It was just a regular practice, but the players were excited to get on the soccer field. They divided into teams and chose from an array of bibs that all bore the same message: “Women Win.”

Just being on the field was a revolutionary act for some of these girls and women — migrants from Myanmar, or Burma, in Thailand — because they were defying cultural norms by playing a sport. On that recent Monday evening, it was a place to forget for a little while the civil war that has ravaged their native land and the worries about life in their adopted home as refugees or undocumented migrants.

The coach blew a whistle, and the match began. Some of the women moved the ball deftly past others. Cheering their friends on from the sidelines, others screamed in Burmese, “The ball is here!”

There has long been a sizable Burmese community here in the city of Mae Sot, a trade hub in western Thailand. But since the Myanmar military seized power in a coup in February 2021, that population has swelled and transformed Mae Sot, as people fled the military dictatorship’s campaign of bombings and torture.

Nyein Pyae Sone Naing, 37, is one of them. She was an assistant manager for the soccer federation in Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city, but never played because her parents forbade her to do sports. After the junta took control, she was one of many peaceful protesters charged with incitement. She fled to the jungles, where for a while she was a medic for an armed rebel group. She moved to Mae Sot in 2022 and signed up for soccer this July.

Her first time was a disaster. Each time the ball flew in her direction, she dodged it. Asked to run for the ball, she shouted back, “No!” The outing left her so sore that she had to take painkillers.

Ms. Nyein Pyae Sone Naing said she was inspired by her 16-year-old son, who played with her that first time in a mixed game. “Now, he sees me as his hero and says I can do anything,” she said. She returned the following week.

The Monday practices are run by a decade-old nonprofit called PlayOnside. One of its goals is to foster communication between migrant children from Myanmar and the local Thai population of Mae Sot.

At least 350,000 Burmese now live in Mae Sot, a third of whom arrived after the coup, according to the Joint Action Committee for Burmese Affairs. The Mae Sot government puts its total population at roughly 175,000, suggesting that many Burmese are here illegally.

A community that was largely migrant workers from Myanmar is now an assortment of activists, teachers, filmmakers and celebrities. In restaurants and cafes, one often hears more Burmese than Thai in this dusty border town that is quickly filling up with safe houses.

For the migrants, life here is a constant state of waiting. Waiting to hear back on asylum offers. Waiting to see if they can ever go back to a democratic Myanmar. There is anxiety and paranoia about being spied on by the junta.

PlayOnside tries to help with this too, and offers group therapy of sorts. After practice that Monday, 50 girls and women, ranging in age from 13 to 45, sat in a circle. It was time for “women’s talks,” and the theme that day was, “Bad day, not bad life.”

“Today, I had a job interview. Since I’m an ethnic minority, I was worried because I’m not very good at speaking Burmese. I don’t speak English well either,” a petite woman said in Burmese.

“Everyone living here is constantly dealing with stress and struggling to get by,” a woman in a red jersey said. “That’s why I came here with the determination to survive and make this place a place of solace for myself.”

For those fleeing the war in Myanmar, living in Mae Sot can be both a haven and a hazard. Thailand has sheltered about 90,000 refugees from Myanmar across nine refugee camps since the mid-1980s, but has also pushed back thousands of the recent arrivals, according to Human Rights Watch.

Ei Ei Aung said when she first moved to Mae Sot in 2022, she was lonely, jobless and lived in fear of the Thai police.

“When I play football, I forget about the stress,” said Ms. Ei Ei Aung, 41, who represented Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-biggest city, in the Under-14 division. “I also realized that I’m not the only one with trauma and stress when I see my friends here.”

Initially, it was hard for PlayOnside to recruit women to play. Schools with migrant populations would send only male students.

“What about the girls?” Javier Almagro, the Spanish co-founder of PlayOnside, said he asked the principals.

Finally, in 2017, PlayOnside started with seven or eight female players.

They turned up in pants, worried about exposing their legs. Now, all of them wear shorts. The women’s biggest obstacles were often their parents.

