German authorities on Saturday were searching for a motive that they said led a driver to plow an SUV into a crowd at a Christmas market set up in a narrow alley in the eastern city of Magdeburg on Friday evening, killing at least five people and injuring more than 200 others.

Memorials were planned for Saturday, and Chancellor Olaf Scholz, accompanied by several of his ministers, visited the site of the attack, which came as many Germans were marking the start of the Christmas holiday after a year of gloomy news about a slowing economy and the collapse of the German government.

Of the people injured, 41 were severely hurt, the police in Magdeburg said. The authorities said that they believed the attack was deliberate, but that the driver, who was arrested shortly after the attack, acted alone.

The German authorities said the driver of the SUV was a male, 50-year-old citizen of Saudi Arabia who had lived in Germany for decades on a visa that granted him permanent residency.

Video broadcast on German television showed a man with a trim beard and round, wire-rimmed glasses lying prone on the ground beside a BMW with a crumpled front fender and grill, as officers pointing pistols at him shouted at him not to move.

The police searched an apartment in a town 25 miles south of Magdeburg where the man was reported to have lived and worked as a psychotherapist. He first came to Germany in 2006, the authorities said. They have not released the man’s name.

The doctor had an active social media presence that included postings criticizing Germany for what he called the authorities’ tolerance of radical Islam, German news media reported. A security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that those reports were accurate.

In his social media, the man also expressed support for the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party and reposted comments by party leaders warning of the threat of Islamic law being imposed in Germany.

In 2016, an Islamic extremist rammed a semi truck into a crowd in at a Christmas market in central Berlin, killing 13. Since then, bollards blocking the entrances to street festivals and holiday markets in Germany have become standard, as have security cameras and increased police presence, including plainclothes officers circulating among the crowds.

This year, knives were banned at holiday markets across the country, after an armed man killed three people at a street festival in August.

In Magdeburg, a line of large concrete blocks painted red and green had been placed at the entrance to the Christmas market, which was set up in narrow streets holding wooden stalls decorated with twinkling lights and selling hot mulled wine, sausages and gifts. But the driver appeared to have taken advantage of a gap along a tramline to plow into the crowd.

“It is not 100 percent possible to protect such events,” said Andreas Rosskopf, the head of the federal police union.

After Friday’s attack, cities across Germany sent extra patrols to the thousands of Christmas markets that remained open on Saturday. In Cologne, the authorities banned suitcases and larger bags at the market around the city’s cathedral. In Leipzig, the police set up extra barriers at the entrances to the market.

“We will need to speak about security, but not today,” Reiner Haseloff, the governor of Saxony-Anhalt state, told reporters on Saturday. “Today we are mourning.”

Germany needed to have an “intense discussion” about what it would take to “give citizens the feeling that in Germany, we not only have secure Christmas markets, but that we are able to live our lives how we want to,” Mr. Haseloff said.

Magdeburg, which is the capital of Saxony-Anhalt and has a population of about 240,000, was part of Communist East Germany. The annual market is set up in the center of the city, in front of City Hall. On Saturday, people came to lay flowers at a memorial set up on the steps of the Johanniskirche, or St. John’s Church, near the attack site.

The pile of flowers at the steps of the church grew throughout the day on Saturday as visibly shaken people stopped by to pay their respects and to mourn.

Marko Heyer, 49, of Magdeburg, came with his wife to the church, both of them fighting back tears. Mr. Heyer recalled visiting the market — with its fairy-tale section with figures that recounted stories to children, as well as with the usual stands selling food and gifts — when he was a boy.

“In my opinion, it was the nicest Christmas market in Germany,” he said. “It will never be the same again.”

Surveillance footage circulating on social media and verified by The New York Times on Friday shows a car plowing into a large crowd at the market shortly after 7 p.m. The car then turns right onto another crowded street. Video of the aftermath shows people helping the wounded as cries are heard.

A couple who were at the market during the attack told a German television station that a black SUV suddenly careened into an alley packed with people who had come to celebrate the start of the last weekend before Christmas. The car drove some 1,200 feet before it stopped, officials said.

“It all happened so quickly,” the couple said.

Justin Trudeau’s career is the stuff of 21st-century political drama, with an arc that has taken him from glamorous liberal standard-bearer to the butt of jokes by President-elect Donald J. Trump and his acolytes.

He burst onto the international scene in 2015, a newly elected young leader of Canada whose father had also once been a popular prime minister.

