-foot room on the ground floor of an apartment building, but inhabiting the ground floor is prohibited, so the owner was demolishing the room.

Now they were homeless, and unsure of where to go.

Kuwait, perched on the Persian Gulf, is one of the richest countries in the world, with a $980 billion sovereign fund built on oil revenue. But little of that wealth is enjoyed by migrant workers like Mr. Kumar and his roommates, who often struggle with inadequate housing and low wages, and who have limited power to seek recourse.

Mr. Kumar and his roommates were all construction workers subcontracted on projects for Kuwait’s state oil firm and refining company, and they said they could afford to pay only about $325 in rent between the four of them. Because a whole apartment would cost more than twice that amount, they were resigned to finding themselves another room to share, with no guarantee that it would be any safer or more comfortable than their old home.

The high death toll from the fire in June — which engulfed a seven-story building where nearly 200 migrant workers lived — shocked people across Kuwait. In the weeks after the tragedy, it spurred an unusually public reckoning over unsafe housing for migrant workers, as inspectors fanned out to issue building code violations.

But that response stopped short of addressing the structural issues that afflict migrant workers in Kuwait and other Gulf countries, human rights activists say. In some cases, the government’s reaction punished the migrants themselves — evicting them from their homes and leaving them in fear of deportation. After the fire, Kuwait’s Interior Ministry said an unspecified number of visa violators in workers’ housing had been arrested.

“It’s a perfect tragic example of how migrant workers are noticed only when there is some kind of catastrophe,” said James Lynch, a director of FairSquare, a London-based research group that investigates rights abuses. “Nobody was thinking about worker housing in Kuwait until this happened — until it made the government look really bad.”

The insecurity that migrant workers face, combined with limited political freedoms and labor organizing rights, means that it is rare for them to publicly complain or push for change.

Kuwait’s Public Authority for Manpower, which oversees labor affairs, did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Kuwait Oil Company or Kuwait National Petroleum Company — the companies that Mr. Kumar and his roommates said they worked for, via third-party contractors.

After the fire, The New York Times interviewed 18 migrant workers in Kuwait about their living conditions; many spoke on the condition of partial anonymity because they feared retribution.

Several of them described Kuwaiti authorities cracking down on building code violations, ordering people to leave their homes with minimal notice.

Employers in Kuwait are obligated to provide accommodations, but many of the workers said they had been left to find their own. Rashid and Rahmat, Pakistani workers who declined to give their last names, described going from building to building on foot to ask about vacancies. The biggest struggle, they said, is finding a space they can afford.

At the heart of the problem, according to migrant rights activists and scholars, is a system governing foreign labor in the Gulf called “kafala” — which binds workers to their employers — as well as the power imbalances faced by migrants who flock to the Gulf from poorer nations across Asia and Africa to earn higher wages than they could back home.

“These workers are disposable in nature,” said Manishankar Prasad, an independent labor researcher in Malaysia, describing the kafala system.

Mr. Prasad, an Indian national who grew up in the Gulf, said he was “infuriated” as he followed the news of the fire, watching the names of the dead trickle out on social media.

Foreign residents make up more than two-thirds of Kuwait’s population of four million; that ratio is even higher in nearby Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Many work in office jobs, but across the Gulf, lower-income migrants perform essential work as street cleaners, truck drivers, construction workers, child-care providers, cashiers and more.

“There is no incentive for anybody to change the system,” Mr. Prasad said. “Because for each worker who is killed, there are 10 other people who’ll replace them within a day.”

The fire began in the early morning of June 12 in Mangaf, an area near Kuwait City where many migrants live. Survivors interviewed by The Times said they awoke to screams and found thick black smoke filling the building’s corridors. Building codes in Gulf countries are often laxly enforced, and smoke detectors and fire escapes are not common in residential properties. In addition to the 49 people killed, more than 50 people were injured.

Kuwait’s firefighting force said that the blaze had been caused by an electrical short circuit, and that it had started in a guard’s room on the ground floor.

Visiting the scene of the fire, Sheikh Fahad Yusuf Al Sabah — Kuwait’s deputy prime minister — blamed “the greed of property owners” and said the owner of the company employing the workers would be detained. Soon after, Noura Al Mashaan, Kuwait’s public works minister, said the authorities would start tackling building code violations.

