Brazil blocked the social network X on Friday after its owner, Elon Musk, refused to comply with a Brazilian judge’s orders to suspend certain accounts, the biggest test yet of the billionaire’s efforts to transform the site into a digital town square where just about anything goes.

Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, ordered Brazil’s telecom agency to block access to X across the nation of 200 million because the company lacked a necessary legal representative in Brazil.

Mr. Musk closed X’s office in Brazil last week after Justice Moraes threatened arrests for ignoring his orders to remove X accounts that he said broke Brazilian laws.

X said that it viewed Justice Moraes’s sealed orders as illegal and that it planned to publish them. “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes,” Mr. Musk said on Friday.

In a highly unusual move, Justice Moraes also said that any person in Brazil who tried to still use X via common privacy software called a virtual private network, or VPN, could be fined nearly $9,000 a day.

Justice Moraes also froze the finances of a second Musk business in Brazil, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite-internet service, to try to collect $3 million in fines he has levied against X. Starlink — which has recently exploded in popularity in Brazil, with more than 250,000 customers — said that it planned to fight the order and would make its service free in Brazil if necessary.

Mr. Musk and Justice Moraes have been sparring for months. Mr. Musk says Justice Moraes is illegally censoring conservative voices. Justice Moraes says Mr. Musk is illegally obstructing his work to clean up the Brazilian internet.

In his order, Justice Moraes said Mr. Musk was an “outlaw” who intended to “allow the massive spread of disinformation, hate speech and attacks on the democratic rule of law, violating the free choice of the electorate, by keeping voters away from real and accurate information.”

The fight is now at the center of Mr. Musk’s bid to turn X into a safe haven for people to say nearly anything they want, even if it hurts the business in the process.

In dozens of posts since April, Mr. Musk has built up Justice Moraes as one of the world’s biggest enemies of free speech, and it appears Mr. Musk is now betting the judge will cave to the public backlash he believes the block will cause.

“He might be losing money in the short term, but he’s gaining enormous political capital,” said Luca Belli, a professor at FGV Law School in Rio de Janeiro, who has tracked Mr. Musk’s strategy with X.

But the longer the blackout on X lasts, the more it will test Mr. Musk’s commitment to his ideology at the expense of revenue, market share and influence.

Since 2022, Brazil has ranked fourth globally with more than 25 million downloads of the X app, according to Appfigures, an app data firm. X’s international business has become more important under Mr. Musk, as U.S. advertisers have fled the site because of an increase in hate speech and misinformation since Mr. Musk bought it.

Mr. Musk has overhauled the social network since buying it for $44 billion in 2022, when it was still called Twitter. In addition to renaming the service, he jettisoned many of its rules about what users could say. (Though he introduced a new rule against using a term he deems overly liberal: “cisgender.”) He also reinstated suspended accounts, including that of former President Donald J. Trump.

Yet Mr. Musk said X would still follow the law where it operates. Under his leadership, X has complied with demands from the Indian government to withhold accounts and removed links to a BBC documentary that painted a critical portrait of Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister.

At other times, Mr. Musk has battled orders to remove content, such as in Australia, where he fought an order to remove videos depicting a violent attack against a local bishop.

But he has met a formidable challenge in Justice Moraes.

Few people have had a larger singular impact on what is said online in recent years than the Brazilian judge. He has emerged as one of Brazil’s most powerful — and polarizing — figures after the country’s Supreme Court enshrined him with expansive powers to crack down on threats to democracy online, amid fears about a far-right movement led by Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president.

Ahead of Brazil’s 2022 election, the court empowered Justice Moraes to unilaterally order the takedown of accounts he deemed threats. He has since wielded that power liberally, often in sealed orders that do not disclose why a given account was suspended.

He has ordered X to remove at least 140 accounts, most of them right-wing, including some of Brazil’s most prominent conservative pundits and members of Congress. Some of those accounts questioned Mr. Bolsonaro’s 2022 election loss and sympathized with the right-wing mob that stormed Brazil’s Congress and Supreme Court.

Justice Moraes has also led multiple criminal investigations into Mr. Bolsonaro and voted to deem the former president ineligible to run in Brazil’s next presidential election.

Those efforts have made Justice Moraes a hero of Brazil’s left — and the No. 1 enemy of Brazil’s right.

Mr. Musk suddenly entered the debate in April with a series of posts calling Justice Moraes a dictator, giving new life to Mr. Bolsonaro’s right-wing movement. Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters lauded Mr. Musk as a savior from a tyrannical judge.