“When I was younger, they restricted me, and I even got beaten for playing,” said Thone Darin Han, 23. “I used to be jealous of my brother. My parents never stopped him from playing because he’s a boy.”

Fah Sai, 24, was raised in a refugee camp where men’s soccer tournaments were organized.

“When I was in high school, I was told I couldn’t join because I’m a girl,” she said. “They believed soccer was a sport for men, saying it was too tough for girls.”

Ms. Fah Sai, an ethnic Karen whose parents are from Myanmar’s Kayin State, plays for Girls On Fire, a team made up of women from refugee camps in Thailand. Unlike more recent arrivals from Myanmar, she has lived in Thailand since she was born in 2000 in a refugee camp in Tak Province, where her family fled a long-running conflict between Karen rebel groups and Myanmar’s military.

Many of her teammates are not allowed to leave their camps unless they get permission from the Thai authorities.

Often, they also need clearance from male figures in their families.

“We can’t just change women’s minds — we need to focus on men’s perspectives as well,” said Pyae Sone, the PlayOnside coach.

His group started offering free transportation for the women and set up soccer sessions for their children, who play at the same time as their mothers.

In November 2022, Daen Kajeechiwa, a founder of PlayOnside who now has his own training program, raised money to start a women’s tournament. This summer five teams played in a league for the first time.

During the second week of the Borderland Women’s League, a crowd of supporters banged on tin cans and cheered on the teams.

On that Saturday evening, Ms. Fah Sai’s Girls on Fire was pitted against Amicizia, Mr. Daen’s team.

As the matches ended after dark, a birthday cake appeared: It was Mr. Daen’s birthday. There was dancing and cheering.

Then it was time to leave. The men were waiting to play.

President Biden will be under increasing pressure this week to loosen restrictions on Ukraine’s use of weapons when global leaders converge on the United Nations for their annual gathering.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine will also come with what he calls a victory plan for Mr. Biden to examine, and key European leaders are already pushing hard for Mr. Biden to allow him to use longer-range weapons supplied by NATO countries to hit farther inside Russia, to strike bases from which Russian planes and missiles attack Kyiv with relative impunity.

The push comes as Ukraine is slowly losing ground to mass Russian assaults in the eastern Donbas region and Russia continues to pound Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, including electricity and heating plants, from a safe distance as winter is approaching.

Mr. Biden has been reluctant to give permission, careful as he has been since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 not to escalate the war and risk a direct conflict between Moscow and the NATO alliance. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia already blames NATO for the war and has made threats of retaliation, including frequent veiled references to his nuclear arsenal. But he has not retaliated militarily against the West even as NATO countries have gradually increased the quantity and quality of their arms supplies to Kyiv.

Finland’s new president, Alexander Stubb, joined the chorus for longer-range weapons in an interview with The New York Times, while Jens Stoltenberg, in his last days as NATO secretary general, has all but done the same, while noting diplomatically that each country must decide for itself.

Mr. Stubb, who will speak for all the Nordic countries at the U.N. General Assembly, was blunt.

“I call upon our allies in the global West, including the United States, to allow Ukraine to fight without one hand tied behind its back and to lift those restrictions,” he said in a wide-ranging interview on Thursday from Helsinki. “We need to continue to support Ukraine, starting with finance, starting with ammunition, starting with vehicles, and also with allowing Ukraine to use weapons as itself pleases, as long as it’s in self-defense and within the framework of international rules.”

Mr. Stoltenberg has been unusually outspoken as he prepares to leave office at the end of the month. “I fully understand the desire from Ukraine to have as few restrictions as possible,” he said in an interview with Christiane Amanpour of CNN. “There are less restrictions now than just some months ago,” he said, “and that’s the right thing to do,” because “this is a war of aggression” and “according to international law, self-defense is legal.”

Ukraine, he said, “has the right for self-defense and that includes striking legitimate military targets on the territory of the aggressor, Russia.” And NATO countries, he went on, “have the right to provide the weapons that they are using to do so without us becoming a party to the conflict.”