Kuwaiti regulations specify that no more than four workers be housed in a room and set minimum space requirements per person. Rooms must be well ventilated and employers must provide air conditioning as well as at least one toilet for every eight workers.

Depak Pasma, 24, from Nepal, said that his housing in Mangaf was provided by his company, with four people sharing an air-conditioned room that he described as large.

But many other workers said their reality was very different. Some described cramming six people into tiny rooms inside illegally subdivided apartments. Several said they lived in buildings with ground-floor apartments that were now being torn down.

“We have been living in this building for years and nobody said anything,” said Sayed Abu Khalid, a 58-year-old supermarket worker from Egypt. “After what happened in Mangaf they want us to move out of the ground floor.”

Mr. Abu Khalid said he lives in a two-bedroom apartment that houses eight people.

The building owner plans to demolish their apartment, and the tenants hope to move into a vacant apartment upstairs.

Combined, the eight roommates pay nearly $1,000 in monthly rent to a sublessor, who then pays about $800 to the apartment’s owner and pockets the difference, Mr. Abu Khalid said.

Profit-making middlemen are built into the perilous system that migrant workers must navigate. Their troubles sometimes begin in their home countries, with predatory recruiters and loan sharks who leave them in debt before they start working. After they arrive in the Gulf, they are often employed by third-party contractors, who sponsor their visas and house them while they perform jobs for other companies.

The workers who died in the fire were employed by a third-party contractor called NBTC Group. In a statement, the company said it was “greatly shocked and saddened” by the tragedy, and promised to pay nearly $10,000 to the families of workers killed, saying it was ready to “render the fullest assistance.”

Similar third-party arrangements are common in Gulf countries, allowing the workers’ ultimate employers to outsource the tasks of hiring and housing migrant workers.

“It’s a convenient dumping of risk and responsibility onto the private sector,” said Mr. Lynch of FairSquare.

NBTC Group works across the Gulf in construction and engineering, logistics and other fields. In Kuwait, according to its website, it has been subcontracted by firms including the Kuwait Oil Company, the Kuwait National Petroleum Company and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said in a statement to The Times that it was “committed to the well-being” of workers and that it had “tools in place to ensure companies we contract with are complying with federal requirements, such as routine site inspections and interviews with contractor personnel.”

Gulf countries’ economic models rely on cheap foreign labor, and inadequate housing is often the result of cost-cutting, Mr. Lynch said. But, he added, blaming the private sector “is missing a key part of what is going on here — which is the failure of the state to live up to its own obligation.”

Russian troops defending a pocket of territory wedged between a river and the border with Ukraine were at risk of becoming encircled, military analysts said Monday, after Ukraine bombed bridges that are the only routes for resupply or retreat.

In their counterattack into Russia, which has been underway now for nearly two weeks, Ukrainian troops quickly broke through thinly manned border defenses, fanned out on highways and captured towns and villages, initially pushing deeper into Russian territory.

The bombing of bridges, in contrast, takes aim at land between the Seym River, the border and an area inside Russia already controlled by Ukraine, with the potential to entrap the Russian forces positioned there. Three bridges span this stretch of river, all now destroyed or damaged, according to statements released by the Ukrainian Air Force and to social media posts by Russian officials and military commentators.

“Minus one more bridge!” the Ukrainian Air Force commander, Lt. Gen. Mykola Oleshchuk, wrote in a post on Telegram on Sunday.

The potential encirclement of its forces in the area adds another challenge to a Russian Army caught off guard by Ukraine’s startling incursion over the border on Aug. 6. The operation has injected a new sense of optimism to Ukrainian forces that had been backpedaling for months elsewhere along the front line.

Analysts and Western officials, though, say it is too soon to know whether Ukraine will emerge with a strategic success. In his nightly video address on Sunday, President Volodymyr Zelensky indicated that a goal of the incursion was to form a “buffer zone” inside Russia along the border with his country, though he offered no specifics about how wide a swath his military would seek to seize.

In the fighting swirling over mostly flat plains in Russia and Ukraine, the tactic of seeking to encircle troops has been central to both country’s armies. Becoming surrounded or pinned against a river is a much-feared outcome for soldiers. The envelopments are called, in Russian military parlance, “kettles.”