Yet when Justice Moraes included Mr. Musk in an investigation into disinformation and began threatening X with fines, the company sent a conciliatory letter that it would comply with the judge’s orders.

Then, in recent weeks, X stopped complying. After Justice Moraes threatened the company’s legal representative in Brazil with arrest, Mr. Musk closed X’s office.

“The people of Brazil have a choice to make — democracy, or Alexandre de Moraes,” X wrote when announcing the move.

Mr. Musk has used X as a political cudgel. To his nearly 200 million followers, he has repeatedly boosted Mr. Trump and other right-wing leaders, while mocking politicians he opposes, such as Vice President Kamala Harris and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil.

Mr. Lula supported the block of X. “Just because someone has money doesn’t mean they can do whatever they want,” he said Friday. “They must accept the country’s rules.”

The U.S. Embassy in Brazil said it was monitoring the dispute. “The United States values freedom of speech as a cornerstone of a healthy democracy,” the embassy said in a statement.

Several authoritarian governments have banned X, including China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Some other nations have temporarily blocked the site at times. In 2021, Nigeria suspended the service for about seven months after the company removed posts the country’s then president threatening secessionist groups.

On Friday, Justice Moraes ordered Brazil’s telecom agency to “adopt all necessary measures” within 24 hours to block people in Brazil from using X.

He also said that people who use VPNs to circumvent the block and access X could face fines of nearly $9,000 a day. VPNs, which can make internet traffic appear as though it was coming from a different country, are common software used for privacy and cybersecurity.

He issued multiple orders on Friday. In the first, he also ordered internet providers to block access to X, and he ordered Apple and Google to prevent downloads of X and popular VPN apps.

People across Brazil quickly criticized the move against VPN apps, and about three hours later, Justice Moraes issued a second order, cutting language about ordering internet providers, Apple and Google to take measures against X or VPN apps.

As a result, it appears the order now relies on Brazil’s telecom agency to force internet and cell-service providers to block access to X, said Carlos Affonso Souza, a Brazilian internet-law professor.

It will become clear in the coming days whether that approach works. X was still online in Brazil by Friday night.

Even with the amendment, Mr. Souza called the order “the most extreme judicial decision out of a Brazilian court in 30 years of internet law in Brazil.”

It is not the first time Brazilian authorities have blocked an online service for ignoring court orders. Yet such blocks have usually lasted just days before a company has reversed course and complied. That was the case in 2022, when Justice Moraes blocked the messaging app Telegram for a weekend.

Mr. Belli, the law professor, said he expected the same with Mr. Musk and X. “My bet is that he might be blocked for a couple of days, and then will comply and portray himself as a victim,” Mr. Belli said. “So he’s still winning.”

To many of the athletes arriving at the 2024 Paralympic Games in Paris, the part of the city designed specifically for them amounted to something of a utopia.

The Paralympic Village had plenty of adaptive scooters that, when latched onto the front of a wheelchair, help it easily navigate the athletes’ mini-city, which is situated in the hilly exurbs of northern Paris. Tri-level water fountains had spouts at standing height, wheelchair level and ground level — for guide dogs. Every shower in the athlete housing complex could be rolled into. Even the T-shirt racks in the official merchandise store could be reached from a seated position.

“It’s the place in the world where I feel the least disabled,” Birgit Skarstein, a Norwegian para rower, said. She added: “I don’t have to go on Google Maps and zoom to see if there are stairs wherever I’m going, you know, to plan. I don’t need to figure out whether I can go to the toilet, because I know. And if the world could be like a Paralympic Village, it would be better for all of us.”

But never mind the world — even the rest of Paris is not like its Paralympic Village. Though the city made extensive improvements in the years leading up to the Games, it will be decades before its cobbled streets, narrow sidewalks and small parks achieve even a semblance of the Village’s accessibility.

Paris’s 124-year-old Metro system poses the largest challenge. Despite the considerable investment in infrastructure made since 2017, when the city won its Olympic bid, only 25 percent of the rail network that travels to central Paris — including the Metro, express rail and trams — is accessible to people with disabilities. And only one Metro line, its newest, is fully accessible to those who use wheelchairs.

