Russia on Sunday bombarded residential areas of Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, with ballistic missiles and powerful guided bombs, wounding more than 40 civilians, Ukrainian officials said. The attack came hours after what the Russian authorities said was a wave of drone attacks against energy facilities across Russia, including an oil refinery in Moscow.

At least 10 explosions rocked Kharkiv, a city of 1.3 million situated less than 25 miles from the Russian border, local officials said, warning that they expected the number of casualties to rise as emergency crews raced across the city to various blast sites.

The attack on Kharkiv came less than 48 hours after powerful Russian guided bombs hit the city on Friday, striking a 12-story residential building and devastating a children’s park. At least six people were killed in those strikes, including a 14-year-old girl. In addition, 59 people were reported injured, with 20 in serious condition and some requiring amputations, Oleh Syniehubov, the head of the Kharkiv military administration, said in a statement.

In the attack on Sunday, Mr. Syniehubov said that a post office, a sports complex, a shopping center, stores and cars were damaged. “The enemy targeted only civilian infrastructure,” Mr. Syniehubov said. In a later statement, he said that at least 41 people were wounded.

The Russian Ministry of Defense did not offer any immediate comment on the strikes in Kharkiv.

The city’s Palace of Sports, which features a 4,000-seat arena, was targeted by four strikes, Ukraine’s National Olympic Committee said in a statement. “The sports complex was destroyed,” the committee said.

Rescue workers searched for survivors in the rubble of the complex throughout the afternoon and into the evening.

Earlier, the Russian military claimed to have largely thwarted one of the largest Ukrainian drone assaults directed at Russia territory since the start of the full-scale war, and said it had shot down 158 drones across 15 regions.

Local officials in Russia reported fires and explosions caused by drone attacks at a number of facilities, including an oil refinery in Moscow and one of the largest energy production facilities in the central Russian region of Tver.

Military analysts confirmed geolocated footage showing a successful Ukrainian strike on the Moscow oil refinery in Kaputnya, which is only about 10 miles from the Kremlin.

“The inability of Russia’s air and missile defense systems to protect against relatively crude long-range, one-way drone attacks is surprising,” Fabian Hoffman, a doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, who specializes in missile technology, wrote on X.

Many of the drones were directed at targets in the regions of Kursk, Bryansk, Voronezh and Belgorod, all of which border Ukraine, according to the Russian military. The reports by Russian officials could not be independently verified.

In a statement issued Sunday, before the Kharkiv attack was reported, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine did not comment on specific strikes against Russian targets but said, “It is only fair that Ukrainians should be able to respond to Russian terror in exactly the way necessary to stop it.”

The Ukrainian military has repeatedly targeted Russian oil and gas facilities in what it has said is an effort to undermine Russia’s ability to supply its forces with fuel and cut into the energy revenues that fund the Kremlin’s war effort.

It was difficult to assess the effect of the overnight attacks or the overall Ukrainian campaign. As the number of Ukrainian strikes has increased, Moscow has increasingly limited the information it releases on its oil industry.

Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service completely stopped publishing data on the production of oil products in the country this past week.

While Kyiv has been attacking oil facilities for months, the campaign has yet to have a demonstrable effect on the fighting inside Ukraine, where Russian forces have made steady gains throughout the summer in the eastern Donbas region.

The Russian advance in the direction of Pokrovsk, a vital logistics hub, threatens to undermine Ukraine’s ability to supply its forces across a broad swath of the front line.

And even as Ukraine steps up its strikes inside Russia, they still pale in comparison to the destruction wrought by Russian attacks on Ukrainian towns and cities since the war began in February 2022. Moscow has directed around 10,000 missiles, 14,000 long-range attack drones and 33,000 guided bombs at targets across Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian military.

In the past week alone, Mr. Zelensky said, Russia used more than 160 missiles of various types, 780 guided aerial bombs and 400 attack drones to hit targets across Ukraine.

There did not appear to be any military facilities in the vicinity of several places hit in Kharkiv on Sunday. One strike site was a shopping area where the blast caused a fire from a gas pipe.

Another strike site visited by The New York Times was a residential area next to the sports complex. There was a massive crater in the middle of a children’s playground, a hole gouged in the earth near battered slides and seesaws.

A burst water main caused flooding across the whole neighborhood and residents scrambled to use the rubble from the blast site to hand build a dam in a futile attempt to stop waters from inundating apartment blocks.

Given the advantages Russia holds in terms of troop numbers and firepower in the war, Kyiv has been employing a variety of asymmetric strategies.

