President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Saturday apologized for the crash of an Azerbaijan Airlines plane this past week, breaking the Kremlin’s three-day silence on the accident that claimed the lives of 38 people. He did not explicitly acknowledge Russia’s responsibility for the crash.

Mr. Putin “offered his apologies” for the crash in a phone call to his Azerbaijani counterpart, Ilham Aliyev, the Kremlin said in a statement. Mr. Putin told Mr. Aliyev “that the tragic incident took place in Russian airspace,” according to the statement. The phone call was initiated by the Russian leader, the Kremlin said.

Mr. Putin said that as the plane approached its scheduled destination of Grozny, in southern Russia, Russian air defenses had begun to repulse an attack by Ukrainian drones on the Grozny airport and others nearby, according to the Kremlin. The statement stopped short of attributing the crash to a Russian air-defense missile, a cause that investigators in Azerbaijan have focused on.

Azerbaijan’s presidential office confirmed that Mr. Putin had offered apologies to Mr. Aliyev, but suggested that the blame laid with Russian air defenses.

“President Ilham Aliyev emphasized that the Azerbaijan Airlines passenger plane encountered external physical and technical interference while in Russian airspace, resulting in a complete loss of control,” Azerbaijan’s presidential office said in a statement. The plane “was able to make an emergency landing solely due to the courage and professionalism of the pilots,” the statement added.

Mr. Aliyev called for a thorough investigation and for “ensuring those responsible are held accountable.”

The theory that a Russian missile caused the crash has also received support from aviation experts and U.S. officials.

The Embraer 190 airliner was traveling from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Grozny, but was diverted from its path. It eventually crashed in Aktau, Kazakhstan, after crossing the Caspian Sea. More than half of people on board were Azerbaijani citizens. Seven Russians and six Kazakhs died in the crash.

Mr. Putin said Russia had opened a criminal investigation into the crash, according to the Kremlin, and was hosting Azerbaijani investigators in Grozny. The Kremlin’s statement tried to project a united front among the three nations most affected by the crash.

“The relevant agencies of Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan are closely cooperating on the site of the catastrophe in the area of the city of Aktau,” the Kremlin statement read.

Mr. Aliyev’s more accusatory, strongly worded statement, however, presents the first public crack in the Kremlin’s attempts to control the narrative.

Both Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have long tried to build economic ties to the West and shed the Russian colonial legacy — without antagonizing the Kremlin. The two former Soviet states have taken a neutral stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, benefiting from growing trade with Russia without directly supporting Kremlin’s war aims.

Still, the Kremlin’s apology without accepting responsibility complicates these countries’ efforts to maintain friendly relations with the Kremlin without appearing weak to their citizens and the world, analysts said.

The Kremlin’s acceptance of responsibility is particularly important in Azerbaijan because Mr. Aliyev has personally apologized to Mr. Putin for the Azerbaijani military’s erroneous downing of a Russian military helicopter in 2020. At the time, Azerbaijan swiftly took responsibility and offered compensation for the accident, which claimed the lives of two Russian servicemen.

Mr. Aliyev most likely expected a similar response now from the Kremlin, said Zaur Shiriyev, an Azerbaijan expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a policy research organization.

Mr. Putin’s statement “is a textbook example of a non-apology apology,” Mr. Shiriyev said in a written response to questions. “There was no direct acceptance of responsibility, no offer of compensation, and no commitment to hold those responsible accountable.”

Ivan Nechepurenko and Milana Mazaeva contributed reporting from Tbilisi, Georgia.

Vasyl Pipa is not a Ukrainian soldier, but his job, at times, can be as dangerous as fighting in the trenches. As members of the White Angels, a branch of the police that evacuates civilians from the front line, he and others take extreme risks to rescue some of the last civilians who remain close to the fighting.

One of Mr. Pipa’s tasks is to evacuate civilians from Kurakhove, and from along the entire front line in the region. Traveling there is like flooring it through a thicket of life-threatening risks: Jets, drones and artillery can quickly annihilate an armored vehicle. Today, Russians control the city center, where fighting continues among the last few streets before the Kurakhove Power Station.