“Just to make sure we become full-rights citizens — that’s the whole challenge and the whole idea of the Games,” said Michaël Jérémiasz, a former wheelchair tennis player and member of the Athletes Council who advised the Games’ organizers. “So we’ll measure all this in probably five, six, seven years. That’s where we can really measure the impact of the Games. Before that, that’s not something we’ll feel probably in real life.”

‘The Metro Is a Disgrace’

Before the Paralympic opening ceremony Wednesday, some of Paris’s efforts to improve accessibility were evident. Tactile strips, which aid visually impaired people, blended into the surroundings at some crosswalks near the Arc de Triomphe. Beige boxes attached to sturdy lampposts each housed a button that, when pressed, sounded a series of bells to let visually impaired pedestrians know it was safe to cross the street.

The improvements were made possible by an investment of nearly $140 million as part of an effort to make the Games accessible to everyone. Lamia El Aaraje, the city’s deputy mayor in charge of universal accessibility, said in an interview that 91 percent of municipal buildings would be fully accessible by 2025, up from 40 percent in 2022. She added that nearly $25 million had been spent to bring the city’s bus network to full accessibility by redesigning bus stops and training staff to accommodate disabled passengers.

Along with tactile strips and audible signals at 225 crosswalks, the city also added parking in 17 “accessibility enhanced” districts, with the goal of meeting its pledge to be “universally accessible” before the Olympics opening ceremony in July. The area also has 1,000 additional accessible taxis that Ms. El Aaraje said would remain after the Games.

While she acknowledged that having the Olympics as a deadline had been a useful cudgel to expedite development, Ms. El Aaraje said it went only so far in motivating the many stakeholders across a number of local and national entities.

“The Paris Metro within the city walls, the historic Metro, is not accessible,” she said. “And it’s true that it’s a pity we didn’t seize the opportunity of the Games to try and accelerate this issue.”

On Monday, Valérie Pécresse, the head of the public transport authority Île-de-France Mobilités and president of the Île-de-France regional council, proposed a plan for making all of the railway’s older lines fully accessible at a cost of 15 to 20 billion euros. Ms. Pécresse said the agency was ready to assume a third of the cost and called on the state and the city of Paris to cover the rest.

“We need to sit down and agree on the principle that the main transport issue for the next few years is not the creation of new lines, but the accessibility of the historic network. It’s a political decision that all three of us need to make,” Ms. Pécresse said.

But Ms. El Aaraje called financing a third of the proposal “far-fetched” and said the city had “done our part” in redesigning roads to allow for accessible transport.

“We have been pushing the argument in favor of making the Metro partially accessible,” she said via text.

France passed its first law requiring accessibility in public spaces in 1975, with no deadline for compliance. In 2005, the Law for Equal Rights and Opportunities for People With Disabilities set an initial target date of 2015, but provided no penalty to ensure enforcement. A 2014 act extended the deadline to Sept. 26.

“This deadline, in an extraordinary coincidence, coincides to within a fortnight of the end of the Paralympic Games date,” said Nicolas Mérille, accessibility adviser to APF France Handicap, an advocacy group. By that time, all establishments open to the public, from kindergartens to tobacco shops, should be accessible.

“And public transport must be accessible,” Mr. Mérille said. “And we can already see that there will be a huge backlog.”

Still, in 2021 the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities criticized France for “systemic discrimination against persons with disabilities.” The European Council for Human Rights condemned the country in 2023 for failing to increase access to education, health care, buildings and transportation. (Days later, President Emmanuel Macron announced that France would allocate 1.5 billion euros — roughly $1.67 billion — to making public spaces accessible.)

Though the Olympic and Paralympic Games have touted accessibility efforts on behalf of athletes and spectators, some with disabilities pointed out the difficulty of daily life in Paris. Amaury Bost, who uses a wheelchair, participated in the “Marathon for All” held during the Olympics. He and the team of friends who pushed his all-terrain chair were featured in a video montage shown at the closing ceremony of those Games.

But Mr. Bost, a Paris resident who has used a wheelchair since 2011, is often challenged by the cobblestone, narrow or oddly inclined sidewalks near his home, according to his brother Benoît, his caregiver.

“So if you’re in a wheelchair, you’re dead,” Benoît Bost said. “That’s why you end up with electric wheelchairs on the road and not on the sidewalk.”

Accessibility at the Games

Spectators at the Games, which end Sept. 8, may briefly encounter the inclusive environment that wowed Ms. Skarstein, the Norwegian rower, and other athletes at the Paralympic Village.