These include an offensive into the Kursk region of western Russia, grabbing hundreds of square miles of territory in a matter of weeks, in an effort to force Moscow to pull resources from the Ukrainian front to defend its own land. So far, the Kremlin appears determined not to redeploy elements of the military engaged in offensive operations.

Ukrainian leaders have said their efforts to undermine the Russian war effort have been hampered by restrictions on the use of long-range weapons provided by its allies to hit targets inside Russia. The Biden administration has resisted changing the policy out of concern that it could lead to an escalation in the war and draw NATO into a more direct conflict with Moscow.

Ukraine’s defense minister, Rustem Umerov, traveled to Washington over the weekend to press the Biden administration to lift the restrictions, presenting senior officials with a list of military sites that Ukraine would like to hit as soon as the ban is lifted.

Ukraine is also desperate to find a way to limit Russia’s ability to unleash powerful guided bombs from warplanes that can be deployed from the relative safety of the skies above Russia by attacking the airfields where the aircraft begin their bombing runs.

“I appeal to the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany: We need the abilities to really and fully protect Ukraine and Ukrainians,” Mr. Zelensky said on Saturday. “We require both: permissions for long-range use, and your long-range shells and missiles.”

At the same time as Kyiv presses its allies for support, Ukraine has been busy developing its own domestically produced long-range weapons. And Mr. Zelensky said last week that Ukraine had carried out a successful test of the first domestically produced ballistic missile.

He also recently announced the development of a “new class” of domestically produced, long-range strike weapons — a drone powered with a rocket engine.

But the weapons are still in the early stages of development, and Kyiv still has to largely rely on its expanding fleet of slow moving, fixed-wing drones to hit targets deep inside Russia.

Nataliia Novosolova contributed reporting.

Ten p.m. arrives in Cairo’s Sayyida Zeinab neighborhood with the same dogged tenacity as it does anywhere else, but down the fluorescent shopping streets and in the sidewalk cafes, few people used to glance at the clock. It might have been near bedtime in other countries, but Cairo was practically still waking up.

That was summer in the past, season of sweat, and the city adapted its schedule. Days were for cooling inside, or at least avoiding the sun’s blitzkrieg. Nighttime offered mercy. Though the concrete sidewalks still belched up the day’s accumulated heat, the neighborhood came alive only after isha, the last of the five daily Muslim prayers. The day went on long into early morning.

Not this summer. With an energy shortage prompting the government to mandate earlier closing times, 10 p.m. now brings a dimming to Sayyida Zeinab: metal shutters are down or rolling toward the ground, turning the loudly colored, exuberantly lit storefronts to gray.

Years into an economic crunch that has left the government scrambling for dollars and made life a misery for all but the richest, Egypt is short on natural gas and funds to buy more, necessitating daily countrywide blackouts until a few weeks ago.

So, starting in July, orders came from on high: To save electricity, stores must close by 10 p.m. and cafes, restaurants and malls by midnight, slightly later on weekends. Only groceries and pharmacies are exempt.

Wealthy Cairenes in the sprawling suburbs can go from air-conditioned homes to air-conditioned cars to air-conditioned malls, or even send their doormen on errands. In the cramped, churning traditional areas of central Cairo, that option does not exist.

“If you go out to shop during the day, you’ll boil yourself,” said Hind Ahmed, 51, who had gone with a friend recently to pick up clothes from a tailor after evening prayers at Sayyida Zeinab’s landmark mosque. “But we end up having to roast, because the stores close early now.”

Her friend Wafaa Ibrahim, 46, barely goes out anymore anyway, late opening times or no. She cannot afford to.

“The minute I run out of money, I lock myself up at home,” she said. “Now I don’t go out shopping because I don’t want to depress myself.”

By that point, it was well past 10 p.m., and signs of halfhearted compliance were appearing. In recent weeks, one shopkeeper who was closing up explained, the police had been driving down the main streets every night, enforcing the order.

No power can mute Cairo entirely. But the volume was uncharacteristically low, the shoppers dwindling even as motorcycles and tuk-tuks blared down the street.

In some ways, the stillness matched the country’s gloom. The all-night hustle of working-class neighborhoods like Sayyida Zeinab, the mahraganat tunes that blare from tuk-tuks and the dazzling displays of nuts and candies can make for a misleading, if jaunty, facade.