And he spent the next decade building a brand around being a feminist, an environmentalist, a refugee and Indigenous rights advocate, pursuing the same message of change and hope as Barack Obama.

While he drew fawning reviews in the news media — including over his poster boy looks — his honeymoon with Canadians really lasted only about two years; by 2017, a series of controversies had already tarnished his picture-perfect image.

His party went on to lose the popular vote in two elections, in 2019 and 2021, requiring him to form minority governments propped up by a left-wing opposition party. That support, too, has now evaporated.

Today, Mr. Trudeau finds himself — like other Western leaders — facing an angry constituency and losing control.

He will soon either call elections that he’ll most likely lose, or he’ll step down as leader of his party and as prime minister, and let a different leader take the Liberals to the ballot box next year.

The Prince

In Stephen Maher’s 2024 biography of Mr. Trudeau, the author recalls separate occasions in which Mr. Trudeau’s family members called him a “prince.”

“I’ve always known my whole life that this would be available to me if I want,” Mr. Maher quotes a young Mr. Trudeau as saying about entering politics.

When deciding where to start telling Mr. Trudeau’s political story, chroniclers have several choices.

There’s a 2012 charity boxing match, that he, then a young member of Parliament, won against a tough Conservative who had black belt in karate — people still bring up the fight.

Or the moment, in 2015, when he, as prime minister, unveiled the country’s first gender-balanced cabinet and — asked why this mattered — quipped: “Because it’s 2015.” Male leaders around the world were put on notice.

One might also look back to the eulogy he delivered in 2000 for his father, former prime minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, for an early glimpse of Justin Trudeau the politician.

“We have gathered from coast to coast to coast. From one ocean to another, united in our grief to say goodbye,” Mr. Trudeau, then 29, told a packed cathedral of mourners. “But this is not the end.”

Mr. Trudeau, who turns 53 on Christmas Day, was born while his father was in his first of four terms in office.

The elder Trudeau had swept Canada off its feet in the late 1960s, in what came to be called “Trudeau-mania.” Eventually, voters soured on him too, though he stayed in power for 16 years, and his legacy helped launch his son’s career.

“There was this nostalgia that was associated with the name that really worked for Justin,” said Darrell Bricker, a seasoned pollster and chief executive of Ipsos Public Affairs.

“We were coming out of the time of tempestuous Canadian politics run by a lot of old men,” he added, “and even young men who just seemed old, so Justin was like a breath of fresh air.”

Liberal Icon

The “Because it’s 2015” comment on his cabinet’s gender parity catapulted Mr. Trudeau to global political renown.

Glossy magazines swooned; Vogue ranked him as one of 2015’s 10 “convention-defying hotties,” referring to him as a “Canadian politician-dreamboat.”

One former European leader from the Group of 7 industrialized democracies said early meetings with Mr. Trudeau were marked by people lining up to take selfies with him and treating him like some kind of rock star. The former leader asked not to be identified discussing past diplomatic meetings.

As the United States switched from the Obama to the Trump presidencies in 2016, Mr. Trudeau seemed to offer continuity with Mr. Obama’s politics. Few moments exemplified this more than Mr. Trudeau’s decision to offer refugees an open welcome in 2017, as Mr. Trump cracked down on immigrants.

“To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith,” Mr. Trudeau posted on X, then known as Twitter. “Diversity is our strength.”

At the time, Mr. Trump had issued his so-called Muslim ban curtailing travel to the United States for people from some Muslim-majority nations. Mr. Trudeau even went to the airport to personally welcome Syrian refugees arriving in Canada.

Mr. Trudeau was also at the forefront of post-colonial nations reckoning with the legacy of their treatment of Indigenous populations. While Mr. Trudeau has been criticized for not going far enough, it has been during his tenure that a reconciliation with Indigenous populations in Canada began in earnest.

Change All Around

But starting in 2017, his political fortunes at home had already started fading.

As he headed to the polls in 2019, Mr. Trudeau was rocked by scandal, including a luxurious free vacation he took that he failed to declare and videos from the 1990s and 2001 that surfaced showing him dressing up in blackface.

It took a toll: He could secure only a minority government, leaving his party dependent on allies to pass legislation.

And then came the pandemic. Critics describe Mr. Trudeau’s push for restrictive measures as a key reason for the animus against him.