“Each of the competition sites has been modified to ensure there will be fluid movement, whether it’s for an athlete, spectator or staff,” Ludivine Munos, the Games’ director of integration, said in a news conference Monday. Buses will ferry passengers from 10 of the largest Metro stations to the 13 Paralympics venues, which have dedicated drop-off zones.

Visually impaired fans at the Stade de France can request headsets that will show an enhanced version of the action displayed on the video boards around the venue. The headsets will also offer audio commentary. At rugby, blind football and goalball events, some fans will be able to follow the matches on touch tablets whose 3-D pieces slide around to indicate player movement.

Porte de la Chapelle Arena, the only venue built specifically for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, was built to be fully accessible. It is hosting badminton events during the Paralympics and will host concerts and games for Paris’s professional basketball team in the future.

For those seeking greater accessibility, it’s a start.

“It cannot be solved with a magic wand: Harry Potter doesn’t exist, unfortunately,” said Alexis Hanquinquant, a para triathlete competing for France. “But what we need to do is build on the legacy of the Paris Games so that every building, every renovation, every new construction can be 100 percent accessible.”

When Maria Innamorato heard last month that the Via Appia — known in English as the Appian Way — had been added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List, she rejoiced.

Ms. Innamorato, the deputy mayor of the town of Cisterna di Latina, Italy, felt the months of effort to craft a dossier detailing her town’s bona fides had finally paid off. But the joy was short-lived.

Later that same day, city officials were told that Cisterna, which is near Rome and is sliced in two by the modern iteration of the ancient road, was along one of the sections of the Appia that UNESCO experts had excluded from the heritage list.

Ms. Innamorato was stunned, as were officials from other towns that were shut out. “We still don’t really know why we were left off,” she said.

In all, three sections of the road, considered by many the world’s first highway, were passed over by experts for the International Council on Monuments and Sites, which evaluates candidates for the heritage list. The towns’ hopes of becoming new magnets for tourists, and their much-needed money, vanished.

Local officials whose towns lie along the road say their own national officials have let them down as well. Gennaro Sangiuliano, Italy’s culture minister, publicly acknowledged that Italy did not object to the decision to leave out some parts of the road. He and other officials feared any delay would have led to the country losing its bragging rights for having the most World Heritage sites.

By adding the Appia, Italy managed to stay just ahead of China, which also had another site listed this year. China now has 59 sites to Italy’s 60.

Beating out China “is something all Italians can be proud of,” Mr. Sangiuliano said during the celebration of the World Heritage designation last month. “This is a primacy that comes from our history, and it is something that we have to safeguard.”

Critics in the excluded sections of the Appia grumbled that the Culture Ministry was not respecting history, but instead sold out to beat the Chinese at the heritage game.

“We will oppose this with every means at our disposal, every means possible to vindicate our right to belong,” the mayor of Cisterna, Valentino Mantini, said.

Experts from the International Council on Monuments and Sites declined to respond to a request for clarification on their reasoning. But in adding the Appia to the list in July, a council’s representative said that the two excluded sections closest to Rome, which include Cisterna, had been left out because they included sites that were located on spurs just off the roadway instead of on the main road.

The shunned Italians huffed that such a ruling showed a basic lack of understanding of the beauty of highway networks.

Two of the excluded sections are in Lazio, the region that includes Rome; one is in Puglia, Italy’s heel.

Known as the “regina viarum,” or the queen of roads, the Appia was built by the Romans starting in 312 B.C. to allow them to move efficiently and to conquer the south of what is modern-day Italy.

Finished about 400 years later and extending to Brindisi, the road became an important trade route and an example of the excellence of Roman engineering. Many sections are still used today, running through fields, sheep tracks and towns.

Some sections still have the original ancient cobblestones. Others have been paved over, including a long, straight tract of road, about 25 pine-tree-lined miles that run from near Cisterna to the coast, that was used to break 20th century speed records.

For Cisterna, there was much more on the line than getting recognition from UNESCO. While so much of Italy is feeling overwhelmed by tourists — think Venice and the Cinque Terre — Cisterna is desperate for visitors. Making it to the World Heritage List was going to be the town’s ticket to revival.

Cisterna had been on a downward spiral in the decades before World War II, losing much of its political clout when Mussolini’s Fascist regime built a series of new towns in the drained Pontine Marshes. The towns jockeyed with Cisterna, which for centuries had been the only town for many miles.