Earlier in the long-simmering conflict in eastern Ukraine, these tactics have resonated politically, with Ukraine agreeing to a cease-fire in 2015 after thousands of its soldiers were encircled in the town of Debaltseve. In 2022, Russian troops were encircled during a failed river crossing at the village of Bilohorivka that left hundreds dead.

It is unclear how many Russian soldiers remain in the area between the Seym River and the border with Ukraine. The territory includes the town of Glushkovo, with a population before the incursion of about 5,000. Glushkovo is seen as a likely next objective after Ukrainian troops gained control of the Russian town of Sudzha last week.

Russian social media sites posted photographs of one of the bridges still standing after the strike announced on Sunday but with a hole punched in its deck. On Friday, the asphalt surface of the first bridge struck, near Glushkovo, slumped into the roiling river water, a video released by the Ukrainian Air Force showed.

On Monday, Russian military bloggers and a regional official posted that the final bridge in the area had been destroyed. “At night, the enemy hit the third bridge,” Roman Alekhin, an adviser to the governor of the Kursk region, posted on Telegram. He wrote that Russian forces had built pontoon bridges to provide access.

Neither the destruction of the third bridge nor the building of a substitute could be independently verified. Ukraine has not disclosed what weapons it used to hit the bridges.

Russian troops may be forced to withdraw from the area if they are at risk of being cut from resupply or a means of retreating, said Mykola Bielieskov, a military analyst with a Ukrainian nongovernmental group assisting the army, the Come Back Alive foundation.

“Strikes on the bridges complicate, or even completely prevent, the enemy from maintaining their forces south of the Seym River,” he said.

If Ukraine’s forces advance to the riverbank, they would gain the advantage of putting a natural barrier in front of any Russian counterattack.

Inside Ukraine, the fighting has continued in Moscow’s favor. Russian forces are advancing toward Pokrovsk, a strategic rail and road hub in the eastern Donbas region. The military commandant of the town, Serhii Dobriak, told Radio Liberty on Monday that residents should plan to evacuate within two weeks. Russian forces are now about six miles to the east of Pokrovsk.

When her parents denied her food and water for eight days, the girl said that she knew she was going to die, just like her two younger siblings. For days, her parents had beaten her when they caught her sipping water or looking for food. Famished and frail, she said they dressed her in special attire worn for death.

“The children were not supposed to eat, so they could die,” the child, a 9-year-old identified only as EG and hidden inside a witness protection booth, told a packed courtroom on Thursday in the coastal Kenyan city of Mombasa.

She was among the first witnesses to testify last week in the manslaughter trial of Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, an evangelical pastor accused of commanding members of his church to starve their children and themselves to death in order to meet Jesus in the end times.

The pastor and 93 other defendants, including his top associates and some of his followers, denied the manslaughter allegations and pleaded not guilty at the start of the trial.

In three other courts, Mr. Mackenzie and several of the other suspects are facing separate charges of murder, terrorism and child torture and abuse. Earlier this year, the Kenyan government declared Mr. Mackenzie’s church, Good News International Ministries, “an organized criminal group.”

Since April last year, 429 bodies have been exhumed from shallow graves in the Shakahola Forest in southeastern Kenya, where members of the doomsday cult lived, the authorities said. While some died of starvation, others were strangled, beaten and suffocated, according to the lead government pathologist. Dozens of people have been rescued, but hundreds more are still missing, officials say.

For the last 16 months, the East African nation has been both riveted and horrified by the story of how one man was able to convince hundreds of people that the world was coming to an end and that they should follow him into a forest teeming with wild animals.

“The case before you, your honor, is not just for a trial, but for a reckoning,” Betty Rubia, one of the prosecutors, told the Mombasa chief magistrate, the Hon. Alex Ithuku, who is hearing the case. This “is about the exploitation of faith, the erosion of humanity and the chilling cost of blind devotion.”

At the Mombasa Law Courts last week, the suspects arrived chained in pairs — except for Mr. Mackenzie and his second-in-command, Smart Mwakalama, who each walked in alone and in handcuffs. In the humid, packed courtroom, the defendants sat looking forlorn, with some drifting to sleep as the proceedings got underway. None of the victims’ family members were there; many of them are day laborers lacking the time or money to attend hearings regularly, activists said.