As the deadly Russian march forward intensifies, most Ukrainians are running for their lives. While some are loyal to President Vladimir V. Putin and welcome the white, blue and red flag hoisted here, the majority of those left behind are elderly, disabled and poor, with no means of relocating. Helping them to safety is the White Angels’ job, and as the front line shifts, its urgency is rising.

The depth of the hardship was evident this fall over seven weeks of observing the White Angels and other aid groups as they brought food and other essentials to the civilians and evacuated the ones who wanted to leave. They operated in town squares, in battered shelters and in destroyed homes.

“When we lost the armored car, damaged by a drone, we brought the people to an abandoned house,” Mr. Pipa said, recalling a recent evacuation. “The woman had a severe jaw injury, and a man was brought in with them, wounded too. The drones broke the roof and dropped the ammunition inside. Another drone was controlling the grenade dropping,” he said, adding, “We were chased.”

The White Angels finally rushed the civilians to temporary safety, scraping through rubble and under Russian bombardment, and were then able to remove the group farther from the front.

Vasyl Chupak and his brother, Viktor, had a long history of run-ins with law enforcement and had spent half their lives in prison. But this fall, Vasyl Chupak went to the Kurakhove police station voluntarily. His brother had cirrhosis of the liver and was deteriorating quickly. They knew they needed to leave before it was too late.

The police sped across town to their apartment block to find Viktor Chupak emaciated and living in squalor. An armored van took them to an ambulance, which transported them to a hospital.

Kurakhove, a small city in the southern reach of the Donetsk region, sits on the eastern edge of the Zaporizhzhia region’s defense lines. Only about 800 residents, including children, remain from a prewar population of 18,220. Those who stay live in the basements of apartment buildings without electricity, running water or heating. Every day, the city is subjected to artillery fire, mortars and drone attacks.

With people stranded and no supplies, Mr. Pipa and his colleagues delivered food and supplies to the last open shop. Nothing would reach here without their help, leaving people to survive only on scarce canned food.

The Donbas, of which the Donetsk region is part, used to be Ukraine’s most densely populated area. Cities like Avdiivka, Bakhmut and Vuhledar were home to tens of thousands of people. When these and a slew of others were destroyed, falling under Russian control, most residents fled to Pokrovsk.

The fall of neighboring areas has brought Russian forces ever closer to Pokrovsk, turning it from a safe refuge for civilians into a ghost town. By November, the population had shrunk to about 11,400, from 60,000. After the capture of the village of Shevchenko in mid-December, Russian forces are now less than a mile away.

The Russian Army has gone all-in to capture every inch of the surrounding area — a flashpoint of the war and potentially a significant prize for Mr. Putin.

“The Pokrovsk and Kurakhove region remains the most difficult along the entire front line,” said Capt. Artem Mokhnach of Ukraine, the spokesman for Operational Tactical Group Donetsk.

One day last month, under a gray and stormy sky, the heavy sound of bombing rumbled menacingly around the outskirts of Pokrovsk. The city is awash with imposing arrays of concrete “dragon’s teeth,” anti-tank fortifications. A local woman, Natalia, strolled through the concrete spikes to arrive at a shop with a meager selection of salted pork fat and pickled vegetables.

The war has hit her hard, she agreed, describing the lack of running water and heating. “But where to go?” she concluded.

Russian drones maraud throughout the city, and artillery fire is a daily occurrence. The flight range of the drones has increased from about three miles less than two years ago to about 15 miles now. They present a significant daily threat to civilians, and to humanitarian aid workers coming to help them.

These fast-flying and precise lethal weapons have been hunting and stalking the local population, the head of Pokrovsk’s military and civilian administration, Serhii Dobriak, said.