Then, in 1944, Allied bombings and raids destroyed most of the city. The one historic palazzo that was spared now serves as Cisterna’s prized cultural hub, with a library, exhibition space and a room for ceremonies, civil weddings and the occasional concert.

For a city with little left, the Appia came to serve as an anchor to its past and a steppingstone for its future, said Danilo Di Camillo, the municipal worker in charge of culture.

Angela Maria Ferroni, a now retired Culture Ministry official who is widely touted as having masterminded Italy’s Appia bid, said other World Heritage sites like Venice or Pompeii attract “millions of visitors” regardless of the UNESCO imprimatur. But for neglected towns along the Appia, she said, a nod from the experts would have been “an important starting point” for their development.

In the UNESCO bid, Cisterna city officials showcased a local site first excavated in the 1990s: a road station that is cited in the Acts of the Apostles as the place where St. Paul had met some Christians from Rome on his travels to the city.

Local officials still hope that a previous plan to create a walking path along the Appia will come together. The Culture Ministry would like to replicate the success of the Camino de Santiago, which each year attracts tens of thousands of pilgrims and tourists who walk along routes that lead to the burial site of St. James the Great in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

Some 20 million euros were allocated toward the project, which has been bogged down by administrative setbacks. “Unfortunately, the hearsay about Italian bureaucracy exists,” said Luigi Scaroina, the Culture Ministry official in charge of the project. Securing paths where car traffic is heavy is also a concern, he said.

For those along the parts of the road that did win the UNESCO designation, there is optimism that the road will now be better recognized for the cultural treasure it is. Simone Quilici, director of the Appia Antica Archaeological Park, the curated cypress- and umbrella pine-lined segment of the road that begins in central Rome, noted that even this well-known portion of roadway gets only about 60,000 visitors a year, compared with the 12 million who visited the Colosseum last year.

At the Appia celebration, Mr. Sangiuliano, the culture minister, said he was certain that the omission of the three sections of road was “an easily resolvable problem” and pledged to “remedy” the situation. But that could take time because there is only one meeting a year to decide which sites will be inscribed on the World Heritage List. Regardless, when it comes to future decision-making by the Italian government, he said, local officials of the excluded areas will be treated as equals of those whose areas have been included in the site.

Mr. Mantini, the mayor, was only partly appeased. “I want the minister to send me a draft of the commemorative plaque I should put at the entrance of my city,” he said. “Should I write ‘Excluded,’ or ‘It’s there, but we can’t say it is’? Or ‘Part of the Appia patrimony of humanity’ or not?”

Venezuela appears to have sent two foreign members of Ukraine’s military this week to face trial in Moscow, a significant escalation of Kremlin’s campaign to punish its enemies abroad.

The arrest of Colombian fighters in Moscow followed their arrival and subsequent disappearance last month in Venezuela, a neighbor of Colombia and a Russia ally.

Their apparent extradition could damage relations between the governments of Venezuela and Colombia, which share close economic and historical ties, experts said, underlining how the war in Ukraine is creating geopolitical ripples far from the battlefield.

Russian state media on Friday published a video of the country’s secret police interrogating the two Colombians, José Medina and Alejandro Ante, about their combat service in Ukraine, where they fought in the ranks of Ukrainian Armed Forces for eight to 10 months.

A Moscow court on Thursday separately ordered Mr. Medina and Mr. Ante taken into custody on accusations of being mercenaries, a crime under Russian and international law.

Relatives of the two Colombian servicemen confirmed to The New York Times that the men seen in the video being hauled through a corridor by security officers and later interrogated were Mr. Medina and Mr. Ante.

The relatives said they last heard from the two men, retired Colombian professional soldiers, when they landed in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, on July 18, as they traveled home from the battlefields of Ukraine.

“Hey my cutie, heading to Venezuela, and soon to Colombia,” Mr. Medina, 37, said in a video sent to his wife Cielo Paz, as he walked in his military uniform toward an airplane that would take him from Madrid to Caracas. Mr. Medina later shared his geolocation in Caracas’s international airport, Ms. Paz’s phone records show, before breaking off contact.

Venezuela’s government has not commented on the apparent detention and extradition of the Colombian soldiers. The country’s foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Venezuela’s government has also not responded to official requests made in the past month by Colombia for information about Mr. Medina and Mr. Ante’s whereabouts, according to copies of two diplomatic letters seen by The New York Times.

Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, has long allied himself with Russia in his standoff with the United States over his government’s authoritarian turn.

But he has also attempted to maintain good relations with Colombia’s leftist president, Gustavo Petro, an ideological peer of Venezuela’s nominally socialist government.

Venezuela’s apparent extradition of two Colombian citizens comes at a particularly sensitive time for Mr. Maduro’s relations with Mr. Petro, who is attempting to mediate a political agreement between the Venezuelan government and the opposition following a contested presidential election there last month.

Venezuela’s electoral body proclaimed Mr. Maduro the winner without providing any details, while vote counts from electoral observers released by the opposition show that he lost decisively.

In approving the apparent extradition of Colombian citizens, Venezuela’s government is showing that Mr. Maduro is prioritizing traditional alliances with authoritarian nations such as Russia at the expense of more neutral democracies such as Colombia as he hunkers down, said Vladimir Rouvinski, an expert on Latin American relations with Russia at the Icesi University in Cali, Colombia.

“Maduro has crossed out the possibility of reaching any sort of beneficial deal with Petro,” Mr. Rouvinski said.

Mr. Medina and Mr. Ante are the first foreign combatants of the war in Ukraine known to face service-related charges after being detained in a third country.

Both Russia and Ukraine have relied on thousands of foreigners to boost their depleted forces.

Some joined the war because they sought adventure, wanted to defend an ideological cause or because they hated the enemy. But many others — particularly from poorer countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa — went to Ukraine primarily to earn a living for their families.

Colombian fighters have proven to be particularly useful recruits for the Ukrainian military because of their experience fighting Marxist guerrillas and training with U.S. weapons and officers.

Hundreds of retired Colombian soldiers have traveled to Ukraine since the start of the war to fight for Kyiv for about $3,000 a month, more than they could make at home based on their skills, about a dozen Colombian recruits and their relatives said in interviews.

“The money simply did not add up,” Mr. Ante’s brother, River Arbey Ante, said in a brief phone interview on Friday, describing his motivation to enlist. As a frontline soldier, Mr. Ante earned in Ukraine more than double what he had made as a bodyguard in a provincial capital of southern Colombia, his brother said.

Mr. Ante and Mr. Medina had served in the Carpathian Sich 49th Infantry Battalion, one of the two main destinations for Latin American recruits in Ukraine’s Armed Forces.

Russia and Ukraine have sought to punish foreign nationals who had joined the opposing side, to raise morale among their own citizens and deter others from joining the enemy.

Early in the war, a court in Russian-occupied Ukraine issued death sentences against two British nationals and a Moroccan who were taken prisoner while fighting for Ukraine. The sentences were never carried out, and the men were later repatriated in a prisoner exchange.

Since then, Russia has tried Ukraine’s foreign fighters mostly in absentia.

Ukraine has conducted similar trials against captured foreigners fighting for Russia. Most famously, a Ukrainian court convicted a Brazilian man on terrorism charges before eventually returning him to Brazil.

International law is ambiguous about the legality of foreigners such as Mr. Medina and Mr. Ante joining a faraway war, legal experts have said. Such men partly meet the definition of mercenaries, who are banned under the Geneva Convention because they are motivated primarily by money and have no ties to combatant nations.

But because foreign fighters in Ukraine are members of the regular armed forces and receive similar payments and benefits as Ukrainian citizens, the Ukrainian government has claimed that they are legal combatants.

In addition to the Geneva Convention, Russian law explicitly bans mercenaries. The Kremlin, however, has relied significantly on private military companies to recover from the setbacks of its invasion two years ago, and since last year has recruited heavily from nations such as Cuba, Nepal and Syria.

The risk to Russia of its reliance on mercenaries became apparent last year, when the leader of the Wagner paramilitaries, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, staged a mutiny and marched his forces on Moscow. He died in a plane crash months later.

In Colombia, relatives of Mr. Medina and Mr. Ante said they were still waiting to learn what happened to their loved ones. Mr. Medina was scheduled to arrive home on his birthday, July 19. One of the last messages he read on his phone was a photo taken by his wife, Ms. Paz, of a festive table decorated with balloons and a hanging “Happy Birthday” sign.

An official at the Colombian Embassy in Moscow said on Friday that the embassy had learned about the former soldiers’ detention from news reports and that they had yet to receive a reply from Russia’s foreign ministry about the men’s status.