A few of the suspects appeared weak; during a lunch break, a prison guard was heard voicing her concern to another officer about one defendant’s reluctance to consume the bread and milk she had been given.

One suspect died in jail, the authorities said last week, and an inquest was underway to determine the circumstances of that death.

As witnesses arrived, security officers, some carrying guns, stood shoulder-to-shoulder to prevent the suspects from seeing them. Prosecutors said they had lined up 90 witnesses, including minors, to take the stand in the case. Among them are 13 anonymous witnesses, referred to only by their initials, and whose voices were beamed from a speaker atop the enclosed witness booth.

One 17-year-old boy, identified as IA, described how families fell prey to the apocalyptic message of Mr. Mackenzie, who urged them to shun education, modern medicine and beauty products. The pastor also urged his flock to destroy any documents, including identity cards and birth certificates. The boy said his mother — whose remains have yet to be found — sold household items and was lured to Shakahola Forest with the promise of land, which could be had for as little as $20 an acre.

The gathering in the forest grew during the Covid-19 pandemic, with the expanding congregation building makeshift homes in areas given biblical names like Bethlehem and Jerusalem. There, witnesses said, at Mr. Mackenzie’s urging they began plans to starve the children first before the adults could join them.

As they deprived the children of food, parents would make them wear special clothing, they said.

“Those are my death clothes,” the 9-year-old told the still courtroom after she was shown an exhibit submitted as evidence inside the enclosed booth. The clothes were not shown to spectators in the courtroom.

She said she was wearing those clothes when officers rescued her. By then, her two younger siblings, whom she had tried to save by giving them water, had starved to death before her eyes.

The witnesses faced intense cross-examination from the defense lawyer, Lawrence Obonyo, who questioned their memory of events and where and when they heard Mr. Mackenzie say they should starve. Another witness, a 17-year-old girl identified as JCK, gave conflicting accounts about where they lived after her mother pulled her from school.

Activists and human rights groups have criticized the length of time prosecutors took in starting the trial, saying it could hamper the victims’ ability to deliver crucial testimony. Hearings in the trial will resume on Sept. 9.

They have also questioned the government’s choice of defendants. Some of those being tried “are victims themselves and should not have been charged,” said Shipeta Mathias, a rapid response officer with HAKI Africa, a Mombasa-based human rights organization. Mr. Mathias was among the emergency workers who arrived at Shakahola last year when some of the rescued church members were still refusing to eat.

“We had to lie to some of them that we had been sent by Jesus so they could eat,” he said of some of the defendants. “They are brainwashed, and they need help.”

The case has also shined an uncomfortable spotlight on the effectiveness of Kenya’s police force.

Families searching for their loved ones say they sought help from law enforcement, but in vain. Local community members, suspicious about the activities in the forest, filed numerous reports with the police, who failed to follow up or investigate. Rights groups also criticized the force for not monitoring Mr. Mackenzie, who was arrested several times and, at one point, even charged with radicalization and promoting extreme beliefs, though that case went nowhere.

Family members and their advocates say they are also frustrated with the slow rollout of DNA testing. Just three dozen bodies have so far been matched with family members, officials and activists say, disappointing those who want to give their loved ones the final dignity of a proper burial.

“What we need to get is justice for the people we lost,” said Paul Chengo, a manual laborer who said he was missing six members of his family. “What we need is closure.”

Mohamed Ahmed contributed reporting from Mombasa.

In July, as he secretly readied an invasion of Russia, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine sent a very different signal in public: He wanted talks to end the war.

Speaking to the BBC, Mr. Zelensky said he had a plan to end the “hot stage” of the war this year. He dispatched his foreign minister on a surprise trip to China, a mission to improve Ukraine’s relationship with Russia’s most important partner. And he pushed for a series of international meetings, including one planned for Qatar in August, in which he hoped to rally backing for Ukraine’s positions and pave the way for a broader settlement.

His summer overtures departed from the two years of Mr. Zelensky’s refusing to offer any hint of concessions in the face of a Russian invasion that many Ukrainians believe aims to wipe their country off the map. And they made it all the more stunning when on Aug. 6, Ukrainian forces rolled into Russia’s Kursk region, delivering one of the most embarrassing moments for President Vladimir V. Putin in 30 months of war and confounding predictions that the two countries might be headed toward a cease-fire.