“A family was going to Novotroitske, a father, mother, and son,” he said. “They saw that it was an ordinary civilian car, a Lada. But the drone hit them on purpose. It killed the son. The mother’s arm was torn off.”

“Neither the ambulance nor the military could reach them,” he added.

On Dec. 12, a pipeline was bombed beyond repair, cutting off all gas to the town. On the same day, the Pokrovsk city administration announced the interruption of drinking water deliveries to the distribution points because the bombardments made it too dangerous. The most important thing is for civilians to leave the city, Mr. Dobriak said.

Entire blocks of Myrnohrad, a city near Pokrovsk, have been destroyed and are now covered in gray concrete dust, with people’s belongings blown into the street.

“In Myrnohrad, the enemy is constantly inflicting indiscriminate fire on the city using various types of weapons,” explained Captain Mokhnach, the spokesman for Operational Tactical Group Donetsk. This mining town, adjacent to the city of Pokrovsk, which in 2020 had a population of 48,864, now has just 1,658 inhabitants, local officials said.

A black smear stained the street beside a woman selling food from a small stand. She said it was the blood of a woman who had been decapitated by a rocket that fell on the building next door. Her account was corroborated by several others, including two men who said they had witnessed it.

Viktor Shotropa, 36, of Global Empowerment Mission, a disaster relief group, tries to ensure that humanitarian aid reaches the people along the front line. Two 20-ton trucks from his agency containing about 1,500 food parcels are delivered daily to the Donetsk region to help cope with the ongoing crisis. Mr. Shotropa knows the situation well; he has delivered aid to dangerous Ukrainian cities such as Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Vuhledar.

“In Pokrovsk, the situation is just beginning,” he said. “We should prepare for the worst.”

In the Myrnohrad town square, Mr. Shotropa opened the rear doors of his armored van as people appeared, seemingly from nowhere, with bicycles, wheelbarrows, carts and baby carriages to transport the food aid boxes home. Pushing and shouting, they tried to get a box before the supply ran out or the Russian drone operators noticed the crowd.

After almost three years of evacuating people, Mr. Pipa remembers a man who died despite his efforts to save him. “It’s hard to bear when people die, ordinary people in your arms,” he said. “It’s just hard. It leaves such an emptiness inside.”

For the past several weeks, Fadia Nasser, a widow sheltering in Deir al Balah in central Gaza, says she has subsisted on nothing but a small sandwich of herbs for breakfast and a tomato she shares with her daughter for lunch.

Eleven miles away in a tent camp in southern Gaza, Said Lulu, who used to run a small coffee kiosk in Gaza City, says he is suffering in pain from kidney disease but has no access to the clean water doctors say he must drink to keep it from getting worse.

And Ola Moen, in Beit Lahia in the enclave’s north, fears going outside because of frequent airstrikes. But she doesn’t feel she has a choice: She says she spends her days scouring pharmacies for burn cream and painkillers for her 9-year-old nephew, whose legs were broken and burned by an Israeli airstrike in October.

Even as mediators try to secure a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas, Palestinians and human rights organizations say the humanitarian situation is getting more desperate.

In the 14 months since Israel launched its invasion of Gaza in response to the Hamas-led terror attack on Israel, military bombardments have turned cities into rubble-filled wastelands and 90 percent of the population of about 2.1 million has been displaced at least once. Winter is adding to the misery. A doctor at a hospital in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, said that four infants in tent encampments had died from the cold in the past week.

Israel says that its target is Hamas and that it does everything possible to limit the loss of civilian life. But the increasingly dire humanitarian situation has prompted a particularly scathing chorus of condemnation from the United Nations and international human rights organizations.

Here is a closer look at three parts of Gaza’s humanitarian crisis.

Food

Yaser Shaban, a 58-year-old civil servant for the Palestinian Authority who is living with six people in a tent in Gaza City, is dependent on the limited supplies of food — beans, lentils and pasta — brought in by humanitarian organizations.