The lack of response from the Venezuelan and Russian governments presents a diplomatic challenge for Mr. Petro’s government, said Mr. Rouvinski, the political science professor.

After assuming the presidency in 2022, Mr. Petro has sought to preserve Colombia’s status as a main ally of the United States in South America. But he has also assumed a neutral position on Russia’s invasion, even after a Russian strike injured several prominent Colombian intellectuals visiting Ukraine.

In late 2022, Mr. Petro’s ambassador to Russia, Hector Arenas, offered a tip to Russian tourists who wanted to visit Colombia despite the various wartime travel restrictions: fly via Venezuela.

Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting from Bogotá, and Stanislav Kozliuk from Kyiv.

Even before the #MeToo movement rocked Hollywood and rippled around the globe, the film industry in India’s prosperous and progressive south had embarked on a reckoning of its own.

In early 2017, a superstar of Malayalam film was accused of hiring criminals to abduct and rape a female star in a brutal case of retaliation. That prompted the government of the state of Kerala, where the Malayalam film industry is based, to conduct an investigation into what had long been an open secret: that the male-dominated cinema was rife with sexual abuse and harassment.

The government promised safer work spaces for women in the industry. The actor went to jail, then got out on bail as his high-profile trial continued. But while the investigation’s report was completed in 2019, it was never made public, and the movement fizzled out before any justice was served — a sign of the widespread impunity in India for sexual violence and harassment.

Now, the movement has gotten a second wind, after media organizations and others filed a petition that forced the report’s release.

The report, while redacted to protect the privacy of both the victims and the powerful industry figures they accuse, offers damning evidence of widespread gender discrimination and sexual misconduct.

Exploitative practices, like seeking sexual favors for entry into the field and landing movie roles, were prevalent. Basic safety for women, such as separate bathrooms or changing rooms, was neglected. Gender pay gaps were large, and female actors, technicians, makeup artists and dancers were deprived of legally binding contracts.

In the roughly two weeks since the report’s release, more victims have emerged with more stories of abuse. Some of the most powerful men in Malayalam cinema have resigned from their posts in industry organizations, in some cases because they were directly accused of sexual misconduct and are facing criminal investigations.

The #MeToo revival in the Malayalam film industry has come as the country is gripped by protests over another gruesome case of sexual violence in the workplace: the rape and murder of a female doctor in Kolkata after a long shift at work.

The release of the report has offered a measure of vindication for the victims and other women who spoke up years ago and faced widespread retaliation, with many struggling to find work, while the accused actor, known as Dileep, remained free and continued on to even bigger hits.

The report, which was compiled by what is known as the Hema Committee, named for the female judge who led the inquiry, turned to poetic language to describe the ugly reality among the industry’s stars. “The sky is full of mysteries, with the twinkling stars and the beautiful moon,” the report said. “But scientific investigation revealed that stars do not twinkle, nor does the moon look beautiful.”

The Kerala government has faced severe criticism over its handling of the matter. The state’s chief minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, is seen as having protected the rich and powerful in the film industry by having the report withheld. While Malayalam cinema is much smaller than the Hindi cinema of Bollywood, its leaders and stars wield enormous influence in South India.

The rot in Malayalam cinema remained under the surface even as it projected a progressive image and tackled sensitive subjects that mainstream Bollywood and India’s other regional cinemas did not.

J. Devika, a feminist historian who studies culture in modern Kerala, said that the report would merely be “eyewash” unless it led to justice and change.

“Their inaction since its release and their reluctance to release it in the first place shows a lack of political will to bring about any change,” she said of the Kerala government. The government, she added, is “politically progressive but socially and culturally conservative.”

Two news organizations, The News Minute and Newslaundry, collaborated on an investigation that detailed how Dileep, the actor, had gotten away with what they called the “orchestrated nightmare” of the alleged abduction and rape. The news organizations said the case showed how deeply rooted misogyny was, even in a seemingly progressive state.

Dileep has repeatedly cast himself as a victim, both questioning the credibility of the survivor’s accusations and minimizing her success and talent. Seven years later, the legal case against him is still pending trial.

Since the report’s release, the entire executive committee of the Association of Malayalam Movie Artists has resigned. That organization, the regional cinema’s premier organizing body, is accused of maintaining a silence that enabled abusers. So are several big-name male stars.

Female artists have banded together to form a collective that is pushing for a wider investigation into problems in the industry. Their efforts saw that an Internal Complaints Committee, mandated under an Indian law on sexual harassment in workplaces, was set up on film sets too.