Kyiv is making a risky bet: that the incursion gives it new leverage for a favorable deal with the Kremlin, even as its military remains on the defense across much of the front line in Ukraine. Russians who know Mr. Putin expect him to lash out in response, believing that his military has the upper hand in personnel and weaponry.

There are already signs that cease-fire efforts suffered a setback. A diplomat involved in the talks said that Russian officials postponed a meeting planned to be held in Qatar this month to negotiate a deal in which both sides would stop attacks on each other’s energy infrastructure. The postponement was reported earlier by The Washington Post.

In comments reported on Monday by Russian state media, Mr. Putin’s foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, said, “At the current stage, given this escapade, we are not going to talk.” The length of any pause in negotiations, Mr. Ushakov added, “depends on the situation, including on the battlefield.”

Grigory A. Yavlinsky, a longtime Russian politician who met with Mr. Putin last October to promote the idea of a cease-fire, said in an interview from Moscow that there had been hope in the Russian capital that “the fighting would stop this year.”

“The circumstances that have just happened,” he added, “they have lowered all these chances, they have removed them from the agenda.”

Two former senior Russian officials close to the Kremlin also said they believed the prospects for cease-fire talks had become more remote. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. One said that Mr. Putin’s focus now was “not peace, but revenge.”

To many Ukrainians, Mr. Putin’s focus has never been peace, but rather the complete domination of their country. Officials in Kyiv say the incursion into Kursk could help provide the leverage they need to achieve a deal on Ukraine’s terms. They say that only by making more Russians — and Mr. Putin himself — feel the pain of war can they force the Kremlin to back down.

“It’s very hard to imagine peace in our era unless Russia loses,” Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, a member of Ukraine’s Parliament, said in an interview. “The only solution to anything with Russia is: Make them pay.”

Ukraine’s counterattack into Russia will hasten talks, he said, by raising the cost of war on Russia. Ukrainian officials insist that Mr. Zelensky’s public diplomatic outreach this summer, coupled with his secret planning for the Kursk offensive, were two prongs of the same strategy.

“They’ve thought through how military and diplomatic maneuvers could work together,” Evelyn Farkas, the director of the McCain Institute, said of Ukraine’s approach. “It’s not just smart in the context of setting them up for peace talks today, it’s putting pressure on Russia and reminding the Russians they don’t control the narrative.”

It is far from clear that the combination of military and diplomatic pressure will work with Mr. Putin, who has so far faced down political and economic headwinds at home and shown he is willing to bear a heavy cost to defeat Ukraine.

Ukraine’s position has been shifting in recent months.

In June, Mr. Zelensky spearheaded a 92-country gathering in Switzerland meant to win global support for his vision of a “just and lasting peace.” The plan as outlined would eventually mean Ukrainian membership in NATO, a full Russian withdrawal and prosecutions of Russians for war crimes.

But China skipped the summit, and some of the leading non-Western countries in attendance, including India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa, refused to sign on to the summit’s joint declaration. To those countries, a key problem was that Russia was not invited to the Swiss summit; any peace talks, they said, needed to involve both sides and a willingness to compromise.

In the ensuing weeks, Mr. Zelensky showed an increasing openness to negotiate with Russia directly. He said that Russia could be invited to a second “peace summit” this year, and that Ukraine could regain its territory through negotiations.

Outreach to neutral countries has continued. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India plans a visit to Ukraine, the Indian Foreign Ministry said on Monday.

Ukraine has also sought to set up a series of interim meetings focusing on specific issues. The first such meeting was set to be held in Qatar this summer, Mr. Zelensky said in July, on energy security; further meetings would come, in Turkey and in Canada, on food security, prisoners of war and Ukrainian children who had been taken to Russia.

Even as Ukraine was signaling its readiness to talk, its military was preparing for one of its most daring attacks since Mr. Putin’s invasion began in February 2022.

The flurry of Ukrainian talk about peace may have served in part as strategic deception, encouraging Russia’s leadership to see meekness and let down its guard.

But Ukrainian officials have also insisted that diplomacy and taking the war onto Russian territory are not contradictory efforts. And Ukrainian analysts have pointed out that Ukrainian strikes on oil refineries that began last winter provided leverage to negotiate on Russian attacks on Ukraine’s electrical power plants, a military tactic that led to the planned talks in Qatar.