Within two years, in the middle of the pandemic, Mr. Trudeau called an early election believing it might return him to a majority government; he was wrong. He ended up again commanding only a minority of representatives in the House of Commons.

By that point, the Western world’s center of political gravity was already shifting to the right over vaccine and restrictive mandates. In Canada that set off protests in various parts of the country that came to be known as the Freedom Convoy, including weeks of demonstrations in Ottawa, the capital, that paralyzed the city’s downtown.

Canadians found themselves battered by persistent inflation, setting off an affordability crisis, while an open migration policy to bring in workers backfired, turning one of the world’s most immigrant-friendly societies against newcomers.

Mr. Trudeau also faced turmoil on the family front, last year separating from his wife of 18 years, with whom he has three children.

A Walk in the Snow

Mr. Trump’s election victory in November has brought into sharp focus Mr. Trudeau’s weakened position. Mr. Trump has threatened to impose blanket 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods, which would devastate Canada economically. Mr. Trump has also been mocking Mr. Trudeau online, referring to him as a governor, and to Canada as the 51st state.

This time a political brand that appears antithetical to Mr. Trump’s isn’t working for Mr. Trudeau. “He caught a wave on his way in, and when you catch a wave, it can lift you up,” Mr. Bricker said. “But on the other side, if you don’t get off, it will ground you.”

With elections required by October because of Canada’s electoral rules, Mr. Trudeau’s departure is increasingly seen as a foregone conclusion. The question is where this leaves his Liberal Party. The latest Ipsos poll, published Friday, found that the Liberals trail the Conservatives by 25 percentage points.

On Monday, his deputy prime minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland resigned with a bombshell letter, accusing him of engaging in “costly political gimmicks” and being ill-prepared to face the challenge posed by Mr. Trump.

Then on Friday, the opposition party that has propped up his Liberal minority said it would bring a vote of confidence against it after Parliament resumes in January.

“Like most families, sometimes we have fights around the holidays,” Mr. Trudeau mused at a party for Liberal staff in Ottawa on Tuesday, in a nod to Ms. Freeland’s departure. “But of course, like most families, we find our way through it. You know, I love this country, I deeply love this party, I love you guys.”

But the party, like the country, may no longer love him back. Mr. Trudeau’s allies say the prime minister will take time over the holidays to decide his next steps.

A growing chorus is asking Mr. Trudeau to “take a walk in the snow,” a phrase that became part of political lore after his father, in February 1984, facing calls to resign, took a long walk in the snow.

When he came back, he had decided to resign.

Nacho Fernández Suárez winces when he recalls the eight years he spent as an administrative assistant doing odd errands in Argentina’s Congress. He was part of an inclusion program for people with disabilities.

“They bullied me, they pushed me, they treated me poorly,” said Mr. Fernández Suárez, 34, who has an intellectual disability. He was also bored, he added, barely given any work to do.

Boredom is not much of a problem these days for Mr. Fernández Suárez, who is part of the staff at a popular restaurant in Buenos Aires that is believed to be the first eating establishment in Argentina largely operated by neurodivergent individuals.

The restaurant, Alamesa, is seeking to change the paradigm of what inclusion in the workplace means for people who often do not have a clear path to employment after their formal schooling ends.

Even though Mr. Fernández Suárez earns about one-third of what he did as an assistant, his mother, Alejandra Ferrari, said he was thrilled because he “feels indispensable.” (The program in Argentina’s Congress he was hired through has been dissolved.)

“When you go to work and have a purpose,” she said, “it changes your life.”

That is precisely what inspired Dr. Fernando Polack, a renowned pediatric infectious disease specialist in Argentina, to open Alamesa this year as part of a deeply personal quest to figure out how his daughter, Julia, 26, who is autistic, could gain independence in a world that seemed hostile to her needs.

“I realized that the way I could take charge of what we’re going to do with Julia was to build something, and that had to be a job,” Dr. Polack said. “And to do that, I had to create that job.”

He dipped into his personal and family savings and settled on the idea of a restaurant in part because of childhood memories of feeling safe and secure while sitting around the dinner table with his large extended family during holidays.

Dr. Polack, who ran clinical trials for Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine in Argentina, quickly figured out he could apply his years of scientific, methodical research to build a team made up of people with nontraditional sets of skills.

Julia became the restaurant’s first official employee. The staff then expanded with other neurodivergent people Dr. Polack knew through Julia and word of mouth.