But members of the collective said that female actors and groups like theirs were left to bear the “unfair burden” of seeking basic dignity and safety.

“We are film professionals, not activists,” said Bina Paul, one of the founding members of the collective. “The onus is on the civil society, as much as on the women, to speak up.”

Mujib Mashal contributed reporting.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine dismissed the head of the country’s Air Force on Friday, days after the crash of an F-16 warplane in what may have been a friendly fire incident.

A Western official who has been briefed on the preliminary investigation of the crash said that there were “indications” that friendly fire from a Patriot missile battery might have brought down the jet, though mechanical failure and pilot error have not been ruled out.

The dismissal of the Air Force commander, Lt. Gen. Mykola Oleschuk, announced by the president in a post on the Telegram social media app, is the second high-profile departure this year. In February, Mr. Zelensky dismissed Ukraine’s top military leader, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, replacing him with Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky.

Mr. Zelensky gave no specific reason for the decision, which came one day after the Air Force had announced the loss of the F-16, but said that it was necessary to strengthen military leadership. “We need to get stronger,” he said. “And we need to take care of people. Take care of the personnel. Take care of all our soldiers.”

The plane crashed on Monday while defending against an intense aerial attack by Russian forces, which on Friday hit an apartment block in Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, killing at least seven people and wounding scores more, local authorities said.

The possibility of friendly fire incidents becomes especially acute during mass attacks by missiles and drones, military experts say.

“Keeping track of what’s the good guy and what’s the bad guy particularly when there are missiles flying around at the same time is difficult,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington. “Fratricide is a huge problem.”

The United States has supplied Ukraine with Patriots, which include a powerful radar system and mobile launchers that fire missiles at incoming projectiles, and the Ukrainian military has used them frequently as part of its defense against Russian aerial attacks.

Ukraine took delivery of half a dozen F-16’s just a few weeks ago, the first of a total of 45 promised by its allies in Europe. The loss of one so soon after their arrival is a significant blow to Ukraine’s effort to integrate the aircraft into its war effort, and to convince NATO allies that it can efficiently handle sophisticated Western weapons.

The pilot of the plane, Lt. Col. Oleksiy Mes, died in the crash. He was one of only about a dozen Ukrainians who had been through an accelerated training program before going into battle, an element of added risk, experts said.

The United States and Ukraine are already collaborating on an investigation of the matter, and the American defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, and Ukraine’s minister of defense, Rustem Umerov, held a scheduled meeting in Washington on Friday.

The aircraft, delivered after many months of pressure by Mr. Zelensky and other senior officials, are the most high-profile pieces of military hardware supplied by the country’s allies during the war.

As such, they have become a symbol of Ukraine’s defense and their pilots were considered by many people to be national heroes.

In a statement about the crash on Thursday, the Air Force said only that “communication was lost” with the plane, leaving unclear whether it had been shot down, by either enemy or friendly fire, or was a victim of mechanical failure, pilot error or another factor. The Air Force also said that F-16’s had shot down four Russian cruise missiles on Monday.

Military experts said that, while the loss of the aircraft is a setback, it is not unusual for fighter jets to crash, even in peacetime training missions, and that the impact on Ukraine’s overall war effort was likely to be small.

“Flying these things is a very high risk activity,” said Ben Barry, a senior fellow at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a research institute in London.

Ukrainians have placed great faith in the potential battlefield impact of F-16s, which are better equipped for both defensive and offensive operations than the fleet of Soviet-era aircraft that Ukraine’s Air Force has been using. But experts have cautioned that it could take years before enough of the planes are delivered — and enough pilots and ground crews trained — for their full impact to be felt.

A recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies said that it should be possible for Ukraine to start to use the aircraft to hit ground targets soon, but it “will be years before the Ukrainian Air Force has enough experience to execute combat missions effectively.”

The nationwide missile and drone strike on Monday was one of the largest since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Moscow followed up with another barrage on Tuesday and a smaller one on Thursday. In addition, Russia has also pummeled frontline areas in eastern Ukraine.

On Friday, a Russian glide bomb hit a mid-rise apartment block in Kharkiv, the head of the regional military administration, Oleh Syniehubov, said in a post on the Telegram social media app. Mr. Syniehubov said the strike would not have succeeded if Ukraine had adequate air defenses. He later said that seven people had been killed and nearly 60 others wounded.

Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine.