The more Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is cast as an international pariah, the more many Israelis appear to embrace him.

The arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court on Thursday for Mr. Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, on accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip spurred a wave of outrage and condemnation across Israel’s political spectrum.

“It is embarrassing to see Netanyahu and Gallant in the same place as Muammar el-Qaddafi, Slobodan Milosevic, Ratko Mladic and several African dictators,” wrote Sima Kadmon, a political columnist and longtime Netanyahu critic, in the Friday editions of the popular Yediot Ahronot newspaper. Still, she added, “the allegations of anti-Israel-ism are understandable. Perhaps even antisemitism.”

Despite deep domestic polarization, analysts said, most Israelis were likely to rally around Mr. Netanyahu’s repudiation of the court’s decision, which he denounced as “antisemitic” for “falsely accusing” the democratically elected prime minister of Israel.

“This helps Netanyahu,” said Mitchell Barak, an Israeli pollster who worked as an aide to Mr. Netanyahu in the 1990s, portraying him as “the lonely man standing against all the evil in the world.”

“It turns him into the victim he likes to be, the person fighting for Israel’s rights,” Mr. Barak said, adding that Israelis have been largely unified in their support for the war.

The warrants came as Mr. Netanyahu’s domestic image has eroded in recent months and as international censure has grown over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where more than 44,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to local health officials who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Public trust in Mr. Netanyahu’s leadership plummeted after the surprise Hamas-led assault in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killed about 1,200 people, making it the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust and plunging the region into a long war.

Many Israelis have accused him of prolonging the war in Gaza for political reasons: to keep his right-wing governing coalition together and to remain in power even as he battles corruption charges in an Israeli court.

Yet, most were likely to reject the international court’s decision.

Mr. Netanyahu is also probably not losing any sleep over the warrants, according to a recently retired Israeli government official who worked on issues related to Israel’s international affairs for years and requested anonymity to be able to speak frankly.

For one thing, the United States, Israel’s most important ally, has rejected the court case against Israeli leaders. For another, Israel is not a member of the international court and does not recognize its jurisdiction in Israel or Gaza.

“Do I have some issues with how this war has been conducted? Absolutely,” said Thomas R. Nides, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel in the Biden administration. “That said,” he added, “I think the I.C.C. decision is outrageous.”

The reaction to the warrants has underscored the gulf between widespread Israeli perceptions of the war in Gaza and the way it is viewed from the outside.

Few Israelis have publicly expressed empathy for Gaza’s civilians, blaming Hamas for their suffering. And with most of the country’s 18-year-olds drafted for mandatory military service in the so-called people’s army and with many serving in the reserves into middle age, most Israelis find it hard to imagine the soldiers as war criminals.

Israelis are aware that international warrants could yet be served against officers and soldiers, adding to their animus toward the court. But at the same time, they are largely insulated from the antipathy toward Israel abroad.

“Internally, we are in a bubble,” said Mazal Mualem, an Israeli political commentator for the Middle East news site Al-Monitor and the author of a biography of the Israeli leader, “Cracking the Netanyahu Code.”

For Mr. Netanyahu, Ms. Mualem said, this is “another war to fight.” She added, “This won’t harm Netanyahu; it will strengthen him with own base on the right.”

Even his political opponents are saying what most of the Israeli public appears to be thinking.

“Israel is defending its life against terrorist organizations that attacked, murdered and raped our citizens,” Yair Lapid, the centrist leader of Israel’s parliamentary opposition, wrote on social media on Thursday, adding, “These arrest warrants are a reward for terrorism.”

The warrants come at a turbulent time for Mr. Netanyahu and Israel. The country is on the brink of a potential cease-fire deal over the conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon, while about 100 hostages, at least a third of whom are assumed to be dead, remain in Gaza.

Mr. Netanyahu recently fired Mr. Gallant as defense minister because of differences over the continuation of the war in Gaza and domestic policies, further undermining trust in the government.

Mr. Netanyahu’s office has also been increasingly scrutinized over a series of investigations focused on the mishandling of intelligence material. On Thursday, Israeli prosecutors charged one of his aides with leaking classified information on Hamas in a way that prosecutors say was likely to harm national security and put people in life-threatening danger at a time of war.