“To engage Russia in a fair negotiation process, the Russians need to face tactical defeats on the battlefield,” Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior presidential adviser, said in an interview on Aug. 6, the day the Kursk incursion started. “As these defeats pile up, social unrest will start to stir within Russia.”

There are signs that Ukraine’s attack has already unsettled many Russians. A Russian state-controlled pollster, F.O.M., published weekly survey results on Friday in which 45 percent of respondents said those around them were in an “anxious mood,” a 12-point jump from two weeks earlier. It was a spike in anxiety similar in magnitude to the one after the terrorist attack at a concert hall near Moscow in March.

But Russians who know Mr. Putin said they doubted that the Kursk incursion and any ensuing public unrest could force the Russian leader to change course. The fundamentals of the fighting, they noted, have remained unchanged, with Mr. Putin convinced that he has the resources to outlast Ukraine and the West. Russia continues to dominate along much of the front in Ukraine and to make gains in the east, closing in on the strategically important Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk.

Projecting business as usual, Mr. Putin flew to Azerbaijan on Sunday for a two-day visit. The Kremlin released footage of him relaxing on a couch in shirtsleeves, top shirt buttons undone, with Azerbaijan’s authoritarian president, Ilham Aliyev, and Mr. Aliyev’s wife, Mehriban Aliyeva.

Mr. Putin has said nothing about the incursion since a tense, televised crisis meeting on Aug. 12, when he questioned whether there was any use for negotiations with Ukraine, without ruling them out entirely.

“The enemy is apparently trying to improve its future negotiating positions,” Mr. Putin said. He claimed, without evidence, that Ukraine was firing at civilians, and added: “What is there to even talk about with them?”

Russia postponed its participation in the Qatar meeting on energy security after the Kursk incursion, the diplomat briefed on the matter said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. Russia did not pull out of the talks but said it needed more time, describing the incursion as an escalation, the diplomat said.

Last Tuesday — a week after the incursion began — Andriy Yermak, the head of Mr. Zelensky’s presidential office, said the meeting on energy security was still set to take place this month but in an online format. A spokesman for Mr. Zelensky’s office declined to comment.

Since the Kursk incursion, Mr. Putin will now be looking for ways to increase the amount of pain he is inflicting on Ukraine, said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. Rather than negotiate, Mr. Putin is convinced that Russia will eventually triumph, she said, and he is prepared to take on more risk and force Russians to carry a heavier cost.

“Putin is ready to pay an even higher price than this,” she said, referring to the consequences of the Kursk incursion. “For Putin, this is simply a question of the price of victory.”

Constant Méheut, Evelina Riabenko and Stanislav Kozliuk contributed reporting from Kyiv.

One person was killed and six people were missing on Monday after a sailing yacht carrying 22 people sank during a violent storm off the coast of Sicily, Italian officials said.

The yacht sank after a storm “with strong winds” struck around 5 a.m., according to Luciano Pischedda, the Italian Coast Guard official overseeing the rescue operations. The vessel had been anchored about half a mile off Porticello, about 12 miles east of the Sicilian capital of Palermo.

Coast guard officials were told by crew members that there had been 12 passengers and a crew of 10 onboard. The authorities have yet to determine what caused the yacht to sink.

“This will be ascertained later,” Mr. Pischedda said, adding that several crew members were in the hospital and had not spoken to investigators.

Among the dead and missing, four were British, two were American, and one was a man with dual citizenship from Canada and Antigua, he said.

The dead person has yet to be identified, and it was not immediately clear whether the dead and missing were crew members, passengers or a combination of the two.

A passenger ship sailing under the flag of the Netherlands, the Sir Robert Baden Powell, anchored nearby, provided immediate assistance to the 15 surviving passengers, Mr. Pischedda said.

The coast guard brought the survivors to shore. On Monday morning, four coast guard ships and a helicopter were at the scene.

Italy’s firefighter corps said that their divers had started carrying out a search and rescue mission at dawn.

Luca Cari, a spokesman for the firefighters, said in a telephone interview that expert divers were on the way from Naples and Sassari, Sardinia, to search the vessel, which was about 165 feet underwater.

Operations at that depth, were “complicated,” he said, and required specialized divers.