When those run out he begs for food or uses his few remaining shekels to buy items from the market at vastly inflated prices. Fruit and meat are out of reach, he said. And eggs, at 15 shekels, or $4, each, are a rare treat. “I am not looking for delicious, healthy or luxury food,” he said. “The goal is to only beat hunger.”

The United Nations warned in November that 1.95 million people were at risk of famine and that absent a dramatic increase in food aid, people would start dying of hunger. On Dec. 24, it said deliveries of humanitarian aid were still inadequate, particularly in the north, where Israel has ordered evacuations and severely restricted access. Israel is pressing a renewed offensive there in an effort to stamp out what it has called a Hamas resurgence, unleashing some of its military’s most devastating attacks yet.

Georgios Petropoulos, a senior U.N. official based in the southern city of Rafah, noted that even when Israeli authorities allow shipments of humanitarian aid in, they sometimes strip the deliveries of vital components, such as the fuel needed to run generators in hospitals and shelters. Israel says that the fuel cannot be sent to areas where militants are active.

“From where we are in Gaza, it looks like the aid system has been weaponized,” Mr. Petropoulos said. “Every day as an aid worker in Gaza, you’re forced to make horrible decisions: Should I let people die of starvation or the cold?”

On Dec. 5, Amnesty International accused Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza, citing prevalent hunger, the risk of famine and the inaccessibility of aid as contributing factors. Israel rejected the claim, and the Israeli authority that coordinates the flow of goods to Gaza said on social media that the group’s accusation that it is obstructing aid deliveries and precipitating famine “deliberately and inaccurately ignores the extensive humanitarian efforts made by Israel,” and listed recent deliveries of food, fuel and medical supplies.

There is little question that aid delivery has been reduced to a trickle, both because of Israeli restrictions and concerns about looting. To Ms. Nassar, what matters is that she still does not have enough to eat. She said that there is food in the market — most often smuggled in, or looted from humanitarian aid convoys — so, to outsiders, “it may not look like famine.”

“But when food is so expensive that most people cannot afford it, is it still available?” she asked.

Water

Mr. Lulu, the former coffee seller, has no regular access to a tap for water. He lives in a tent camp in Rafah, in southern Gaza, and the water there is delivered by the tank-load to a central area, where residents wait in line for hours to fill up their jars and buckets, at 2 shekels, or 50 cents, a gallon.

But the quality is dubious: smelly, cloudy and flecked with debris. “The only good thing about it,” he said, “is that it is less bad than the seawater.” He knows that drinking the water will exacerbate his kidney problems, but bottled water is unaffordable.

It wasn’t always that way. Gaza has water treatment plants, desalinization facilities and three pipelines channeling fresh water from Israel. But in a report released on Dec. 19, Human Rights Watch said Israel was intentionally depriving Palestinians in Gaza of adequate access to safe water for drinking and sanitation.

The pipelines were turned off and damaged from bombing at the start of the war and only partially reopened a month later, the report found. Israel’s restrictions on fuel imports have virtually halted desalinization activities. Water and sanitation infrastructure has sustained extensive damage, the report found. Israel also prevented the importation of equipment and chemicals, such as chlorine, needed for purifying water, saying those items risked being used by Hamas.

As a result, Gazans have little access to clean water. The report recorded 669,000 recorded cases of acute watery diarrhea since the war began, and more than 132,000 cases of jaundice, a sign of hepatitis. Both diseases spread via contaminated water.

The Israeli Ministry of Defense said in response to the report that Israeli pipelines were sending millions of gallons of water into the Gaza Strip and that Israel had helped repair damage to the water infrastructure caused by Hamas. Human Rights Watch noted that water from the pipelines was insufficient to offset the decrease in water production from other sources.

Ms. Moen says she spends two hours a day waiting in line to buy drinking water — at 19 shekels a gallon, or more than $5, in north Gaza. And she still has to boil and filter it. “At least I don’t see worms in it,” she said. “That is our criteria now.”