Both Mr. Stubb and Mr. Stoltenberg noted that various allied “red lines” had already been crossed, with the provision to Ukraine of Leopard II battle tanks, Storm Shadow and Scalp cruise missiles, longer-range artillery and even American-made F-16 fighter jets. All were subject to fierce debates over whether they would prompt Mr. Putin to escalate the fight and even use nuclear weapons.

The new prime minister of Britain, Keir Starmer, has also pushed Mr. Biden to allow the use of these longer-range weapons, like Storm Shadow and Scalp, its French version, to hit bases farther into Russia from where Mr. Putin launches attacks.

Adm. Rob Bauer, chairman of the NATO Military Committee, said last week that attacks deep inside Russia were legal, because “to weaken the enemy that attacks you, you not only fight the arrows that come your way but also attack the archer.” Still, he said, nations providing weapons can demand “certain limitations” in their use, “because they feel responsible for those weapons.”

Mr. Stubb, whose country joined NATO only in response to the war and shares a long border with Russia, has few illusions about what he considers NATO’s need to stand up to Russian aggression in Ukraine. “Russia is an imperial power that has expansion in its DNA,” he said.

“So what we need to do is to convince Putin that there’s no point for him to continue this war, and I think Putin needs to lose both the war and the peace, because the only thing that he understands is power,” Mr. Stubb said.

“The key is to allow Ukraine to fight this war without any kind of restrictions, and everything after that is secondary,” Mr. Stubb said. “The more we allow Ukraine to act, the sooner we will achieve peace negotiations.” Then the West must provide Kyiv with security guarantees leading to membership in both NATO and the European Union, he said.

Mr. Stoltenberg agreed. “By giving Ukraine more weapons, we can make Putin realize he cannot get what he wants by force and make it so costly that he will have to accept Ukraine has a sovereign, democratic right to persist as a sovereign, democratic country,” he said in a speech last week in Brussels to the German Marshall Fund. “The paradox is that the more weapons for Ukraine we are able to deliver, the more likely it is that we can reach a peace and end to the war. And the more credible our long-term military support, the sooner the war will end.”

Given raging global conflicts, including in the Middle East and Africa, the United Nations must re-engage in true peacekeeping, Mr. Stubb said. To that end, in New York, he said he would propose an expansion of the U.N. Security Council to include five new permanent members, one from Latin America, two from Asia and two from Africa, coupled with 10 rotating members and an elimination of the single-country veto, “which makes the Security Council dysfunctional,” he said. He would also propose that a member country “in blatant violation of the U.N. Charter and international law, such as Russia is right now in Ukraine,” should be suspended by a vote of the General Assembly.

Serious changes to the Security Council have proved impossible in the past, given the veto, he concedes, but he insists that the crisis demands new thinking. The veto might be replaced by weighted voting, he said, but it was crucial to include members of the so-called Global South, developing countries largely left out of post-1945 international institutions.

Those countries may see hypocrisy in the criticism of Russia and the support for Israel in Gaza, he said. “But my argument to our friends in the Global South, who are sometimes justifiably expressing doubts about Western double standards, is to say that this war in Ukraine sets the scene for how other nation-states can behave in the rest of the world,” he said. “If we now allow Russian imperialism to take place, we will see this happening elsewhere in the world, and that’s why I think this is a key struggle for all of us.”

When the United Nations General Assembly convenes on Tuesday, attention will focus on the major wars raging in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan, amid a reckoning that neither the global body nor world powers have been able to end the violence.

By all accounts, the world has descended deeper into chaos and turmoil since last year’s annual gathering, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Sudan’s civil war cast shadows. Now, those have been eclipsed by the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and the war that followed in Gaza, with its catastrophic humanitarian toll on Palestinians.

The United Nations itself has had a turbulent year. A record number of its staff, 220 in total, have been killed in the war in Gaza. Its humanitarian resources, a crucial backbone of the global relief effort, are overstretched and underfunded as needs multiply rapidly because of wars, climate change and natural disasters. At the same time, its leadership struggles to play a meaningful role in conflict mediation.

“International challenges are moving faster than our ability to solve them,” said Secretary General António Guterres in a news conference this past week. “We see out-of-control geopolitical divisions and runaway conflicts — not least in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and beyond.”