Next month, Mr. Netanyahu is expected to take the stand in his own corruption trial. He has been charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three separate but interrelated cases being heard in parallel. He has denied any wrongdoing in the cases, which center on accusations that he arranged favors for tycoons in exchange for gifts and sympathetic news coverage for himself and his family.

Some Israeli critics say Mr. Netanyahu contributed to the international court’s decision to issue arrest warrants by preventing the establishment of an independent Israeli commission of inquiry, with a panel headed by a judge, to examine the government’s failures on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s conduct in the war.

Instead, eager to stave off any personal blame toward Mr. Netanyahu for those failures, and with the time approaching for him to testify in his corruption cases, Mr. Netanyahu’s supporters have doubled down on their attacks against Israel’s judicial system. Perhaps emboldened by the Trump victory, they’ve fed into the notion that Mr. Netanyahu is being persecuted by liberal forces at home and abroad.

“Since the election of Trump, the gloves have come off,” said Gayil Talshir, a political scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Israelis expect the new Trump administration to be more accommodating toward the Israeli government, the most right-wing and religiously conservative in the country’s history.

Ms. Talshir added that Mr. Netanyahu’s depiction of the international court as antisemitic might only widen the chasm between Israel and much of the rest of the world.

Notwithstanding the widespread Israeli rejection of the decision to issue warrants, sympathy for Mr. Netanyahu may wane in the longer term, some analysts say.

Being a “diplomatic persona non grata” is not a good look for a prime minister, said Mr. Barak, the pollster, especially given that Mr. Netanyahu’s outsize international stature was once one of his electoral calling cards.

Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant face no risk of arrest at home because of the warrants. They could, however, be detained if they were to travel to one of the court’s 124 member nations, which include most European countries but not the United States.

Even flying to the United States could be risky should someone on board, say, require urgent medical treatment, forcing an emergency landing along the way.

Referring to the new limits on Mr. Netanyahu’s ability to travel abroad, Mr. Barak said: “You can’t be a prime minister on Zoom.”

Israel pressed on with its bombardment of Lebanon on Friday after issuing widespread evacuation warnings in the country’s south, as its conflict with Hezbollah militants showed no sign of abating despite a U.S.-led push for a cease-fire.

The Israeli military launched “a series of raids” on the Dahiya, the area near Beirut that is in effect controlled by Hezbollah, a military spokesman, Avichay Adraee, said on Friday afternoon. The area, once home to a large civilian population, has been a frequent target of Israeli strikes since the war began and has been hit especially hard in recent days.

Other strikes, which came as Lebanon celebrated its independence day, hit near the southern port city of Tyre, after calls by the Israeli military for civilians to evacuate entire towns in the area and flee more than 20 miles north.

Lebanon’s health ministry said two separate Israeli strikes in the south had killed five paramedics.

Lebanon’s health system has sustained 126 attacks this year that have killed 223 health workers and injured 183 others, Abdinasir Abubakar, the U.N. World Health Organization’s representative in Lebanon, told reporters on Friday. The majority of these casualties have occurred in attacks on ambulances, he said.

Analysts say Israel’s ramped-up strikes across Lebanon are intended to pressure Hezbollah into agreeing to a cease-fire on terms that are favorable to Israel. Amos Hochstein, the Biden administration’s point man in the quest to end the war, discussed the terms of a possible deal with Israeli officials on Thursday during a visit to Israel.

U.S. and Israeli officials have provided few details in public about the terms of a deal. An Israeli official said on Friday that there was “cautious optimism” in Israel about the prospect of finalizing the terms in the coming days. A Lebanese official briefed on the talks said that the ball was in Israel’s court, and that Lebanon’s government remained “realistic” that a cease-fire could still fail to materialize. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.

Mr. Hochstein earlier this week held two days of discussions with Lebanese officials in Beirut, which he said had made progress. Hezbollah’s leader, Naim Qassem, said that Hezbollah had responded to the U.S. proposal and that a truce depended on the “seriousness” of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

But Israel and Hezbollah have both pledged to keep fighting during the negotiations, and the violence appears only to have intensified.

Bachir Khodr, the head of the Baalbek-Hermel governorate in eastern Lebanon, said Israeli strikes had killed nearly 50 people in his province on Thursday. The attacks struck more than a dozen towns and villages, he said on social media, describing it as some of the most violent bombardment of the war.

At least 10 of those killed were from the village of Flaoui, Lebanon’s health ministry said. The state-run news agency reported that children were among the dead in that village.