Teenage girls peek at windows full of clothed mannequins. Mothers in loose abayas shop for children’s sneakers, their sons and daughters occupied with cups of cold mango-topped pudding. Cafe tables colonize part of the street, lorded over by men who suck at water pipes and nurse coffees until late.

Tourists marvel at the shimmying street, at Egyptians’ famed friendliness and broad humor. But locals say they joke to cope with what they cannot change.

“Egypt is a graveyard,” said Saied Mahmoud, 41, who works from noon until closing time in his father’s small, wedge-shaped clothing shop near the mosque. “Everybody is dead on the inside. They’ve surrendered; they’re down. What you see in front of you is dead people walking.”

He earns barely enough for food, rent and bus fare after years of soaring prices, even if inflation had cooled somewhat in recent months, he said. Like many overeducated, underemployed Egyptians, he cannot find better work despite his master’s degree in business. Marriage? He could only laugh at the thought of what a wedding, wife and children would cost.

It was only getting worse, he said: Despite his sly attempts to stay open past 10 (shutter partly closed, lights dimmed), customers were hardly coming anyway, either driven away by the rows of shut shops or unable to afford new clothes.

Having to close earlier “just made muddy water even muddier,” he said, using an Egyptian expression meaning things had gone from bad to worse.

Since coming to power in a 2013 military takeover, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has promised prosperity for a new, improved Egypt. For most Egyptians, however, most of the past decade has been a downward spiral.

Successive devaluations of the currency starting in 2016 damaged their ability to buy the imported goods Egypt depends on. The coronavirus pandemic and wars in Ukraine and the Middle East shocked an economy already weakened by Mr. el-Sisi’s policies. Inflation soared; wages did not, and Egypt skimped on the health care and education spending that once supported middle-class life.

Despite recent infusions of cash from international investors and lenders that have stabilized the economy, analysts say the country may face a new crisis unless it makes major changes.

Though Egypt says it has expanded welfare programs, the most recent official statistics say just under 30 percent of Egyptians live in poverty. But that was before the pandemic and the most recent economic crisis. And International Monetary Fund bailouts have forced the government to cut bread, gas and electricity subsidies vital to many poor Egyptians.

Just last month, Egypt increased electricity prices again.

That means even more of a squeeze for Ahmed Ashour’s barbershop, named for the Yugoslav statesman Josip Broz Tito. Usually, he stays open from 7 p.m. until 5 a.m. all summer: It is so hot out that men’s skin gets inflamed if they come for a shave during the day, he explained. Besides, he has a day job from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Finance Ministry — he cannot make ends meet without both.

Side streets, including the one where Tito stood, seemed to escape enforcement of the government order. But the main streets’ early darkening meant fewer people around, period. Between that and customers’ thinning wallets, Mr. Ashour estimated that he had lost 70 percent of his business during the economic crisis.

Customers from around the neighborhood used to drop by for a haircut and stay for hours, he said, hanging out on his worn black chairs with endless cups of coffee and tea. Now they said quick hellos on their way to their own second or third jobs.

People had the new school year to pay for, summer vacations and the ever-rising cost of practically everything. “A man will consider other stuff, he doesn’t pay attention to how he looks,” he said, though he noted that some customers had learned to cut their own hair at home.

“There’s a point where we can’t continue like this,” he said, his forehead dewed with sweat even at 11 p.m. “It’s as if we’re hanging ourselves.”

In a nearby alleyway, Hosni Mohammed, 67, was closing up the optical shop where he earned a small salary. From 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., he said, almost nobody came in these days.

“Someone taught me that business falls asleep, but never dies completely,” he said, trying to take the long view. “Just like Egypt. It gets tired, but never dies.”

Emad Mekay contributed reporting.

It was once a thriving metropolis in the heart of oil country in Venezuela.

That city, Maracaibo, no longer exists.

Today, the city is rife with abandoned houses, some of which look like bombs were dropped on them, because homeowners tore windows and roofs off to sell for scrap before they took off on journeys to Colombia, Chile and the United States. Middle-class neighborhoods are filled with for sale signs and overgrown yards.

Fewer cars drive down the streets, and fewer criminals are around to steal them. Christmas dinners, once packed with noisy relatives, are lonely affairs aided by webcams.

Nearly eight million people — more than a quarter of the population — have fled Venezuela in recent years, driven out by economic misery and political repression.

Nowhere is that exodus more staggeringly acute than in Maracaibo, which has been hollowed out by the loss of about half a million of its 2.2 million inhabitants — many of them adults in their late teens to middle age. (The population figure is based on surveys, since the government has not conducted an official census in more than a decade.)