The Security Council, which typically holds one session on the sidelines of the General Assembly, is scheduled to meet three times this year, on Ukraine, Gaza and the broader question of leadership challenges in resolving conflicts.

President Biden will address the General Assembly for the last time as his presidency draws to a close. With the exception of the European allies, the majority of U.N. member states have been highly critical of Mr. Biden’s staunch support of Israel and the United States’ blocking multiple calls for a cease-fire during the first eight months of the war.

Mr. Biden has in recent months led an effort, with Egypt and Qatar, to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas and secure the release of all the hostages held by Hamas. But the talks have stalled, and the electronic devices attack in Lebanon this past week and an Israeli airstrike in Beirut on Friday that Lebanese officials said killed at least 45 people, seem to be dimming prospects of any breakthrough.

France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain will attend this year after both France and Britain sat out last year’s gathering. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, will deliver three speeches in person, including at the Security Council meeting on Ukraine, where he is expected to present a new peace plan and renew his pleas to authorize Ukraine’s use of Western missiles to strike military targets deep inside Russia, diplomats said.

“It feels like we say this every year, but this year’s meeting could not come at a more critical and more challenging moment,” said Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, at a briefing with reporters. “The list of crises and conflicts that demand attention and action only seems to grow and grow.”

Ms. Thomas-Greenfield said the United States would pursue three policy priorities during the General Assembly: international cooperation on peace and stability, improving global humanitarian aid responses, and revamping the Security Council.

Iran’s new reformist president, Masoud Pezeshkian, making his debut on the international stage, will be trying to present his government as moderate, pragmatic and open to diplomacy with the West, in contrast with his hard-line conservative predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May.

That might not be an easy sell. Iran’s support of a network of militias in Lebanon, in Yemen and in Gaza and the West Bank, and recent reports that it is supplying Russia with ballistic missiles for its war against Ukraine, pose obstacles to defusing tensions with the West that Mr. Pezeshkian will struggle to overcome.

Richard Gowan, an expert on the United Nations with the International Crisis Group, said that the prospects for breakthroughs on Gaza or Ukraine at the assembly were bleak. But Sudan, Mr. Gowan said, could be an exception.

“I actually think the General Assembly could do some good on Sudan, probably in a way that it cannot on Gaza and Ukraine,” he said. “There is an emerging feeling among a lot of the U.N. membership that the U.N. failed unnecessarily on Sudan and that it’s time to push for more diplomacy.”

Climate change and rising sea levels will join with restructuring of the Security Council and the World Bank as major topics for discussion. For years, countries in Africa, Asia and South America have complained that the Security Council’s core group of five permanent, veto-wielding members — the United States, Britain, France Russia and China — is outdated, overlooking economic powers like India, Brazil and Japan, as well as the entire continent of Africa.

This month Ms. Thomas-Greenfield said that the United States supported adding two permanent African members to the Security Council and proposed starting preliminary negotiations on the matter. Washington also supports adding seats for Germany, India and Japan, but none of the new permanent members would have veto power.

Any changes to the Security Council require altering the U.N. charter and the approval of all current five members, a tall task given the divisions among Russia, China and the United States.

In an effort to spearhead the changes, Mr. Guterres will host a conference on Sunday and Monday, ahead of the General Assembly. The goal is for countries to approve three negotiated documents that are meant to serve as blueprints for addressing current and future challenges on climate, artificial intelligence, conflict and restructuring U.N. institutions.

“So many of the challenges that we face today were not on the radar 80 years ago when our multilateral institutions were born,” Mr. Guterres said. “Our founders understood that times would change.”

When Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won a whopping parliamentary majority in Britain’s election in July, it was with only 34 percent of the vote, leading one commentator to call it a “loveless landslide.” Now, some allies of Mr. Starmer worry that he is going too far in returning the favor.

The new prime minister has shown decidedly little love to a beleaguered British public, restricting payments that help retirees with winter heating costs and warning of painful cuts when the government rolls out its first budget next month. Things, Mr. Starmer said, “will get worse before they get better.”