“To see the potential, that’s what we dedicate ourselves to — that is perhaps the heart of the venture,” Dr. Polack said, “understanding the potential of each person, the richness of each, what they can contribute.”

Sebastián Wainstein, Alamesa’s executive director who oversees daily operations, says the restaurant benefits from the differences among neurodivergent individuals.

Mr. Fernández Suárez, for example, he said, “is super chaotic, but he’s a character.”

“He’s very friendly when it comes to dealing with customers,” Mr. Wainstein said.

Among the 40 neurodivergent employees of Alamesa, Mr. Fernández Suárez also stands out because he can openly talk about his intellectual disability, which he says is the result of having contracted meningitis as a baby.

Most are not able to explain their disability, and no one asks them for a diagnosis before they are hired, Mr. Wainstein said.

Juan Pablo Coppola, 27, says he considers himself “different from the rest” and has experienced the feeling of being a nuisance his entire life in large part because of what he describes as his “extreme shyness.”

“In school, let’s say, the bullying was nonstop,” Mr. Coppola recalled, noting his own father continually pleaded with him “to be normal.” A few years ago, he said, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome.

When he first joined Alamesa, he was so surprised by the supportive atmosphere that he could barely speak on the car ride home with his mother, though he did say that he was surprised that a group of people could treat him “really well.”

It was a stark contrast to his previous stint at a different restaurant, where he worked as a bus boy and never quite understood what was expected of him.

“They would send me to clean the bathrooms, and while I was cleaning, they would say, ‘What are you doing here? You need to go to wash dishes,’” Mr. Coppola said. “I was going crazy.”

None of the neurodivergent employees have specific jobs at Alamesa because the goal is for everyone to be able to do everything.

Dr. Polack says Alamesa’s “real secret” is to harness each individual’s strength to “get out of this narcissistic idea” that a person who is neurotypical “is the superior being.”

“Alamesa breaks with the idea that people with neurodivergence want to be like people without neurodivergence,” Dr. Polack said.

In the process, the restaurant, which is the subject of a recent documentary, has created a community.

“We go to the movies, to drink coffee, go bowling,” said Sofía Aguirre, 27, a neurodivergent employee.

Nestled in an upper-middle-class Buenos Aires neighborhood bustling with stores and restaurants, Alamesa is an oasis. Music is played at a low volume, and soundproof material on the walls and ceiling ensures there is no echo from the cacophony of conversations.

It is just one of the ways Alamesa tries to accommodate its staff, many of whom are particularly sensitive to loud and unexpected noises, a common trait among those on the autism spectrum.

The restaurant, which serves only lunch, has a state-of-the-art kitchen with no knives because all raw materials come sliced and diced. There are also no open flames — the food is cooked in special ovens that use hot air and steam.

To help employees with reading difficulties, ingredients are color-coded so they can easily be matched to any of the 10 main courses and five desserts on the menu.

The menu, with an emphasis on international cuisine, includes an eclectic mix of dishes, such as a pastrami sandwich, salmon with panko breadcrumbs and Moroccan chicken with couscous.

“A lot of people came at first because of the concept of an inclusive restaurant, the food was secondary,” Mr. Wainstein said. “Now, people are also starting to come because, ‘Hey, I ate really well.’”

Alamesa does employ about a dozen workers without neurological issues, many of whom are psychology students or recent graduates from a local university, who provide support to the other workers as needed.

They can help resolve interpersonal conflicts among the neurodivergent staff and can tell if a worker is getting tired and needs a break.

Having such a large staff is one challenge of running Alamesa, but the restaurant manages to turn a small profit even as Argentina is enduring difficult economic times.

When it first opened, the restaurant was fully booked for weeks amid widespread attention from the news media and famous personalities, including Pope Francis, who is from Argentina.

“I congratulate you on the work you do,” the pontiff said in a video message addressed to Alamesa’s employees. “Thank you because it is a contribution to society, a unique contribution, a creative contribution from each one of you.”

Since then, the rush has subsided, but walking into the restaurant without a reservation can still mean having to wait. That has led to uncomfortable situations for Ms. Aguirre, who is often asked to serve as a hostess.

“Sometimes people ask, ‘Please let me in,’” she said. “Sometimes people get insistent and you have to say, ‘Sorry, sorry, I apologize, there’s no room.’”

Though the neurotypical employees continue to play roles like running the cash register and dealing with suppliers, they do so with a neurodivergent employee by their side so they can learn the ropes.