“The first blow you sense is the loneliness,” said Maracaibo’s mayor, Rafael Ramírez. “It’s devastating, and affects you emotionally.”

Maracaibo, which is in western Venezuela and remains the country’s second-largest city, has been battered by a collapsed economy, routine blackouts and persistent gasoline and water shortages.

Many working adults searching for jobs elsewhere have left their children home until they can establish a firmer footing, leaving aging grandparents to fill the breach.

“Right now, this is a country of old people,’’ said Antonio Sierra, 72, as he sat in his living room lounge chair and looked up at a window where outside many of the houses on his block are empty.

All three of Mr. Sierra’s adult children are gone. One of his sons left behind a baby, Rafael, who is now 7. Last year, even the boy’s teachers left. Mr. Sierra and some other grandparents took up a collection to pay a replacement $2 a week to teach first grade.

Maracaibo is now bracing for another wave of departures in the coming months given the country’s plunge into instability after a national election in July that the autocratic president, Nicolás Maduro, claimed to win even though vote tallies showed he lost decisively.

His government has unleashed a brutal campaign against anyone challenging the electoral results, and with the United States among the many countries that have rejected Mr. Maduro’s claim to victory, the U.S. sanctions that have deepened Venezuela’s economic woes are not likely be eased anytime soon.

A mass departure of the country’s dwindling numbers of doctors, nurses, sanitation workers and bus drivers would be even more brutal in Maracaibo, where so many who filled those jobs are already gone.

Mr. Ramírez longs for the days when companies held conferences in Maracaibo and when the state oil company produced so much petroleum at a nearby lake that its workers enjoyed a comfortable standard of living.

“This was an oil city, a city that had designed a convention center so that all industries, people, the oil industry, would come here, ” Mr. Ramírez said. “That city is not going to come back, but it has to be reinvented.”

The sharp increase in migration from Maracaibo, the mayor said, began about a decade ago. It followed the collapse of the state oil company, which was caused by corruption, a lack of investment and political purges of skilled employees — and exacerbated by U.S. sanctions.

An enormous nationwide power outage in 2019 triggered days of looting in Maracaibo and tipped the scales. The State of Zulia, which includes Maracaibo, borders Colombia, making leaving on foot easier for people who could not afford airfare. (The power went out again on Friday, when a major blackout cut electricity nationwide.)

A recent survey commissioned by the Chamber of Commerce in Zulia showed that nearly 70 percent of the families interviewed had an immediate family member outside the country.

At least half of the people questioned for another survey commissioned by Maracaibo’s mayor said they were considering leaving, a number considerably higher than the overall national rate of 30 percent of survey respondents who expressed a desire to go, said Efraín Rincón, a political consultant who conducted the surveys.

“Faced with this reality, we see that the portion of the elderly is growing, but not organically — not because there are more older people,” Mr. Rincón said. “It’s because there are fewer young people.”

Much was riding on the election on July 28, when Mr. Maduro faced off against Edmundo González, a retired diplomat who took the place of a more popular opposition candidate barred by the government from running.

Polling machine tallies collected by electoral observers showed that Mr. González won easily. The government says otherwise, but more than a month after the race, officials have yet to provide precinct-level election results.

Many people, even longtime supporters of Mr. Maduro’s mentor, former President Hugo Chávez, had counted on an opposition triumph to start reversing the country’s fortunes and lure their loved ones back home.

María Corina Machado, the opposition leader who was prevented from running, made that a cornerstone of Mr. González’s campaign.

Instead, the government quickly cracked down on demonstrations in the days after the election — arresting around 2,000 protesters, activists, journalists and politicians.

With the Maduro government showing no inclination to negotiate a solution to the electoral crisis, migration levels later this year are “going to be dramatic,” said Mirla Pérez, a professor and social science researcher at the University of Central Venezuela. “Right now, people are strategizing how to leave.”

Ms. Pérez said migrants typically first leave their children behind and then send for them later, once they are financially situated. Eventually, they send for their parents, too.

A recent trip to the airport in Maracaibo found a number of people, including several older adults, leaving for good to join their adult children in Spain and Argentina. Taxi drivers who frequently make the three-hour trip to the Colombian border reported long lines of Venezuelans leaving on foot.

Back in Maracaibo, hundreds of thousands of older people are in precarious conditions, according to a nonprofit, Convite, earning around $3 a month in retirement benefits. Though most people receive some money from relatives abroad, Mr. Rincón’s surveys showed that the average amount was less than $25 a month.