As he prepares to address his party’s annual conference on Tuesday, several analysts said they expected Mr. Starmer to shift his tone — if not to one of hope and sunny optimism, then at least to one in which he will show how the government’s harsh early moves will pay off in the long term.

“He’ll hammer home the message that he inherited a legacy of ashes,” said Robert Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester. “But then he’ll pivot to the big structural changes that will make Britain stronger.”

One problem for Mr. Starmer is that his austere public tone has coincided with signs that he can be more profligate in private. He has been dogged by a series of tempests over freebies accepted by him and his wife, Victoria, as well as by internal squabbling over the salary paid to his powerful chief of staff, Sue Gray, which exceeds that of the prime minister himself.

The dispute over his adviser’s pay, which was leaked to the BBC, has prompted a flood of coverage of a supposedly strife-torn Downing Street, where political aides and senior civil servants are said to be disclosing damaging information on their rivals. The staunchly pro-Conservative Daily Telegraph summed up the waspish atmosphere with the headline, “I’m Still in Control, Says Starmer, as Feud Erupts.”

By themselves, none of these issues add up to much. But taken together, they have scuffed Mr. Starmer’s reputation for competence and probity. London newspapers, many of which share The Telegraph’s pro-Tory tilt, have delighted in splashing unflattering headlines about how Labour Party donors paid for expensive eyeglasses for Mr. Starmer and for glamorous gowns for his wife.

“What is slightly surprising is the lack of awareness of their political vulnerability,” said Jill Rutter, a senior research fellow at U.K. in a Changing Europe, a research institute in London. “We’ve got a Tory press, and Keir Starmer has made so much of Tory sleaze over the last few years.”

Mr. Starmer and his allies defend his acceptance of gifts on various grounds: the free box seats for games of Arsenal, his favorite soccer team, are necessary because his security detail makes it impossible for him to sit in the stands.

The money for Ms. Starmer to buy clothes was appropriate, said David Lammy, the foreign secretary, because the prime minister and his spouse do not have a wardrobe budget and they need to “look their best for the British people.” (On Friday, however, the prime minister and other senior Labour ministers said they would no longer accept donations for clothing.)

Critics say the couple’s readiness to take freebies was at odds with Mr. Starmer’s oft-repeated pledge to preside over a government of service, after years of Conservative governments that were marred by scandals, incompetence and a sense of being out of touch with regular people.

“The first thing everyone learned about this Labour government is that they took money away from pensioners,” said Steven Fielding, an emeritus professor of political history at the University of Nottingham, referring to the cutback in subsidies given to older people to pay for heating fuel.

“In that context,” Professor Fielding said, “these things about Sue Gray’s pay, Keir Starmer’s free tickets, and his wife’s free clothes muddies the water. It suggests this is not such a different government.”

Mr. Starmer has taken pains to draw a line between his government and 14 years of Conservative rule. He excoriated his predecessors for leaving a 22 billion pound ($29.3 billion) “black hole” in the government’s finances, which he said made it necessary to curb the fuel subsidy for all but the poorest seniors.

He unveiled a review of England’s depleted National Health Service, which concluded that the system had been “starved of capital” under successive Conservative governments. He announced an emergency plan to release thousands of prisoners early to relieve a similarly neglected, overcrowded prison system.

“People have every right to be angry,” Mr. Starmer said in a characteristically chiding speech about the N.H.S.

Voters, however, are not taking out their anger only on the Conservatives. Mr. Starmer’s approval ratings have tumbled, as well. He was viewed favorably by 32 percent of people and unfavorably by 46 percent, according to a poll taken by the market research firm Ipsos in early September. That was his highest unfavorable rating since the Labour Party lost a special election in Hartlepool, a northern port city, in 2021 — a defeat so stinging that it put Mr. Starmer’s party leadership briefly at risk.

Whatever the hit to his popularity, Professor Ford argued, Mr. Starmer was right to emphasize the problems in the early days of his government to make it clear where the fault lies. He pointed out that Margaret Thatcher weathered a rocky first year with dire approval ratings. In a five-year term, he noted, Mr. Starmer will have time to shift the focus to how his policies had improved the country before he faces the voters again.