Hussein Awada, a driver who fled his home in the Dahiya weeks ago, said he had returned to the area on Friday to collect some money from a friend. “I spent all I have,” he said.

Unable to afford cellphone data, he was unaware that Israel had issued an evacuation warning for the neighborhood, and he escaped just minutes before a building was leveled in an Israeli strike, he said. The human rights group Amnesty International has criticized the evacuation warnings as inadequate, in part because they are issued only on social media.

“I passed by it almost every day,” he said of the building that was hit. “It’s a business center, as far as I know. Doctors. Lawyers. Travel agencies.”

Israel began an intensified military campaign against Hezbollah in September, nearly a year after the group began firing rockets into Israel in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza, which like Hezbollah is backed by Iran. The conflict has killed more than 3,500 people in Lebanon and displaced almost a quarter of the population. It is now the bloodiest conflict inside Lebanon since the country’s 15-year civil war, which ended in 1990.

The United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, said four peacekeepers from Italy were injured on Friday when its base in the southern town of Shama was attacked for the third time in the past week.

The base was struck by two rockets, which UNIFIL said were “likely launched by Hezbollah or affiliated groups.”

Here are other developments:

• Gaza hospital: The Israeli military struck Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza overnight, injuring six medical workers, destroying the hospital’s main generator and damaging water tanks, the Gaza Health Ministry said. The hospital, one of the last that is still functioning in the north of the territory, has been struck repeatedly during a weekslong Israeli offensive there, according to the health ministry and doctors who work there. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

• Aid workers killed: The United Nations said that at least 281 aid workers have been killed worldwide in 2024, more than recorded in any other year. It said the war in Gaza was driving the numbers higher and had cost the lives of at least 10 aid workers so far this month.

Adam Rasgon contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Nick Cumming-Bruce from Geneva.

In many ways, President Vladimir V. Putin seems to be winning.

Russian forces are pushing ahead in Ukraine. President-elect Donald J. Trump is returning to the White House. War fatigue is spreading across Europe. North Korean troops have boosted the ranks of his army.

And yet on Thursday, Mr. Putin appeared weary, threatened and newly aggrieved as he took his bellicose threats against his Western adversaries to a new level.

Even with the prospect of a friendlier American administration around the corner, he has found himself struggling anew to confront perhaps the biggest failure of his war: Russia’s inability to deter the West from providing colossal amounts of military aid to Ukraine.

As a result, Mr. Putin is bringing Russia closer to a direct conflict with the United States than at any point in decades. He announced Thursday evening that Russia had struck Ukraine with a new intermediate-range missile, one with nuclear capabilities, using a televised speech casting the West as an aggressor that left Moscow with no choice but to respond.

Two months from now, Mr. Trump’s second presidency could give Mr. Putin the chance to strike a peace deal with Ukraine that he could portray as a victory. But until then, people who study the Kremlin say, Mr. Putin is intent on driving home the chilling message that America risks nuclear war as it expands its support for Kyiv.

“The Russian side has clearly demonstrated its capabilities,” Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said on Friday. “The contours of further retaliatory actions, if our concerns are not taken into account, have also been quite clearly outlined.”

Capturing the mood, one of Russia’s most influential security hawks, Sergey Karaganov, a political scientist, published an article on Thursday warning that Russia risked “ripping defeat from the jaws of victory.” To prevail over the West, he argued, the Kremlin needed to step up the threat of nuclear weapons being used.

“Russia has started to win in the fight against Western aggression in Ukraine,” Mr. Karaganov wrote. “But it’s early and dangerous to relax. The fight is only beginning.”

Ever since he launched his invasion in February 2022, Mr. Putin has mostly been careful to avoid direct military conflict with NATO, even as Western countries poured modern weaponry into Ukraine that killed tens of thousands of Russian soldiers.

But on Thursday, he said in the most explicit terms yet that he was ready for such an escalation: Russia was “entitled,” he said, to strike the military facilities of countries “that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities.”

The main reason for that shift appears clear: President Biden’s recent decision to allow Ukraine to strike deep into Russian territory with American-provided missiles that have a range of 190 miles. That was followed by a similar decision by the British government.

While Ukraine’s present stock of Western missiles is not sufficient to change the course of the war, Mr. Putin appears to fear that the West could provide Ukraine with more powerful, longer-range missiles in the future.