The goal is to make neurotypical workers superfluous.

“Our idea, and it was never utopian, it was always very concrete,” Mr. Wainstein said, “is that one day all neurotypicals will disappear, and they will take charge.”

At end-of-year celebrations, some bosses give their employees gifts of appreciation and extend warm wishes. On Saturday, Pope Francis used his annual Christmas message to the leaders of the Vatican’s various departments to admonish them.

Again.

“A church community lives in joyful and fraternal harmony to the extent that its members walk in the life of humility, renouncing thinking the worst and speaking ill of others,” Francis told the cardinals and prelates who make up the Vatican’s administration.

He also touched on a personal bugaboo: gossip.

“Gossip is an evil that destroys social life, sickens people’s hearts and leads to nothing,” Francis said.

For years, Francis has used his Christmas message to the Curia, as the Vatican administration is known, to air his concerns about the workplace environment in the tiny city-state and to urge his top advisers to do some soul-searching.

He opened off-topic on Saturday with a reminder of the devastation of the war in Gaza, in what appeared to be a reference to deadly Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip on Friday.

“Yesterday, children were bombed. This is cruelty, this is not war,” he said. “I want to say it, because it touches the heart.”

To be sure, Saturday’s message was far tamer than the one in 2014, when he criticized the Curia for what he called a narcissistic “pathology of power” and “existential schizophrenia.” Warning against a lust for power, hypocritical double lives and a lack of spiritual empathy among some men of God, Francis listed 15 “ailments and temptations” that he said were weakening the Curia’s ability to serve.

In 2018, Francis excoriated “the infidelity of those who betray their vocation” and “hide behind good intentions in order to stab their brothers and sisters in the back and to sow weeds, division and bewilderment.” They resembled Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus but did not repent, he said.

He stayed mum on corruption last year, even though a cardinal who had once been one of the church’s most powerful Vatican officials had been found guilty a few days earlier of embezzlement and fraud in a high-profile case that raised questions about the prevalence of financial malfeasance and incompetence at the highest levels of the Roman Catholic Church.

This year, Francis returned to gossip, which he has identified as the root of much evil in the church. In a major 2018 Vatican document, Francis said that those who spread gossip “are really the enemies of peace,” and on his travels he has regularly warned priests and nuns to refrain from doing it.

“Do you know what a gossiping nun is like? She is a terrorist,” he told a group of contemplative nuns during a 2018 trip to Peru. “Because gossip is like a bomb. The terrorist, just like the devil, goes in whispering and murmuring, throws the bomb, destroys and calmly walks off. No to terrorist nuns, no to gossip.”

At the end of the audience on Saturday, he gave the prelates two books: one on the important of grace, and the other a reflection on human frailty.

Iranian-backed Houthi militants launched a missile from Yemen that landed in Tel Aviv early Saturday morning after air defenses failed to intercept it, the latest in an increasing barrage of Houthi attacks.

At least 16 people were lightly wounded by shattered glass in nearby buildings, according to Magen David Adom, Israel’s emergency service. It was at least the sixth such attack over the past month.

The attack set off air-raid sirens across central Israel ordering hundreds of thousands of residents to enter reinforced bomb shelters. The missile landed in a playground in Tel Aviv in the middle of the night.

Yahya Saree, a military spokesman for the Houthis, said the group’s fighters had launched the missile “to aid the victory of the oppressed Palestinian people and its fighters.” He also claimed it had struck a “military target.”

On Thursday, Israeli fighter jets flew over 1,000 miles to bombard sites in Houthi-controlled Yemen, including the capital, Sana. The Israeli military said it had struck power plants as well as fuel and oil tanks.

Israel and the Houthis, who control much of northwestern Yemen, have traded fire since October 2023, when the Yemeni militia began firing rockets and drones at Israel in what it has described as a campaign in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.

While military analysts widely deem the Houthis less powerful than other Iran-backed militias — like Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in Gaza — they have managed to penetrate Israel’s defenses multiple times. In July, a Houthi drone attack killed a civilian in Tel Aviv, prompting Israeli airstrikes on the port of Hudaydah in western Yemen.

On Thursday, a school in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan was damaged after a missile fired overnight from Yemen was partly intercepted, the Israeli military said. At least three people were wounded by broken glass, according to Magen David Adom, but no one was seriously injured or killed.