But other analysts said there was a danger of overdoing the misery. Professor Fielding noted that in 1945, a Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, presided over one of the most consequential modern British governments, creating, among other things, the N.H.S. But his austere policies — he extended the wartime rationing of goods — soured the public, which turned Labour out of power six years later.

The downbeat message could also undercut the government’s efforts to lure foreign investment, a theme that is likely to feature in a speech at the conference on Monday by the chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves.

“If you’re trying to attract more foreign investors to the U.K., and you’re saying, ‘We’re releasing people from jail because we have no room, our N.H.S. isn’t working, and we’re cutting fuel subsidies for old people,’ that’s not going to be very effective,” Ms. Rutter said. “There’s too much of pain for pain’s sake rather than, ‘Take the medicine now and things will get better in the long run.’”

Tanzania’s main opposition party said on Monday that the police had detained its top leaders and dozens of others ahead of a planned demonstration — the second such crackdown in two months by the government of President Samia Suluhu Hassan, who came to power promising a political opening.

Among those detained were Tundu Lissu, the 2020 presidential candidate for the opposition party, Chadema, and Freeman Mbowe, the party’s chairman. A police statement said they and a dozen others had been “arrested and questioned” for defying a protest ban. The party said about 50 people had been detained, in Dar es Salaam, the commercial capital of the country.

Ms. Hassan, who took office in 2021 after her predecessor died, had pledged to break from his autocratic style. The country’s first female leader, Ms. Hassan met with Vice President Kamala Harris in Washington in 2022 and again last year during Ms. Harris’s visit to Tanzania, which was part of efforts to promote democracy and women’s empowerment in Africa.

But the killing earlier this month of an opposition official, Ali Mohamed Kibao, and a series of apparent abductions have kindled fear and consternation in the East African country. Activists say these events have added to questions about the democratic credentials of the nation’s pathbreaking president as local elections approach in November, and a presidential vote looms next year.

“We don’t know exactly what message they want to send us, or if they’re trying to create fear among the people so that, in the upcoming local government election, our members won’t participate because of fear,” said John Mrema, director of communications and foreign affairs for the Chadema party, which organized Monday’s aborted rally.

“I’m feeling afraid because I’m the spokesman of the party, and I have been advised to find a safe place,” Mr. Mrema added.

The police statement said the protest ban was issued because “leaders and members” of Chadema had made statements “indicating potential breaches of peace and creating fear among citizens.”

President Hassan’s office and her party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi, did not respond to emailed requests for comment.

Previously, the president had condemned the “terrible” killing of Mr. Kibao, who defected from the governing party over a decade ago to join Chadema. Tanzania’s police have said that they are investigating the killing and that they have enlisted help from experts from the office of the director of criminal investigations.

The wife and daughter of the party chairman, Mr. Mbowe, were among those detained Monday, but they were released the same day, according to Mr. Mrema. It was unclear how long the others would be held.

Several opposition leaders and activists said on social media that they had received a text message before the rally falsely claiming it had been postponed.

Hundreds of people, including Mr. Lissu, Mr. Mbowe and other top party officials, were arrested in August as activists gathered for a rally in the city of Mbeya. The party leaders were released two days later after posting bail, according to a statement from the party posted on social media.

“The mass arrests and arbitrary detention of figures from the Chadema party, as well as their supporters and journalists, is a deeply worrying sign,” Sarah Jackson, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for East and Southern Africa, said at the time.

On Monday, the party issued a statement mourning people who it said had been “abducted, tortured, harmed, disappeared or killed in Tanzania.”

Boniface Mwabukusi, president of the Tanganyika Law Society, the bar association of mainland Tanzania, said that dozens of government critics had been arbitrarily detained or abducted this year.

No injuries were reported from Monday’s police action. Maria Sarungi Tsehai, a Tanzanian activist who was in contact with people at the protest, said the police had brought water cannons, helicopters, horses and dogs, “clearly intending to intimidate ordinary citizens from participating in the protests.”