“From that point onward,” Mr. Putin said Thursday, referring to Ukraine’s missile attacks this week, “the regional conflict in Ukraine provoked by the West has assumed elements of a global nature.”

But some analysts see a second reason Mr. Putin may feel prepared to take bigger risks now: Mr. Trump’s looming return to the White House.

After all, Mr. Putin’s threats about a “global” war dovetail with Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about Mr. Biden risking World War III. So Mr. Putin — who quickly praised Mr. Trump after he won the election — may believe that taking more aggressive steps now could help him strike a favorable deal once Mr. Trump is inaugurated.

“I don’t see him being concerned about ruining his chances for a deal with Trump — rather, quite the opposite,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “Trump took the position that Biden’s policies are leading to World War III, and what Putin is doing confirms this.”

Mr. Biden long resisted allowing Ukraine to strike deep into Russia with American missiles, to Ukraine’s great frustration, amid concern about Mr. Putin’s response. In September, Mr. Putin said that such a move would put his country “at war” with NATO, for the first time defining a specific “red line” that he was warning the West not to cross.

This week, the Biden administration crossed it, citing Mr. Putin’s own escalation of the war this fall by bringing thousands of North Korean troops into the fight.

Biden administration officials calculate that the risk of escalation by Mr. Putin diminished with the election of Mr. Trump.

But in Moscow, some question that notion. A former senior Russian official who remains close to the Kremlin said “no one knows” if a deal with Mr. Trump is really possible. But “a threat after Biden’s decision has already emerged,” he added, “so we have to respond.” He spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive Kremlin deliberations.

American officials “are overestimating both themselves and the significance of their agenda for others,” said Dmitri Trenin, a hawkish specialist on security policy at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, suggesting Mr. Putin is not so concerned about who holds power in Washington. “Putin has his schedule and his strategy, and he will follow them.”

Still, Mr. Putin has repeatedly signaled that he is interested in a negotiated settlement, as long as he is able to keep the land Russia has captured in Ukraine and to extract political concessions, like a guarantee that the country won’t join NATO.

He has often pointed to a draft treaty that Ukrainian and Russian negotiators hammered out in the first months of the invasion in 2022, in which Ukraine would have declared itself “permanently neutral” and accepted limits on the size of its army.

Russia may be “quite cynical and skeptical” about the prospects for a deal after Mr. Trump takes office, said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. “But they still recognize that they need a deal eventually.”

Ukrainian and Western officials contend that Mr. Putin is simply looking for a deal only on his terms, tantamount to capitulation.

The 2022 negotiations between Russia and Ukraine fell apart amid disputes over how the West could protect Ukraine from another Russian invasion in the future.

That issue — the shape of “security guarantees” for Ukraine — is likely to loom as the most complicated factor in any renewed talks after Mr. Trump returns to the White House, more important than how much Ukrainian territory Russia is allowed to keep control over.

Until then, conditions appear ripe for further escalation — because Russia and Ukraine are jockeying for better negotiating positions before Mr. Trump takes office, and because Mr. Putin appears determined to deter a further expansion of Western aid to Ukraine that could bring the fighting deeper into Russian territory.

“We’re in an escalatory spiral,” Mr. Charap said. Separate from any preparation for future negotiations, he added, that spiral “is a sort of dynamic of its own.”

Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, Europe’s perennial rule-breaker and a champion of national sovereignty, said on Friday that he had invited Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, to visit his country and would ignore an International Criminal Court arrest warrant against the Israeli prime minister.

Hungary, unlike the United States, is a signatory to the court and thus formally obliged to act on its warrants. But Mr. Orban, in a defiant message on the social media platform X, dismissed the warrant against Mr. Netanyahu as “brazen, cynical and completely unacceptable” and said Hungary “will guarantee his freedom and safety” should he visit.

Mr. Orban’s vow to protect Mr. Netanyahu from arrest made Hungary the first European Union country to openly flout the I.C.C. ruling.

The arrest warrants issued Thursday against Mr. Netanyahu and his former defense chief Yoav Gallant have put many countries in an uncomfortable position, particularly Germany, whose desire to separate itself from the horrors of the Holocaust during Nazi rule has made it wary of criticizing Israel and its leaders.