Medicine

When Ms. Moen’s house in Beit Lahia was hit in October, most of her immediate family died. Others were injured and are still in need of medical treatment. But painkillers, antibiotics and medicine for chronic diseases like diabetes are impossible to find.

She fears getting sick or injured. Going to a hospital is out of the question, she said. They are unclean, reek of death and blood, and lack the most basic supplies.

Few are functioning properly. The Israeli military forced patients and staff members on Friday to leave one of the last functioning hospitals in northern Gaza, saying it was a stronghold for Hamas. Fighting has raged around the facility, Kamal Adwan, for nearly three months.

On Dec. 19, a report from Doctors Without Borders described repeated Israeli military attacks on Gaza’s civilians and medical infrastructure, along with the “systematic denial of humanitarian assistance,” as “clear signs of ethnic cleansing.” Israel’s foreign minister slammed the report as “blood libel.”

Ms. Moen doesn’t need a report to tell her what is going on in Gaza, she said. Nor does she think it will make a difference.

“It’s been over a year of mass killing, starvation, displacement, and misery, and no one seems to care,” she said.

Shrapnel kept turning up in the fish pools. The twisted metal had been falling from the sky for 14 months, detritus of Hezbollah rockets and Israeli missile interceptors colliding overhead.

There was not much the fish farm’s workers could do, other than pick it out and soldier on. The war had largely emptied the rolling hills along Israel’s border with Lebanon, but about a dozen farmers had stayed put.

The fish — 50,000 female osetra sturgeon gliding back and forth in 39 pools — had to be fed.

“Every morning I ask myself if this is the right thing to do — to ask the employees to come in again and again,” Assaf Koren, the fish farm’s boss, said recently, between constant booms of outgoing and incoming rockets, just before a cease-fire was reached. “But,” he added, “we don’t have any other choice.”

Why? Those sturgeon carried the ovaries that promised a decade’s worth of caviar. Once extracted, salted and shipped off to places like New York, Los Angeles, Paris and Tokyo, the eggs could be worth upward of $40 million. “We must continue,” Mr. Koren said, a pistol tucked into his pants.

So, three weeks earlier, when Mr. Koren watched a Hezbollah rocket blow off the steel door of the factory at Caviar Galilee, spraying shrapnel and igniting a truck, everyone returned to work the next morning. The fish had to be fed.

The latest war between Israel and Hezbollah chased more than 60,000 people from their homes and businesses in northern Israel — and displaced one million across Lebanon. After the two sides agreed to a cease-fire, some residents are trickling back, while many others are staying away until it is clear the fragile peace will hold.

But in pockets along the border, a small number never left. For some, it was an act of defiance. Others felt they had no place to go. And then there were the few with immense economic stakes.

At Caviar Galilee, protecting a decade’s worth of investment requires not missing a day. To produce the caviar, the workers must follow the calendar of the sturgeon ovulation cycle, adjusting the pools’ temperature and oxygen levels and feeding the fish three times a day. And they must do so, without fail, for at least nine years, until the precise moment when the eggs are ready to harvest.

So the first Hezbollah attacks on Oct. 8, 2023, posed an immediate dilemma for Mr. Koren and his team. When Israel issued evacuation orders for the region, Mr. Koren, 47, sent his wife and four children south. Then he and Avshalom Hurvitz, the farm’s 76-year-old fish biologist, stayed behind with the sturgeon.

“You can’t just shut the electricity down and come back a year later,” Dr. Hurvitz said. “These are animals. They have to be taken care of every day, including weekends. No Shabbat for the fish.”

“So,” he added, “we take the risk.”

Eventually, 10 to 15 other employees took the risk, too, while another dozen moved away. For 416 days, the farm — a collection of fish pools, hatcheries and a caviar-harvesting plant in a valley between Lebanon and Syria — was directly in the crossfire. It is just a mile from the border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah fighters were launching rockets and drones, and a few hundred yards from an Israeli military post that was firing back.