President Petr Pavel of the Czech Republic, a former senior NATO general who has been one of Ukraine’s most robust backers in its war with Russia, says he thinks it is time for Ukrainians and their supporters to face what he says is reality.

With Russia-friendly populist leaders such as Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary disrupting European unity over the war and with the fatigue of 31 months of conflict “growing everywhere,” Ukraine “will have to be realistic” about its prospects of recovering territory occupied by Russia, Mr. Pavel said in an interview.

“The most probable outcome of the war,” he said, “will be that a part of Ukrainian territory will be under Russian occupation, temporarily.” But, he added, that “temporary thing,” could last years.

The Czech presidency is a largely ceremonial post but the views of Mr. Pavel, who was elected last year by a wide margin, are generally aligned with those of the country’s center-right government under Prime Minister Petr Fiala. Mr. Pavel has considerable influence on security issues as a former chief of the Czech military’s general staff and past chairman of NATO’s military committee.

Since the failure last year of Ukraine’s monthslong counteroffensive to retake territory, European officials have spoken increasingly in private about Ukraine’s slim chances of recovering much lost land. In public, they mostly recite the mantra that the shape of any future settlement with Russia is up to Kyiv to decide, not the European Union or NATO.

The question of Ukraine’s future will be a major topic at the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week, where Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, will be appealing for more military and political support when he makes a speech there on Wednesday. He will also present a “victory plan” to President Biden in Washington on Thursday before unveiling it publicly.

Neither Ukraine nor Russia, Mr. Pavel said, can expect to secure its maximalist goals. For Ukraine, that includes the recovery of all the territory, including Crimea, seized by Moscow in 2014. For Russia, it is a demand that Ukraine formally cede land claimed by Moscow, including four regions only partially controlled by Russian forces.

“To talk about a defeat of Ukraine or defeat of Russia, it will simply not happen,” Mr. Pavel said in his office at Prague Castle this past week, “So the end will be somewhere in between.”

Mr. Zelensky, who had ruled out direct talks with Russia, softened his stance over the summer, suggesting that direct talks could begin in November. But he has not backed down on demands that Russia leave all Ukrainian territory.

Whether to give up territory, Mr. Zelensky told the French newspaper Le Monde in July is a “very, very difficult” question.

Opinion polls conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion show a marked increase since last year in the share of Ukrainians ready to accept territorial concessions.

That figure rose to 32 percent in May this year, from around 8 percent to 10 percent during the first year of war. A majority of Ukrainians, however, still oppose surrendering land.

Mr. Pavel said there were “a number of examples” of territories held temporarily by Moscow. He did not specify, but experts in Eastern Europe have often pointed to the Soviet Union’s occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as something Ukraine could face if it does not restore its preinvasion borders. The Baltic nations were occupied for half a century, but they eventually recovered their independence with the collapse of communism in 1991.

After surveying public opinion in Ukraine and in 14 other European countries, the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank, in July reported “a profound chasm between European and Ukrainian opinion about how the war will end.” Ukrainians, it said, “want weapons in order to win, while most Europeans send weapons hoping this will help lead to an acceptable eventual settlement.”

Speaking to Ukrainian journalists on Saturday, Mr. Zelensky said that Western partners had encouraged Ukraine to open negotiations.

“All our allies, including the closest ones who are on our side and always against Russian aggression, said that Russia should be present” at settlement talks planned in November, he said. “There can be no end to war without one of the parties.”

The Czech Republic, along with Poland and the Baltic States, has been a particularly stalwart supporter of Ukraine but has faced growing public pressure to curb its aid and to push Ukraine toward a deal with Russia.

Nearly two-thirds of Czechs, according to an opinion poll conducted this summer, would support a quick end to the war in Ukraine even at the cost of some territory remaining under Russian control.

An earlier survey found that 54 percent opposed sending weapons under their country’s flagship policy on Ukraine — a multibillion dollar program known as the Czech Ammunition Initiative. The program, managed by the Czech defense ministry and funded by Germany and other European Union countries, has provided Ukraine with hundreds of thousands of artillery shells obtained by Czech arms dealers from manufacturers in Turkey and elsewhere.