The Houthis have also attacked cargo vessels passing through the Red Sea in an attempt to enforce a commercial embargo on Israel. That has prompted international condemnation and a campaign of airstrikes by the United States and its allies against them.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, appeared to suggest on Thursday that Israel could take even more muscular action against the Houthis. But with the Yemeni militia so far from Israeli territory, it is not clear what Israel could do to decisively end the attacks.

“They are finding out and will find out the hard way: Whoever harms Israel will pay a very heavy price,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a statement.

Israel fought Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel in October 2023. In November, Hezbollah agreed to a cease-fire after Israel assassinated its leaders and invaded Lebanon in response to Hezbollah rocket fire.

With Russia intensifying airstrikes on Ukraine’s power grid over the past month, darkness once again engulfs Ukrainian cities at night. In Kyiv, residents rely on cellphone flashlights to navigate unlit streets. To walk their dogs, they use glow sticks doubling as makeshift collars.

Ukraine has so far weathered the effects of three major Russian strikes over the past month by cutting street lighting and imposing intermittent shutdowns to ease pressure on the power grid. But two years of attacks on power plants and substations have left the country’s energy network on the verge of collapse, experts say.

The United Nations has warned that power outages could last up to 18 hours a day this winter, “leaving civilians without the electricity they need to power homes, run water pumps and allow children to study online.”

That has forced the Ukrainian authorities to turn to unconventional measures to try to avert an energy crisis. They are bringing an entire aging Lithuanian power plant to Ukraine to scavenge parts for the damaged grid; have moved to lease floating power plants from Turkey; and have even requested a U.N. presence at critical substations, hoping to deter Russian attacks.

“We are doing everything possible,” Viktoriya Hryb, the head of the Ukrainian Parliament’s subcommittee on energy security, said in a recent interview in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.

Still, Ms. Hryb and other Ukrainian officials admitted that these measures would not be enough to prevent blackouts. In some cases, they may not even be ready before year’s end, when subzero temperatures drive up electricity consumption.

Here’s a closer look at Ukraine’s efforts to keep the lights on, and the challenges it faces.

Scavenging for parts

Months of Russian attacks have depleted Ukraine’s stockpiles of equipment to repair and maintain power plants.

Because Ukraine’s energy facilities were mostly built when it was part of the Soviet Union, they are reliant on spare parts from Soviet-era facilities, said Andrian Prokip, a Kyiv-based energy expert with the Kennan Institute in Washington.

So last year, DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, began hunting through plants in former Eastern Bloc countries like Slovakia and the Czech Republic to find compatible parts. “We found power plants using generators and turbines that were pretty much like ours,” said Oleksiy Povolotskiy, the head of DTEK’s recovery office.

In one of Ukraine’s boldest projects, an entire power plant that once supplied heat to half of Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, is being disassembled with support from the European Union and its parts used to repair a few damaged Ukrainian facilities.

The operation began this summer and is continuing, according to Ignitis, the Lithuanian energy company that owns the plant. More than 300 pieces of equipment are being shipped to Ukraine, their exact destination kept secret for security reasons.

The plant’s spare parts were originally scheduled to arrive in Ukraine before winter, but logistical obstacles and bureaucratic delays have pushed back the timeline, and some key equipment will not be delivered until next year, according to officials and business people involved in the operation, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of its sensitive nature.

Renting floating power plants

Building new power plants is a lengthy process that Ukraine cannot afford as winter sets in. As an alternative, the country plans to rent “powerships” — floating plants mounted on cargo ships — to supply electricity to the Black Sea coastal region of Odesa, which lacks power generation facilities.

The powerships, running on fuel or gas, will be moored in the region’s ports and will transmit electricity to the grid via onshore substations.

Ukrainian officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the plan’s sensitivity, said they were in talks with Karpowership, a Turkish company specializing in powerships, to rent several vessels. Last year, the company signed a memorandum of understanding with a state-owned Ukrainian energy trader to install powerships capable of generating 500 megawatts per hour, enough electricity to supply one million Ukrainians.

Karpowership did not respond to requests for comment.

The plans have accelerated in recent weeks, with the government issuing a decree permitting the installation of gas pistons and turbines on ships to power the floating plants. Ukrenergo, the national electricity operator, said this fall that it had begun building transmission facilities to link the ships to the grid. A Ukrainian official said the facilities were now completed.

Ms. Hryb said two powerships might be operational within weeks if Ukraine could overcome two challenges.

The Ukrainian government is trying to get its Western partners to pay part of the cost of generating electricity on the ships, which Ms. Hryb and Mr. Prokip said is very high. Another issue is ensuring the ships’ safety in the Odesa region, an area frequently bombed by Russia.

Mr. Prokip said there was hope that the ships might be spared because they are operated by Turkey, a country that has mediated agreements between Russia and Ukraine during the war.

Stationing U.N. experts at critical substations

With most of its thermal and hydroelectric power plants destroyed or badly damaged, Ukraine has relied on its three operational nuclear power stations to keep the lights on. Together, they can provide 7.7 gigawatts of electricity per hour, more than half of the country’s current generation capacity, according to DiXi Group, a Ukrainian energy think tank.

Russia has refrained from attacking the nuclear plants directly, which could trigger a catastrophic disaster. Instead, it has recently focused on crippling their ability to transmit power by destroying the substations connecting them to the grid.

Since August, the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. body, has recorded four attacks on such substations. Each time, the strikes forced several reactors offline or required them to reduce output as a precautionary measure.

Ukraine has built concrete shelters around the substations to protect them, but officials admit that they are ineffective against missiles. So they have turned to a drastic measure: asking officials from the U.N. agency to stay at the substations, banking on their presence to deter Russian attacks.

Moscow might be reluctant to risk the lives of the agency’s staff because it depends on its support for its nuclear program exports, said Jan Vande Putte, a nuclear expert at Greenpeace.

In September, Ukraine’s parliamentary energy committee sent a letter to the agency that was reviewed by The New York Times, urging it to station “a permanent monitoring group” at critical substations to “prevent possible provocations” by Russia. The next month, Yuliia Kyian, a top official at the Energy Ministry, said Ukraine was negotiating with the agency to arrange such oversight.

So far, the International Atomic Energy Agency has agreed to conduct periodic monitoring missions at critical substations but not to station agents there permanently, Greenpeace said.

The agency reported that one of its vehicles was hit by a drone while en route to inspect a Russian-controlled nuclear plant in southern Ukraine last week. The agency did not specify which side launched the drone, and both Russia and Ukraine traded blame. Mr. Vande Putte said the attack appeared to be a deliberate Russian attempt to intimidate the agency.

Ms. Hryb conceded that International Atomic Energy Agency agents would risk their lives by staying at the substations. “But who in Ukraine doesn’t today?” she asked.

Ten years have passed since Ajoon Khan’s son died in a ghastly attack by the Pakistani Taliban that killed about 150 people, mostly children, at a military-run school in Peshawar, in northwestern Pakistan.

But the pain of loss is unrelenting — it grows only deeper with time. Mr. Khan, a lawyer, said he could never forget the parents sobbing and pleading outside the school gates, the soldiers storming the building, the children and the teachers fleeing in terror.

“It has been nearly a decade, but it feels like nothing has changed,” said Mr. Khan, speaking last week, just before the Dec. 16 anniversary of the death of his son, Asfand, who had been in the 10th grade. “If you look at the security situation in the country, it feels that our children’s sacrifices were in vain.”

The brutal assault on the school in Peshawar led to rare political unity in support of a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy for Pakistan and a vast military operation in the country’s former tribal areas near Afghanistan. The efforts forced militants to retreat across the border and brought a degree of relative peace to Pakistan. Large-scale terrorist attacks were significantly reduced, with fatalities dropping from 2,451 across 1,717 attacks in 2013 to 220 in 146 attacks in 2020.

But the hard-won gains from Pakistan’s counterinsurgency offensive — a costly endeavor in money and lives — are now in jeopardy.

Over the past few years, violence by the Pakistani Taliban and other Islamist militant groups has surged in parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, in northwestern Pakistan. Experts attribute the increase to the Afghan Taliban’s seizure of power in neighboring Afghanistan in August 2021.

Simultaneously, ethnic separatist groups in the southwestern province of Baluchistan have regained momentum, increasingly targeting security forces and Chinese nationals involved in projects under the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s infrastructure investment program. The separatists accuse Pakistan’s government of allowing China to extract the region’s wealth.

Last week, the Interior Ministry reported that 924 people, including civilians and law enforcement personnel, had been killed in 1,566 terrorist attacks across the country over the past 10 months. The ministry said that 341 terrorists had been killed during the period. Most recently, an overnight attack on Friday in a former tribal district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province killed 16 people, most of them soldiers, according to The Khorasan Diary, an Islamabad-based research platform specializing in tracking militant activity.