The boat, identified by Italian officials as the Bayesian, is an Italian-made 56-meter-long sailing yacht first launched in 2008, according to the website marinetraffic.com which tracks ships. It sails under the flag of Britain. It was built by Perini Navi, an Italian luxury yacht maker.

Eight of the 15 passengers who were rescued were taken to hospitals in Palermo, the coast guard said.

The youngest passenger onboard, a 1-year-old girl named Sophie, was taken to the Di Cristina hospital in Palermo with her mother, Charlotte, who had some scrapes and cuts, said Domenico Cipolla, director of the pediatric emergency room at the hospital.

Sophie’s father was in the hospital’s adult emergency room and had been in contact with his wife and daughter by phone, Dr. Cipolla said. He was not permitted to release the family’s surname. Both mother and child were in good condition apart from “great emotional stress” he added in a telephone interview.

“We’re comforting them more than curing them,” he said.

After weeks of living in jungle tents, the handful of Mennonite families trying to make a new home deep in the Peruvian Amazon began to despair. Wasps attacked as they tried to clear forest. Heavy rains turned the road to their camp to mud.

Running low on supplies, some wanted to turn back. Instead, they worked harder and eventually carved out an enclave.

“There’s a place here where I wanted to live so we came and opened part of it up,” recalled Wilhelm Thiessen, a Mennonite farmer. “That’s what everyone did to have a place to live.”

Today, seven years later, the cluster of homesteads is now a thriving colony, Wanderland, home to roughly 150 families, a church — which doubles as a school — and a cheese-processing facility.

It is one of a string of Mennonite settlements that have taken root throughout the Amazon, turning forest into thriving farms but also raising concerns among environmentalists about deforestation of a jungle already under threat from industries like cattle ranching and illegal gold mining.

Mennonite communities have come under official scrutiny, as well, including in Peru, where the authorities are investigating several, accusing them of clearing forest without required permits. The colonies deny wrongdoing.

Mennonites first started migrating to Latin America from Canada about a century ago, after the country ended their exemptions from education requirements and military service.

The president of Mexico at the time, Álvaro Obregón, eager to consolidate rebellious northern regions following the Mexican Revolution, gave Mennonites uncultivated land and guarantees that they could live as they wished.

In subsequent decades, other Latin American countries, seeking to expand their agricultural frontiers, made similar invitations.

Today, more than 200 Mennonite colonies in nine countries in Latin America occupy some 9.64 million acres, an area larger than the Netherlands, where their denomination first emerged, according to a 2021 study by researchers at McGill University in Montreal.

Bolivia has seen the fastest growth of any Latin American country and now has 120 Mennonite colonies, while in the past decade a half dozen settlements, including Wanderland, have emerged in Peru, according to analysts.

Mennonites have also sought land in Suriname, a small South American country rich in pristine forests, setting off protests from Indigenous groups and Maroons, the descendants of enslaved people.

“They’re basically trying to find the last places on earth that still have these just huge, continuous areas that can support their lifestyle, and that just happens to be forested areas in the Amazon,” said Matt Finer, a senior research specialist at Amazon Conservation, an environmental nonprofit.

On the ground, Wanderland looks like a page from the past. Horse-drawn buggies carry passengers along dirt roads. Men in overalls toil in fields stretching behind simple wooden houses.

There is no electricity. As night falls, families dine by candlelight after giving grace in Plautdietsch, a Germanic dialect spoken almost exclusively among Mennonites in the Americas.

Fragments of what was once wild linger. A pet monkey on a front porch. A caged parrot. In one backyard shed, Johan Neufeld, 73, showed off three lowland pacas, a large Amazonian rodent prized for its meat. He caught them in the forest and wants to try to breed them.

Wanderland is an “Old Colony” settlement, made up of Mennonites who trace their history to an 18th-century settlement, Chortitza, that is now part of Ukraine.

Like other Mennonites, they follow the teachings of a Dutch priest, Menno Simons, who was persecuted during the Reformation for opposing infant baptism and military conscription. Over time, though, living apart from the rest of the world and rejecting new technology became hallmarks of Old Colony faith and culture — and migration a means of preserving them.

“Our ancestors thought that if we live far away, in the countryside, there’s more possibility of controlling evil,” said Johan Bueckert, an Old Colony farmer who now lives in Providencia, a colony near Wanderland. “We want to live like they did. We don’t want constant change.”