During the war, Mr. Koren said he started each day with a call to the Israeli military. On a few occasions, when fighting was particularly intense, they asked him to pause work for a few hours. Mr. Koren is a longtime army veteran. “It’s better not to speak about that,” he said.

He left the army five years ago to lead Caviar Galilee. He had experience in gourmet food, investing years ago in a truffle business, and the fish farm was just down the hill from his home.

To him, transitioning from fighting to fish farming made sense. “Both are forms of Zionism,” he said. Zionists believe that farming helps Jewish people set roots in Israel.

As he drove his white Dodge Ram up an empty road to his kibbutz, a small community based on shared farming, there were signs of war everywhere. The surrounding hills were blackened, the aftermath of brush fires started by wayward rockets. The kibbutz entrances were watched by armed guards, one of whom was recently hit by shrapnel in his chest. And the community pool was full of a green algae bloom, while the nearby lookout point over the valley was covered in sandbags propped up for sniper positions.

Mr. Koren, impatient with the war, brought his family home several months ago. That meant regular family retreats to the bomb shelter.

On the day we met, Mr. Koren said a siren warning of incoming rockets awoke his family in the middle of the night. At breakfast, he said, another siren sent them racing to the shelter. Less than an hour later in our conversation, a siren sent us running for an aboveground shelter the size of a walk-in closet that the farm had recently bought. After a boom in the distance, we exited.

In Tel Aviv, residents usually have more than a minute to take shelter after the sirens sound because of the distance rockets must travel from Lebanon. Here along the border, people have a few seconds.

It has made for a stressful workplace — and a stressful home for the fish.

Dr. Hurvitz said stress increases hormones like cortisol and glucose in sturgeon. “And these hormones affect the physiology of the fish,” he said. “Fish, when they are in stressful conditions, do not want to reproduce. They want to conserve energy for better days.”

Dr. Hurvitz said that typically about half of the fish expected to ovulate have caviar-grade eggs. This season, just a tenth did, which he attributes to the stress of the constant vibrations from the explosions.

Caviar Galilee, a multimillion-dollar enterprise, is owned by socialists. Six kibbutzim — small communities founded on socialist ideals, where residents share the work and spoils of collective farms — founded the operation in the 1990s. They made it a private company and agreed to share its now hefty profits.

With half the shares, the principal owner is Kibbutz Dan, where the farm is, along a tributary of the Jordan River. The 60-degree spring waters flowing from Mount Hermon in Syria are ideal for raising fish, Dr. Hurvitz said, so residents of the kibbutz have farmed fish for generations.

In the early 1990s, the kibbutz saw an opportunity: Caviar prices were soaring in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. So the kibbutz started raising sturgeon for their eggs. It shipped its first caviar about 15 years later.

Now those eggs, sold under the brand Karat Caviar, are a favorite of Michelin Star restaurants, including Le Bernardin and Daniel in Manhattan. Virtually all caviar is now farmed, after a global ban on fishing sturgeon in the Caspian Sea, and China’s entry into the market in recent years has doubled world production. Yet demand still often outstrips supply. Mr. Koren said that this year, all of his company’s caviar had sold while still inside the fish.

Caviar Galilee now produces roughly six tons of caviar a year, which it sells at up to $500 a pound to wholesalers. End consumers can pay as much as $3,600 a pound. For some varieties of caviar, a one-ounce tin — enough for about three servings — costs $225.

Americans buy 65 percent of its product. The next largest market is Israel, though many Israelis are not potential customers.

Caviar is not kosher.

Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.

Greeks smoke more than most other Europeans, and even 14 years after Greece banned smoking in indoor public places, it is not uncommon to see people light up in bars and clubs.

So as the European Union urges countries to extend smoking bans to outdoor spaces as part of its efforts to “achieve a tobacco-free generation” by 2040, Greece’s official response has been: No, thanks.

Last year, a health profile of Greece from the European Commission reported that about a fifth of the country’s deaths in 2019 could be attributed to tobacco smoking, including direct and secondhand. Still, many in Greece are sticking to cigarettes — from habit, defiance or simply realizing that they can get away with it.