The Maduro administration, in an apparent acknowledgment of the problem, created a Ministry for Older Adults to guarantee access to health care, food and public services.

Mr. Sierra’s wife, Marlenis Miranda, 68, said she managed the household around the schedule of when power and water were available.

Electricity comes on maybe once a week, sometimes every other week. When the water turns on every week or so, she fills four huge barrels to use the rest of the week, and reuses bath water to flush the toilets.

Their son, a former police officer, is driving for Uber in Texas, while their daughter is working at a nursery school in Vermont. Another son, who in 2013 was the first in the family to leave, is a graphic designer in Barcelona.

“Sometimes you look outside on a Saturday and say, ‘Oh, how this looks so alone,” Ms. Miranda said. “So alone.”

After two of Edith Luzardo’s children left Maracaibo for the United States, Ms. Luzardo, stayed behind raising her two grandchildren. When The New York Times visited her in July, she lamented how only five people were left in a house where 24 people once lived.

She debated whether to wait to be approved for entry into the United States under a special Biden administration migration program, but in August, it was briefly suspended.

Two days after the suspension announcement, Ms. Luzardo decided to take the same treacherous route many Venezuelans have followed, through the Darién Gap, a jungle path connecting Central and South America.

“I’m not afraid,” Ms. Luzardo, 66, said. “I’m strong.”

Low on money, Ms. Luzardo, one of her sons and the two grandchildren she had been raising were stranded for a few days in Costa Rica before finally making it to Mexico, according to her son.

Xiomara Ortega, 68, said so many people planned to leave if Mr. Maduro won that she expected to be the only one left in her Maracaibo neighborhood. Two of her daughters are in Colombia, and Ms. Ortega is raising six grandchildren.

On most days, she has no water — or even money to buy any. She sweeps neighbors patios for extra cash and steals electricity from a nearby utility pole. She looked around at the sparse low-income settlement and counted three empty houses.

“There’s no one left,” Ms. Ortega said. “I will stay.”

Sheyla Urdaneta contributed reporting.

Placards on the train bluntly listed its purpose: “Evacuation.”

With hugs and teary goodbyes, families bundled children and the elderly aboard coaches at the central train station in the eastern Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk. They stood and waved through the windows as they departed.

With the Russian Army at its doorstep and closing in quickly, Pokrovsk is a town bowing to reality. The police drive around with loudspeakers blaring instructions to leave now. Municipal workers have shipped out library books, elementary school desks and statues from parks and squares.

By late afternoon, with a curfew in effect, the streets were eerily deserted last week, except for military vehicles zipping about.

The Ukrainian military’s surprise attack into Russia last month came as one of Kyiv’s boldest gambles of the war, bringing swift gains in land and prisoners captured. But hundreds of miles away, inside Ukraine, the wholesale evacuation of Pokrovsk is evidence of the operation’s risks.

Ukraine was calculating that its incursion over the border would force Russia to divert troops to defend there. Instead, Moscow has carried on with its relentless advance in eastern Ukraine, and Pokrovsk, a key logistics and transit hub, is in the path of destruction.

“It didn’t go as planned,” Mykyta Pohorelyi, a 19-year-old evacuating with his mother and sister, said of the Ukrainian Army’s move into Russia.

President Volodymyr Zelensky and his top military commander have conceded that the offensive into Russia, which began Aug. 6, fell short of the objective of forcing Moscow to redeploy forces from the Donbas region of Ukraine.

Now, it is too late to ensure that Pokrovsk will be protected from artillery bombardment, the town’s military administrator said.

In the fast-moving fighting in fields and villages nearby, the Ukrainian military has retreated in places by more than a mile a day, soldiers fighting in the area said. The Russians are now six miles outside the town.

Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, is “still thinking of how to keep the occupied territories and does not think about how to protect his people,” Mr. Zelensky said of Moscow’s response to Ukraine’s incursion.

Ukraine’s military commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, said Russia had redeployed 30,000 troops to defend against the Kursk operation, but not from the offensive in the Donbas, the region of coal mines and sunflower fields that has been a principal Russian target in its two-and-a-half-year-old invasion.

Russian forces since April have ground through five defensive lines east of Pokrovsk, said Serhiy Dobryak, the town’s military administrator. With only two more lines remaining, the incursion into Russia, and the potential diversion it might cause, was essentially a last hope.