Steffen Hebestreit, the German government’s main spokesman, said in a statement Friday that the country was “one of the biggest” supporters of the international court, noting that Germany had helped create the I.C.C. statutes under which the arrest warrants were issued. But as “a consequence of German history” it has “a unique relationship with and a great responsibility for Israel,” he said.

Asked to clarify his written statement, Mr. Hebestreit said at a news conference in Berlin on Friday that given Germany’s past, he would not expect the country’s police to carry out the arrests if it ever came to it. “It is difficult for me to imagine that we carry out arrests in Germany on this basis,” he said.

Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister, had earlier said that Germany abides “by the law at national, European, and international level” but added that the question of whether the Israelis would be arrested was “theoretical” as they were not in the country.

Britain and France both reaffirmed the court’s standing but stopped short of saying whether they would arrest Mr. Netanyahu if he crossed their borders. One of the countries clearly promising to enforce the arrest warrant should Mr. Netanyahu visit was Slovenia, which in June officially recognized a Palestinian state.

Mr. Orban did not equivocate, and Mr. Netanyahu, in a statement, thanked him for his “moral clarity” and for “standing on the side of justice and truth.”

Mr. Orban has often been accused by critics of stoking antisemitism by casting the Hungarian-born Jewish financier George Soros as the global puppet master behind liberal causes. But the Hungarian leader has been one of Israel’s most stalwart allies in Europe, embracing Mr. Netanyahu as a kindred spirit in step with his own view that countries should not bow to outside pressure.

The arrest warrant against the Israeli leader, Mr. Orban told Kossuth Radio, was “fundamentally wrong” and an “outrageously brazen” political decision that would only lead to “the discrediting of international law” and “add fuel to the flames” of conflict in the Middle East.

“I will guarantee him that if he comes the International Criminal Court ruling will have no effect in Hungary,” Mr. Orban told the state radio station.

The international court on Thursday ordered the arrest of Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip. It amounts to the first time that leaders of a modern Western-style democracy stand accused of war crimes by the global tribunal.

The court also issued a warrant for the arrest of Hamas’s military chief, Muhammad Deif, accusing him, too, of crimes against humanity, though he may be dead.

Mr. Orban, who presents himself as a maverick in the mold of the United States President-elect Donald J. Trump, has a long record of breaking ranks with his European allies and defying what he views as anti-democratic judicial overreach by domestic and international tribunals. Just days after Hungary in July assumed the European Union’s rotating six-month presidency and adopted the slogan “Make Europe Great Again,” Mr. Orban dismayed fellow leaders by flying to Moscow to meet President Vladimir V. Putin in defiance of Europe’s policy of trying to isolate the Russian leader.

Peter Kreko, the director of Political Capital Institute, a research group in Budapest, described Mr. Orban’s defiance of the I.C.C. as a “continuation and expansion of his anti-establishment logic” and a gesture to not only Mr. Netanyahu but also to Mr. Trump, who shares his anti-establishment views and strong support for Israel.

Mr. Orban, he said, sees rocking the boat as “his trump card” and “he uses it as much as he can,” no matter what the risks are “for a small country that could benefit from the protection of international law in certain aspects.”

Europe’s top court this week began hearing a case against Hungary on child protection legislation that the European Union says equates pedophilia with homosexuality and constitutes a “massive and flagrant violation” of European laws.

Hungary sees the case before the European Court of Justice as another example of what Mr. Orban this month scorned as “judicial activism” that undermines the will of voters by allowing judges to override decisions taken by their elected representatives.

Some other European leaders have voiced reservations about the I.C.C. warrants against Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant, including Prime Minister Petr Fiala of the Czech Republic, who said the move undermined the court’s authority because it “equates the elected representatives of a democratic state with the leaders of an Islamist terrorist organization.”

But Mr. Fiala and others said they would abide by their commitments as signatories of the international treaty that established the I.C.C.

Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting from Berlin.

Ukraine’s Parliament canceled a session on Friday over a warning that Russia could target the building in an attack with a missile that Ukraine’s air defenses cannot shoot down, lawmakers said.

Although they did not say which type of missile they were worried about, the decision to cancel the session came a day after Russia fired what it described as a new, intermediate-range missile. Ukraine has no radars capable of detecting those missiles in flight through the upper atmosphere, nor air defense systems capable of shooting them down, Ukrainian experts have said.