Experts and security officials have identified a range of challenges impeding Pakistan’s progress against terrorism: political instability, weak governance, dwindling public support, economic constraints and reduced U.S. counterterrorism assistance after the end of the 20-year war in Afghanistan.

“The greatest challenge lies in mobilizing the necessary financial resources and manpower for operations across such vast regions,” said Muhammad Amir Rana, the director of the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, a security think tank in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.

The source of the problem for Pakistan, experts say, is mainly found across the border, in Afghanistan.

The Taliban administration in Kabul, the Afghan capital, denies accusations of harboring militants from the Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or T.T.P. But Asfandyar Mir, a senior expert at the United States Institute of Peace, said that the T.T.P. had been given “a permissive safe haven in Afghanistan,” which had allowed it to become “resilient and lethal.”

Pakistani security officials privately acknowledged that they had misjudged how the new Taliban rulers of Afghanistan would handle the Pakistani Taliban. The officials had anticipated that the Taliban leaders in Afghanistan would help curb the T.T.P. in return for the covert support that Pakistan had provided them during the U.S.-led war.

Instead, the Taliban in Kabul have provided the T.T.P. with resources and advanced American-made weapons and equipment seized after the collapse of the U.S.-supported Afghan government, according to a senior security official in Islamabad who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal assessments.

The T.T.P. has gone on to unleash a wave of attacks inside Pakistan as it wages a campaign whose aim is to overthrow the government. Among them was a suicide bombing in January 2023 that killed more than 100 people at a mosque in Peshawar.

Pakistani security forces have also been locked in a conflict with ethnic separatist groups in Baluchistan, an arid province bordering Afghanistan and Iran that is home to the Chinese-operated deep-sea port of Gwadar. One of the groups, the Baluch Liberation Army, or B.L.A., has been designated a terrorist group by the United States.

Like the Pakistani Taliban, the B.L.A. has adopted more lethal tactics in recent years, including suicide bombings, and gained access to modern weaponry. One of its deadliest attacks took place on Nov. 9, when a suicide bomber killed nearly 30 people at a railway station in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan Province.

The Pakistani authorities are under immense pressure from China to improve security for Chinese workers in Pakistan. The attacks have jeopardized billions of dollars in Chinese investments in infrastructure, energy and trade, which have been crucial for sustaining Pakistan’s economy during a prolonged economic crisis.

In October, two Chinese nationals were killed in a suicide attack carried out by the B.L.A. near the international airport in Karachi, in southern Pakistan. The Pakistani Taliban have also been linked to attacks on Chinese nationals, including a bombing in March that killed five in northwestern Pakistan.

In response to the surge in attacks, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif in late November announced what he called a comprehensive military operation against ethnic separatist groups, though the details remain undisclosed.

The military action is likely to be much more limited than the counterterrorism operation that Pakistan mounted a decade ago. The current political climate and public sentiment are less supportive of large-scale military offensives.

The country is politically polarized over the monthslong detention of former Prime Minister Imran Khan. The financial burden of military operations is a major concern for Pakistan, which is already grappling with mounting debt and economic instability. While the large-scale military operation in 2014 significantly reduced terrorism, it came at a tremendous cost.

“Thousands were killed, millions displaced from their homes and thousands of houses were destroyed during the military offensive,” said Tariq Parvez, a former senior police official who also led the country’s counterterrorism authority.

Mr. Parvez added that there was widespread opposition to any military operation in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where Mr. Khan’s party is in power.

For residents in northwestern Pakistan, the resurgence of violence has reignited haunting memories of 10 years ago, when insurgents operated with impunity, creating a climate of fear.

“A decade ago, the school attack tragedy transformed the public’s sense of helplessness — stemming from T.T.P. attacks on public spaces — into a unified national response against terrorism,” said Jamaluddin Afridi, a trader in Peshawar whose children currently attend the same military-run school.

Today, however, residents feel disheartened, believing that the military is focused more on internal political struggles than on ensuring public security, he said.

The Pakistani Taliban and other militant groups are exploiting the security vacuum, Mr. Afridi added, by extorting businesses.

He said he had paid $3,800 to the T.T.P. a few months ago out of fear for the safety of his family, including his two children. “It seems like the government is waiting for another tragedy, similar to the school attack, to happen again,” Mr. Afridi said.