The town for now is not at risk of imminent capture, he said, but officials expect a sustained artillery bombardment that is likely to leave it in ruins. That has been the fate of other Ukrainian towns like Bakhmut and Avdiivka that Russia pummeled into rubble before forcing Ukraine to pull back.

“They will bring the artillery nearby and they will destroy the town,” Mr. Dobryak said. “That will happen.”

With that prospect looming, the town’s population has dropped from about 62,000 inhabitants at the beginning of August to 36,000 today. Signs of people fleeing are everywhere.

At the train station, coaches rattled and clanged. Brakes were released with a hissing noise, signaling an imminent departure.

A mother watched her daughter’s teary goodbye to the daughter’s husband, who would be staying to continue working in a coal mine. “Don’t cry,” she said, “let me cry for you.”

Grocery stores have closed. Moving vans parked along leafy back streets. Sidewalks are cluttered with bed frames, flat-screen televisions and plastic bags packed with clothes.

A curfew is now in effect, except for four hours in the late morning and afternoon.

“The enemy is close and getting closer,” said Ihor Kopytsya, the owner of a stationery store who was trying to unload the last of his notebooks, pens and backpacks before the bombing began.

Asked about the military’s gamble that an attack into Russia would slow the advance toward his town, he called it a worthy attempt. “They hoped it would work but it didn’t,” he said.

Volodymyr Porosyuk, 20, was evacuating with his grandmother, Zoya Porosyuk, 88. “When we push them out, we will come back,” he said. “If there’s anything to come back to.”

At a school repurposed for registering internally displaced people, volunteers with an aid group, Light of Donbas, handed stuffed geese to children as they boarded buses, to ease the trip. “People realize they will have to leave forever,” said Alyona Fyodorova, a volunteer. “It’s painful to see.”

Nina Mashtikhina, 71, who was moving to live with her daughter in western Ukraine, said the army did its best, even if the town will not be saved.

“I thank them. They are good guys,” she said. “I believe in them. I believe in our victory.”

But other residents questioned why valuable troops were sent into Russia when they might have served better protecting their town in the trenches just east of Pokrovsk.

“They should have defended here,” said Iryna Sekreteva, 39, who was evacuating with her 15-year-old son, Bohdan. “Now, they will retreat. That is what we fear. That is the opinion in the town.”

At the entrance to Jubilee Park, municipal workers were dismantling a statue of Mykola Leontovych, a local musician who a century ago composed in Pokrovsk one of Ukraine’s most recognizable Christmas songs, “Carol of the Bells.” Cobblestones had been torn up around the statue’s feet.

A short drive outside town, a Ukrainian artillery commander watched video streaming in from reconnaissance drones. It showed Russian soldiers filtering through backyards in the village of Mykhailivka, swathed in smoke from fires.

The fighting has come in a flurry of small movements. The Russian Army relies largely on infantry units. Soldiers dash forward and hide in trees or abandoned houses near Ukrainian positions, then attack. The Ukrainian military reported 58 such engagements near Pokrovsk on Thursday.

Nearby in a field, sweaty, dust-covered soldiers with the 15th Brigade of the Ukrainian National Guard firing a howitzer said they were aiming for a Russian position near a coal mine’s slag that only five days earlier had been a Ukrainian stronghold. “We just don’t have the people,” said the commander, who asked to be identified by his nickname, Doker, in keeping with Ukrainian military protocol.

Russia’s slow response to the Kursk incursion could reflect disorganization in its military, said Johan Norberg, a military analyst at the Swedish Defense Research Agency, or alternatively it could be a strategic trade-off — capturing more territory in Ukraine while leaving its own lightly guarded.

“They had momentum in Donbas, so why not carry that through?” he said of the possible Russian calculation, with an intention to turn to Kursk later. “Russia can easily trade territory for time,” he said. The incursion bore a cost for Mr. Putin domestically and abroad by signaling an inability to defend the border, he said.

It has not, though, slowed the advance in the Donbas, forcing a sad reckoning for those now leaving Pokrovsk.

Vitalia Trusova, 37, an economist for the national railway company, sat on a chair on the sidewalk hugging her daughter, watching the contents of her home loaded onto a moving truck.

“We are leaving forever,” she said. “We and the kids will build a new life somewhere quiet.”

Olha Konovalova contributed reporting from Pokrovsk, and Stas Kozliuk from Kyiv.

The Israeli military said on Saturday that it had found a number of dead bodies during an operation in the Gaza Strip, asking the Israeli public to refrain from speculation about their identities.