Since the start of the war, Parliament has continued meeting in its chambers, even in the first months of the conflict, when Russian forces were just 12 miles from the center of the capital. But on Friday, Parliament decided not to take the risk.

“They canceled it late last night, citing the danger of a missile strike,” Oleksiy Honcharenko, an opposition member of Parliament, said of the planned session.

The intermediate-range missile launched Thursday carried conventional warheads, but it is also capable of carrying nuclear weapons, and analysts and Western officials said the purpose was to instill fear in Ukraine and the West.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Thursday said his forces used the missile in response to Ukraine’s using American and British weapons in strikes further into Russia.

“The world must respond,” President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on X Thursday evening. “Right now there is no strong reaction from the world. Putin is very sensitive to this. He is testing you, dear partners.”

At Ukraine’s request, NATO is planning to hold an emergency meeting of ambassadors on Tuesday to discuss the recent strikes as well as the general battlefield situation, a NATO official said.

With Thursday’s missile attack, a new wave of worry has gripped Ukraine, already unnerved by Russia’s continual strikes on Ukrainian cities and its daily advances at the front line.

“Putin makes a lot of threats,” said Oleksii Sheka, 53, rushing across a windy St. Sophia Square in central Kyiv on Friday. “A strike on Kyiv is now possible, but I wouldn’t want for it all to end like this.”

In Thursday’s attack on Dnipro, in central Ukraine, Russian forces also used a Kinzhal missile. The Kinzhals can be shot down with Patriot air defense missiles.

Also on Thursday, Russia carried out a ballistic missile attack on the city of Kryvyi Rih, with models of missiles used earlier in the war. The attack injured 31 people and damaged residential buildings, local authorities reported.

And overnight on Thursday into Friday, after a three-month long chain of missile and drone attacks, the city of Sumy in northern Ukraine was targeted again. This time it was attacked with drones, leaving two people dead and 12 injured.

In addition, Russia overnight occupied another village in the Donetsk region: the small settlement of Dalnie, south of the town of Kurakhove. That town has been an important logistics hub for Ukrainian forces but now is about 70 percent surrounded by Russian troops advancing both to the north and to the south.

Nataliia Novosolova contributed reporting from Kyiv, and Steven Erlanger from Berlin.

Russia has supplied North Korea with antiaircraft missiles in return for the deployment of its troops ​to fight in Russia’s war against Ukraine, South Korea’s national security adviser said on Friday.​

In recent weeks, North Korea has sent an estimated 1​1,000 troops, some of whom have joined Russian forces in their fight to retake territories occupied by Ukraine in Russia’s Kursk region, according to South Korean and United States officials. It has also sent close to 20,000 shipping containers of weapons to Russia since the summer of 2023, including artillery guns and shells, short-range ballistic missiles and multiple-rocket launchers, South Korean officials have said.

In return, North Korea has been widely expected to seek Russian help in modernizing its conventional armed forces and advancing its nuclear​ weapons program and missiles. One of the ​biggest weaknesses of the North Korean military ​has been its poor​, outdated air defense system, while the United States and its allies in South Korea and Japan run fleets of high-tech war planes, ​including F-35 stealth fighter jets.

“We understand that Russia has provided related equipment and anti-air missiles to shore up the poor air defense for Pyongyang,” the North Korean capital, ​South Korea’s national security adviser​, Shin Won-shik, ​said in an interview with SBS-TV on Friday.

The cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow came as Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, continued to stoke confrontational rhetoric against the United States and South Korea. In a speech at a military exhibition on Thursday that was reported by state media, Mr. Kim warned that the Korean Peninsula has never faced such risks of nuclear war as now, blaming the tensions on Washington’s “aggressive and hostile” policy.

Mr. Shin said Russia was also supplying other military technology to North Korea, including help to improve North Korea’s satellite-launch programs.​ After two failed attempts, North Korea placed its first spy satellite into or​bit last November​, triggering speculation that Russia was behind the success. But in May, a North Korean rocket carrying another military reconnaissance satellite into orbit exploded midair shortly after takeoff.

Mr. Shin added that North Korea was suspected of getting economic help as well. Russia has likely shipped more than a million barrels of oil to North Korea over an eight-month period this year, in violation of National Security Council resolutions, according to an analysis of satellite imagery published on Friday by the UK-based Open Source Center and the BBC.