Mr. Pavel dismissed as “nonsense” insistent calls by populist leaders like Mr. Orban, a critic of military aid, that Ukraine should swiftly sue for peace and stop draining resources better spent on Europe’s domestic needs.

But, he said, Ukrainians need to be “realistic about the support that they can achieve” from governments under pressure to scale back help against Russia.

“The issue is linked to populism,” Mr. Pavel said, “It’s easy to say, ‘Let’s stop providing Ukraine with weapons and ammunition and then the peace will come on its own.’”

He added that “as someone with some experience with defense and security, and with knowledge of Russia, I know that peace will not come from a declaration by Ukraine that it will stop fighting.” Russia, he said, “will not stop its military activities.”

Mr. Orban, who has repeatedly denounced his NATO allies as warmongers, called for a halt to military aid to Ukraine and sought to rally support for an ill-defined “policy of peace,” is “probably the prototype of European populism,” Mr. Pavel said.

Dismaying fellow E.U. leaders, Mr. Orban traveled to Moscow in July to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin as part of what he called a “peace mission” that also included a visit to the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and to Beijing. It was the first time that a European leader had visited Russia for an official meeting with Mr. Putin since the first months after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Mr. Orban’s efforts failed to budge Mr. Putin from sweeping demands that Ukraine withdraw troops from the four regions that Moscow has declared part of Russia and drop aspirations to join NATO. But Mr. Orban’s stance has been cheered by fellow Ukraine-skeptics, such as Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia, and by Russia-friendly politicians on both the far left and far right across Europe.

“Constantly repeating that everybody else wants war, but I want peace — that would make me look much better than all the others,” Mr. Pavel said, “Unfortunately, most people do not realize that such a proposal is unrealistic.”

Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine, Steven Erlanger from Berlin and Barbora Petrova from Prague.

A Russian military patrol plane breached Japanese airspace off the country’s northwestern coast three times on Monday, prompting Japan’s military to dispatch a fighter jet to issue radio warnings and, for the first time, to use a signal flare to deter the Russian aircraft.

According to Yoshimasa Hayashi, the chief cabinet secretary to Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, the Russian plane flew above Rebun Island, which is northwest of Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost prefecture, between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. on Monday.

“This violation of our airspace is extremely regrettable,” said Mr. Hayashi, in remarks to reporters on Monday afternoon. “We have lodged an extremely strong protest with the Russian government through diplomatic channels and have strongly urged them to prevent a recurrence.”

This was not the first time that a Russian military plane had violated Japanese airspace but it was the first time that Japan’s military had responded with a flare to warn the plane to leave. Last month, a Chinese military aircraft flew into Japan’s territorial airspace and the government said it was the first known incursion by the Chinese military.

Minoru Kihara, Japan’s defense minister, said that Japan’s military had dispatched F-15 and F-35 fighter jets but that there had been “no particularly dangerous acts by the Russian aircraft.”

According to Japan’s defense ministry, the flights on Monday represented the 44th known incursion by a Russian plane — or an aircraft suspected to be Russian — since 1967, but it was the first time that a Russian military plane had breached Japanese territorial airspace since June 2019.

Mr. Kihara noted that both Chinese and Russian naval vessels had passed this week through the Soya Strait between Hokkaido and Sakhalin, a Russian island about 25 miles north of Hokkaido. Mr. Kihara said it was possible that the movement of the ships and the Russian aircraft were related.

Mr. Hayashi said the Japanese government did not know the “intentions and goals” of the Russian military aircraft. He said Japan would “take all possible measures to ensure vigilance and surveillance.”

The prime minister is in New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly, and Mr. Hayashi said he had advised Mr. Kishida to “respond calmly and resolutely” and to cooperate closely with the United States.

Russia’s embassy in Tokyo referred requests for comment to the defense ministry, which did not immediately respond.

Anton Troianovski contributed reporting from Berlin.