The announcement was widely interpreted in Israel, however, as confirmation that more Israeli hostages had died in captivity, and it quickly amplified calls for an immediate cease-fire in order to free the roughly 100 captives still held, both dead and alive, in Gaza.

Roughly 250 people were captured by Hamas and its allies during their Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which started the war.

The military said in a statement on Saturday that the recently found bodies had yet to be identified and brought to Israel. It did not give further details about how many bodies had been found or where they were discovered, and it would not officially confirm that they were hostages.

Still, the news of the discovery accelerated an increasingly rancorous debate within Israeli society about whether Israel should soften its position during negotiations with Hamas for a cease-fire. Under the terms currently being negotiated, scores of hostages would be released from captivity in exchange for hundreds of Palestinians detained in Israel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is holding out for a deal in which the country would be able to retain control of strategic parts of Gaza during the cease-fire and restart the war in the future.

That position has angered Israelis who want their leaders to swiftly agree to a deal in order to accelerate the hostages’ release. For months, the families and supporters of the hostages have said that the prolonged negotiations had made it more likely that their relatives would be killed in captivity.

Minutes after the military’s announcement, an umbrella group representing the families of the hostages said in a statement: “Netanyahu abandoned the hostages! This is now a fact.” The statement also called on the public to prepare for new demonstrations starting as soon as Sunday.

More than 100 hostages were freed in an earlier cease-fire in November, while eight have been rescued alive during Israeli rescue operations that have cost the lives of scores of Palestinians. The bodies of several others have also been found and repatriated by the Israeli military. Three were shot and killed in December, after waving a white flag, by Israeli soldiers.

But roughly 100 others are still held in Gaza, about two-thirds of whom are believed to be alive. Mr. Netanyahu’s critics say he is putting those surviving hostages at risk by dragging out the negotiations. Mr. Netanyahu and his allies say that a bad deal would endanger Israel’s long-term security.

President Biden on Saturday evening commented on the Israeli military’s discovery of the bodies in Gaza, but said he did not know the exact number, nor whether the dead were hostages.

There’s a lot of speculation about who they are,” Mr. Biden told reporters, adding that he was “not at liberty to do that at this moment.”

Eight U.S. citizens are among the captives in Gaza, and the United States has sought for months, with Egypt and Qatar, to broker a deal to halt the fighting and exchange hostages and detained Palestinians. Mr. Biden said he was optimistic about those talks, although diplomats have struggled in repeated rounds of talks to settle major disagreements between the parties.

Ronen Bergman and Aishvarya Kavi contributed reporting.

Exhausted doctors resting in crowded on-call rooms with no locks, two to a single bed. Frustrated relatives of patients angrily challenging a physician’s diagnosis. Too few security guards to keep the peace.

These are everyday realities in Indian government hospitals. Young doctors describe multiday shifts and harrowing working conditions in rooms and wards often lacking in safety and hygiene, where learning is frequently interrupted by the crushing load of urgent cases.

Their plight has come to light in recent weeks after the rape and murder in Kolkata of a 31-year-old junior doctor who had been resting after a grueling 36-hour shift. Last month, the police arrested a man, considered a prime suspect in the killing, after he was caught on CCTV walking into the hospital late at night.

The case has prompted nationwide protests, with doctors, students and human rights activists demanding justice for the victim, as well as better protection and safer workplaces for doctors and women. Many doctors also went on strike.

“People protested because we identified with the victim,” said Dr. Susmita Sengupta, who graduated in 2020 from M.G.M. Medical College & Hospital in Jamshedpur, a large city in the eastern state of Jharkhand, and worked there for a year before moving to private practice.

Between the lack of security personnel and the challenges many female doctors face to be heard, “any residency in India becomes toxic,” Dr. Sengupta said.

The brutalized body of the Kolkata doctor was found on Aug. 9 in a seminar room at R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital, a state-run institution where she was completing a residency. After the attack, India’s Supreme Court set up a national task force to recommend workplace safety measures.

The New York Times interviewed more than a dozen Indian doctors, within India and abroad, who shared their experiences in the country’s state-run hospitals and medical colleges. Many who practice in India spoke only on the condition that their names be withheld, fearing for their safety.

Some told of verbal or physical abuse from families of the ill whose patience had been exhausted. Many, having chosen the medical profession with a deep determination to save lives, said their resolve had turned into despair and then resignation as they went through their residencies in an overwhelmed system.