Earlier this week, Mr. Kim met with Alexander Kozlov, Russia’s minister of natural resources and ecology who led a government delegation to Pyongyang. During the meeting, Mr. Kim noted that “the bilateral solidarity and cooperation have been closer and deepened in different fields” since he and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia signed a treaty of mutual defense and military cooperation in Pyongyang in June, North Korean state media reported.

Mr. Kim called for “further promoting the intergovernmental trade, economic, scientific and technological exchange and cooperation in a more extensive and diversified way,” state media said.

As an emblem of deepening ties between the two countries, Mr. Putin has sent more than 70 animals to North Korea — including bears, domestic yaks and an African lion — as a gift to the Korean people, according to TASS, a Russian news agency.

The deployment of troops to the Russia-Ukraine war is the first major engagement in an armed conflict by North Korea since the Korean War of 1950-53. It is expected to help the North Korean military gain combat experience and learn about modern warfare.

The move ​also highlights North Korea’s deepening military ties with Russia at a time when the ​Asian country was seeking a partner to counter the growing military cooperation among the United States, South Korea and Japan​ in northeast Asia.

In his speech Thursday, Mr. Kim seemed skeptical about rekindling diplomatic ties with President-elect Donald J. Trump, saying North Korea had already gone as far as it can with negotiations, according to the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.

The remark was Mr. Kim’s first on his ill-fated direct diplomacy with Mr. Trump since the former president was re-elected earlier this month.

Authorities in Norway have arrested a Norwegian man who worked as a security guard at the U.S. embassy in Oslo, accusing him of passing sensitive information to Russia and Iran.

Under interrogation, the man, identified as Mohamed Orahhou, 27, admitted to collecting and sharing information with an officer from Russia’s domestic intelligence service, the S.V.R., as well as with unspecified Iranian officials, according to Norwegian authorities and Mr. Orahhou’s lawyer.

The authorities have not released details about the type of information involved, but on Thursday a court in Oslo, citing the seriousness of the accusations, ordered Mr. Orahhou to be jailed for four weeks pending further investigation. After that, another hearing will be held.

“This is a very serious case,” Thomas Blom, an official from Norway’s Police Security Service, said in a text message to The New York Times. “We are at the very beginning of a rather extensive investigation.”

The arrest comes amid heightened concern over Russian espionage activities in Europe following a spate of arson attacks, vandalism and assaults against individuals, all of which have been linked to Russian operatives. This month, details emerged about an apparent Russian plot to place incendiary devices aboard cargo planes in Europe, and on Thursday, U.S. intelligence officials issued a warning to American defense companies to be vigilant in the face of potential Russian sabotage operations.

Last month, Ken McCallum, the chief of Britain’s domestic spy service, MI5, warned that Russian intelligence operatives were on a mission “to generate mayhem on British and European streets.”

Iran, too, represents a serious espionage threat, Mr. McCallum said. Since January 2022, he said, the British security services had disrupted 20 Iranian-backed plots that posed potentially lethal threats to British citizens. Other European countries and the United States have warned of similar threats coming from Iran. This month, Federal prosecutors in New York said that Iranian operatives had plotted to assassinate Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Orahhou was arrested at his residence in Oslo on Wednesday, officials said. If convicted under Norway’s espionage statute, he could face up to 10 years in prison.

The U.S. Embassy in Oslo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In an email to the Times, Mr. Orahhou’s lawyer, John Christian Elden, said his client had admitted to having contact with Russian and Iranian intelligence operatives, but it was still unclear if his activities were serious enough to fall under Norway’s espionage statute.

In a subsequent news release, Mr. Elden said his client had no security clearance as part of his job at the embassy and no access to classified information.

Mr. Orahhou also appears to have been enrolled in a bachelor’s degree program at the University of Tromso, in the far north of Norway. The university released a statement, not naming Mr. Orahhou, but confirming that “the man charged with attempted gross espionage” was a student, studying security and emergency preparedness. Among other things, the course covers defense and security issues related to Norway’s Arctic region, an area of intense competition with Russia.

In 2022, Norwegian police arrested a Russian spy named Mikhail Mikushin, who was working as a researcher at the same university, posing as a Brazilian. Mr. Mikushin was among a handful of Russian operatives sent back to Russia last summer in the swap that freed the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and a former U.S. Marine, Paul Whelan, among others.