As Mennonite colonies in different countries grow more populated and prosperous, the value of nearby land rises — and adhering to an austere farming life, on inexpensive plots, becomes harder. So groups break off to build new settlements.

Mr. Thiessen helped found Wanderland after moving from Nueva Esperanza, one of Bolivia’s largest Mennonite settlements, because he had children who needed farmland to support their own families.

“In Bolivia there are many colonies but almost no land left,” he said.

Worldly temptations, particularly smartphones, were also creeping into daily life as Bolivian colonies became more crowded, said Hernan Neufeld, 39, one of Wanderland’s religious leaders, called bishops.

“Many brothers and sisters lost their way,” he said. “That’s why we sought a more remote place to see if we can enforce our norms.”

Since Mennonite settlements first appeared in the Peruvian Amazon in 2017, they have cleared more than 17,000 acres of forest there, according to an analysis last year by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), which tracks deforestation.

That is just a fraction of at least 370,000 acres of forest lost in recent years in Peru, most of it to small-scale farming. The overall deforestation of the Amazon worries many environmentalists since the rainforest absorbs heat-trapping carbon emissions, making it a crucial regulator of the world’s climate.

Mennonites interviewed in Wanderland and Providencia said they were not familiar with the term “climate change” or how their practices affect the Amazon.

Their leaders acknowledged that parts of the forest were cleared for their colonies, but did not believe they had done anything wrong.

“Every colony clears the forest a little bit, but it’s very little,” said Peter Dyck, a farmer from Belize and Providencia’s leader. “The forest is big.”

The colonies, he added, produce soy, rice and corn to sell in Peru, helping feed people and grow the economy.

But the Mennonites have still come under government scrutiny.

The Peruvian authorities are investigating Wanderland, Providence and a third Mennonite colony, accusing them of clearing forest without required permits. They are seeking reparations and prison terms for colony leaders, said Jorge Guzman, a lawyer representing Peru’s environment ministry in the case.

But the three colonies deny doing anything illegal, arguing that they did not need permits because they already held agricultural titles to the land, issued by the regional government, said Medelu Saldaña, a local politician who advises the colonies.

The colonies bought their land, Mr. Saldaña added, from a logging company that had already stripped the forest of hardwood trees.

But officials and experts said satellite images showed that the colonies had cleared carbon-rich primary forest. And even if parts had been destroyed by logging, the colonies still needed permits and approvals because of the size of their operations.

“They want a piece of paper to trump reality,” Mr. Guzman said.

Some experts on Mennonites say they are being unfairly targeted given that other activities in the Peruvian Amazon are swallowing up much larger tracts of forest.

In Peru, palm and cacao plantations that supply global companies have already replaced large swaths of forest, while drug trafficking and illegal logging and gold mining continue to expand deeper.

“I think the Mennonites are kind of the focus of a lot of critique right now because they are a distinct group of people,” said Kennert Giesbrecht, a Canadian and former managing editor of a German-language biweekly read widely in the Mennonite diaspora.

Several hours down a river from Wanderland, a new Mennonite village, Salamanca, is forming.

Cornelius Niekoley, a farmer and bishop from Mexico, traveled to Peru to assess whether he should buy property for his adult children and their families.

“Good price and nice land,” he said. “Not too many rocks. With too many rocks, it’s hard to clear the land.”

Born in Belize to a Mexican father and Canadian mother, Mr. Niekoley and his children live in a colony in Quintana Roo, in southeastern Mexico, where some of his neighbors have already moved to Salamanca seeking more affordable land.

Looking around the village, Mr. Niekoley said, “There still aren’t many, but more are going to come.”

It started a number of years ago with angry remarks from tourists every now and again. But in recent years, the comments flew all of the time, with people shouting, “Shame!” at Thibault Danthine, a horse-drawn carriage operator in Brussels, as they walked by.

“Ten years ago, that never happened,” said Mr. Danthine, a self-described horse lover. “At the end, it was every day.”

Exhausted by being accused of perpetrating animal cruelty, Mr. Danthine decided to sell his five horses and use the proceeds to buy two electric carriages, designed to look like an early model of an electric vehicle developed in the 1800s by the inventor Robert Anderson, instead. In June, Brussels became the first European capital to offer daily tours on electric carriages.

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