“When a smoker knows there are gaps in the system they can exploit to smoke, they’re going to do it,” Stathis Papachristou, a psychologist and an official at the National Public Health Organization’s smoking cessation office, said in an interview.

These days, more than a third of Greeks smoke — second in the European Union after Bulgaria — according to the European Commission.

Greece banned smoking in all indoor public areas in 2010, and the country’s statistics agency has recorded a significant drop in smoking. But the ban was widely flouted, so in 2019 a tougher law was introduced. It included fines of 100 euros (about $105) for patrons smoking indoors and up to €10,000 for businesses, along with a complaints hotline.

To enforce the ban, the authorities conducted 3,376 inspections on enclosed public spaces in the first 11 months of this year, about 2,200 of them in Athens​, according to the agency in charge. It said it had issued 659 fines, totaling €529,400, for violations during that time, mostly for business owners or managers.​

Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis says smoking in indoor areas has been stamped out.

“Greece has implemented a series of measures, it polices its restaurants, it has virtually eliminated smoking in inside areas,” he said in a written response to questions.

But experts say the country has not done enough.

“The inspections are inadequate,” said Panagiotis Behrakis, a pulmonologist and founder of Smoke Free Greece, an anti-smoking initiative that holds seminars in schools. He added that many businesses allowed smoking in formerly open spaces that were sealed off with plastic sheeting.

On a recent Saturday night, fogs of smoke hung inside several Athens bars.

“Whenever I’m stressed, I just light up and switch off,” said Antonis Vasiliadis, 45, sitting with friends at a small crowded bar.

He said the relatively low price of cigarettes in Greece — about €4.50 for a pack of 20 — allowed him to maintain his pack-a-day habit. As for nonsmokers, he said, “It’s their choice to be here.”

Katerina Theofilou, 29, a nonsmoker sitting nearby, said the smoke from neighboring tables irritated her, but not enough to flag it. “I’m out to have a good time,” she said, “not report people.”

That befits patrons like Spiros Manakis, 38, an I.T. worker at another bar who described himself as a “committed smoker.” He tried to quit once, he said, but decided that smoking suited his sedentary lifestyle of computer work and video games.

As for government restrictions, he said, “The state doesn’t have the right to ban smoking.”

The authorities in Greece disagree — to a point.

After the country introduced the stricter smoking ban in 2019, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis declared, “There is no longer the excuse of ‘These things can’t be done in Greece.’” And in late 2022, the health minister at the time used a picture of a famous actor smoking in a club to warn that no one was exempt. Both the actor and the club were fined.

Mr. Georgiadis, the current health minister, said Greece would not extend smoking restrictions in line with the European Union recommendation. In a vote on the nonbinding measure during a December meeting of European health ministers, Greece abstained along with Germany.

“Greece said, ‘Bring us a study that says exactly what the impact of your proposal is on public health, and we’ll support it,” he said.

“It’s one thing to have a strict policy,” he added, “and quite another to cause harm to thousands of businesses, our tourism product and to lots of people without knowing if this benefits or harms us.”

The hazards of secondhand smoke are well documented.

And experts like Mr. Behrakis point to the World Health Organization’s recommendation that smoking restrictions be extended to outdoor areas, with the agency arguing that “comprehensive smoke-free laws offer the only effective means of eliminating the risks associated with secondhand tobacco smoke.”

That does not faze Nikos Louvros, 69, who owns a popular Athens bar and founded a niche political party for smokers’ rights. An unapologetic chain-smoker, he said inspectors had visited his bar only once, in 2012, and had not returned.

“Whoever comes here knows they can smoke,” he said.

Experts said the challenge was to unseat such deeply ingrained attitudes.

“We can’t have an inspector over each smoker,” said Mr. Papachristou, the psychologist. “We need to change the Greek mentality that your neighbor is obliged to inhale your smoke.”