Some have left for private practice, others for foreign shores. Dr. Richa Sharma, now an anesthesiologist in West Hartford, Conn., went to the United States in 2018 for a residency at Columbia University. Dr. Sharma, who graduated from medical school in Delhi, said she was driven to pursue her training outside India partly because she was disillusioned with the Indian medical system.

Even though that system was set up with the welfare of patients in mind, it did not always function that way, Dr. Sharma said. She added that she had worried about losing compassion if she was “caring for hundreds of patients a day as if they were objects in a factory and not people.”

The Kolkata rape and killing galvanized her to bring together a group of U.S.-based alumni of Indian medical colleges to write letters to government offices demanding change. Dr. Sharma said she was in touch with a member of the Supreme Court task force to make recommendations based on the group’s experiences.

One India-based junior doctor, who did not want to be identified talking about her employer, said those in her cohort who protested had to call patients to cancel appointments. “I received threatening messages, voice notes and calls after that from those patients,” she said. “I now block the patient’s number as soon as I make the call to them.”

State-run hospitals are the main providers of health care for those at the bottom of the economic ladder in India. The public network consists of primary health care centers as well as top research and training institutes. Although there are thousands of private hospitals that typically have better facilities, they tend to be expensive and do not necessarily employ the best doctors.

Many young doctors who want to specialize in a certain field of medicine join government-backed medical colleges and teaching hospitals. In recent years, the Indian government has been trying to increase the number of such institutions to train more doctors.

However, highly trained doctors tend to cluster around cities and in states that have more medical colleges and teaching hospitals, which leaves large areas of rural and small-town India without easy access to health services, especially for complex diseases like cancer, studies have found.

City hospitals are left with many more patients than they are equipped to handle. Patients and their relatives, already agitated because of a health issue, often wait for hours to see a doctor.

“There was no system to attend to the most serious patients first,” said Gunika Sehgal, who recently accompanied her father, who suffers from liver dysfunction, to the emergency room at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, one of the country’s top hospitals.

Ms. Sehgal said they were attended to within two hours only because her family pulled some strings. “I don’t know how much longer we would have waited if not for that connection,” she said.

The combination of overwhelmed doctors and irate patients can create a tinderbox.

While resident doctors around the world often work long shifts, since part of their training involves admitting patients and tracking their journey, the burden is heavier in India’s under-resourced system. The frequency with which many resident physicians in India do demanding shifts wears them down, doctors said.

The sheer number of patients makes it incredibly tough, said Dr. Dhrubajyoti Bandyopadhyay, a cardiologist. Dr. Bandyopadhyay worked at several state-run hospitals in India, including R.G. Kar (the hospital where the Kolkata doctor was raped and killed) before joining Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University’s largest teaching hospital.

“People from villages and slums come to the hospital, so in a day in an O.P.D. we used to see 400 patients, which is not possible for two to three people,” he said, referring to the outpatient department.

Once during his residency, Dr. Bandyopadhyay administered CPR to an 80-year-old man in an emergency room after his pulse stopped, but was unable to save him. The patient’s relatives then started accusing him of killing the man by pumping his chest for half an hour, Dr. Bandyopadhyay said, and refused to have a post-mortem done.

“All of a sudden, 50-plus people gathered and started shouting and verbally abusing us,” he said. “There was no one to protect us.”

Reflecting on the episode, Dr. Bandyopadhyay later said in a WhatsApp message that emotion and “impunity that nothing will happen if you abuse a doctor” were behind violent behavior toward health workers.

Dr. Aditya Yadav, a surgeon, recalled an episode during his residency when a patient with acid burns on his face demanded that a consultant doctor do more to fix the damage. When the doctor was unable to do more, the patient walked around the hospital with a bottle of acid, threatening other doctors that he would “make everyone look like him,” Dr. Yadav said.

Even doctors in private hospitals can be subject to patient abuse, and many keep guards on hand.

“Over the last few years, I have seen and heard so many incidents of family members of patients beating doctors that I have lost count of it,” said Dr. Shoborose Tantray, an associate professor at Santosh Medical College, a private hospital in Ghaziabad, near Delhi. “Male colleagues have been beaten blue and black; female doctor friends have been threatened. Some have thought of even finding jobs outside the country.”

Dr. Sharma, the anesthesiologist who is trying to draw attention to the working conditions of her counterparts in India, reflected on the contrast between how doctors are viewed and treated: “They are either seen as supra-human, or not human at all.”

Sameer Yasir contributed reporting.