Justin Trudeau’s announcement on Monday that he would resign was the last card that Canada’s deeply unpopular prime minister, who had set his party on course to lose a national election, had left to play.

The political levers he has pulled will give Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal Party a chance to reinvent itself without him. But they will also leave Canada weakened as it braces for President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has threatened the country with tariffs that could cripple its economy.

It appears to be a gamble that Mr. Trudeau is willing to take.

To allow his party’s thousands of members to choose his successor, a lengthy process that will involve campaigning, Mr. Trudeau suspended Parliament until March 24. A general election is expected to follow.

Holding a party leadership election before a general one is par for the course in countries with parliamentary systems like Canada’s. Suspending Parliament to hold such an election is far less common. By doing so, Mr. Trudeau wards off the likely collapse of his minority government and gives the Liberals time to choose a leader unburdened by his dismal poll numbers.

But it means that in two weeks, when Mr. Trump returns to the Oval Office, Mr. Trudeau will be leading Canada as a lame duck, weakening the country’s hand in crucial negotiations with its closest ally.

“The prime minister stepping down means it will be hard for him to carry any meaningful mandate in negotiating with the U.S., and it doesn’t signal any unity within Canada,” said Xavier Delgado, a senior program associate at the Canada Institute of the Wilson Center, a Washington-based foreign policy research institute. “It’s not a great time for Canada to be in this situation.”

Mr. Trudeau’s opponents wanted a quick general election, which would let a new government with a fresh mandate — presumably led by Pierre Poilievre, whose Conservative Party has a commanding lead in polls — spearhead Canada’s response to Mr. Trump as soon as possible.

Mr. Trump has threatened to slap punishing tariffs on Canadian goods that could send the country’s economy into a recession and upend the North American trade pact established over the past few decades. (It would also be injurious to the U.S. economy; the two nations are each other’s biggest trading partners.)

The president-elect has persistently suggested that Canada should become part of the United States, calling it the “51st state.” He repeated his menacing joke on social media on Monday, after Mr. Trudeau’s resignation announcement: “Many people in Canada LOVE being the 51st State,” Mr. Trump said in a post on Truth Social, promising no tariffs if Canada “merged with the U.S.”

On Tuesday, speaking at a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump went as far as to suggest that he might use “economic force” against Canada to acquire it, highlighting just how high the stakes are for Canada.

Party first

When Mr. Trudeau became the Liberals’ leader, the party was in shambles. In the 2011 national elections, it finished third for the first time in its history. Mr. Trudeau, who assumed its leadership in 2013, is widely credited with raising it from the dead and leading it back into government two years later.

“The Liberal Party, such as it is, has been the Justin Trudeau party for more than a decade,” said Shachi Kurl, president of the Angus Reid Institute, a research center. That has made it hard for the party to let go of him and for Mr. Trudeau to relinquish control, Ms. Kurl said.

But finally, on Monday morning, after weeks of pressure from within the party to resign, Mr. Trudeau acknowledged that his time was up.

“I truly feel that removing the contention around my own continued leadership is an opportunity to bring the temperature down,” he told reporters gathered in the freezing cold outside his Ottawa residence.

“It’s become obvious to me with the internal battles that I cannot be the one to carry the Liberal standard into the next election,” he added. Until the Liberals choose their new leader, Mr. Trudeau said, he will stay on in that role and as prime minister.

The party’s internal election process, which will last several weeks, will allow a handful of hopefuls to reintroduce themselves to the public, no longer as Trudeau associates but as individuals vying for the party’s and the country’s leadership.

“I think the Liberals are now clinging to the idea that there is no longer a path forward for him, but there is absolutely a path forward for someone else,” Ms. Kurl said.

Still, with the Conservatives leading the Liberals by 25 percentage points in recent surveys, the path that Mr. Trudeau bequeaths his successor is likely to be treacherous.

“Sixty or 90 days are not a long time to reinvent a party after 10 years in power,” Ms. Kurl said. “How many more rabbits are in the hat? How many more pivots are there?”

Brief relief

For many Canadians, Mr. Trudeau’s departure was a necessary condition if they were going to consider voting for the Liberals.

David Coletto, who leads Abacus Data, a polling company, said early research on Monday suggested that Canadians felt relief at the news of Mr. Trudeau’s resignation, and that his departure had the potential to shift attention away from his unpopularity.

“People are saying they feel relieved and optimistic about the prime minister stepping down,’’ he said. “That’s a signal to me that there’s potentially an opportunity for the Liberals to rebuild the relationship with Canadians.” But it is far from certain that this will happen, he cautioned.

While Mr. Trudeau’s departure can only improve the Liberals’ situation, analysts said, the country is unlikely to benefit from being practically leaderless as Mr. Trump takes office.

As the new president begins to push through his agenda — which has Canada in its cross hairs, with Mr. Trump having complained about border security, Canadian military spending and a trade imbalance — Canada will be trying to sort out who’s in charge.

“Canada would be strongest in dealing with the United States if it could unify around the message for its leader — and that would apply to any country,” said Mr. Delgado of the Wilson Center’s Canada Institute.

Others were less concerned, suggesting that Canada’s dealings with the Trump administration would be a long game.

Gerald Butts, a former top adviser to Mr. Trudeau who is now vice president at Eurasia Group, a consulting firm, said no leader would be able to cut a deal with Mr. Trump on Day 1.

“Nothing irreparably bad will happen in the next three months,” Mr. Butts said. “We’re going to have Trump for four years; the next three months are not going to be the whole story.”

The United States on Tuesday accused a Sudanese paramilitary group and its proxies of committing genocide, singling them out in a conflict of unchecked brutality and drawing fresh attention to the scale of atrocities being perpetrated in Africa’s largest war.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group fighting against Sudan’s military had committed acts of genocide, including a fearsome wave of ethnically targeted violence in the western region of Darfur.

The Treasury Department backed the determination of genocide with a raft of sanctions targeting the R.S.F.’s leader, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, as well as seven companies in the United Arab Emirates, the group’s main foreign sponsor, that have traded in weapons and gold on his behalf.

“The R.S.F. and allied militias have systematically murdered men and boys — even infants — on an ethnic basis, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence,” Mr. Blinken said in a statement. “Those same militias have targeted fleeing civilians, murdering innocent people escaping conflict, and prevented remaining civilians from accessing lifesaving supplies.”

The genocide determination comes two decades after the United States took a similar step in 2004, when then-Secretary of State Colin Powell determined that the Janjaweed, ruthless ethnic militias allied with Sudan’s military, had committed genocide during a vicious counterinsurgency campaign in Darfur.

The Janjaweed later morphed into the Rapid Support Forces. But instead of being allied with Sudan’s military, the group is now fighting it, in a civil war that has driven one of Africa’s largest countries into a devastating famine, killed tens of thousands of people and forced more than 11 million people — almost one-quarter of Sudan’s population — to flee their homes, according to the United Nations.

Atrocities and war crimes have been committed on both sides, say officials from the United States, the United Nations and human rights groups. The military has repeatedly massacred civilians in indiscriminate bombing raids, sometimes killing dozens at once.

But only the R.S.F. has been accused of ethnic cleansing, particularly during a systematic violence in Darfur between April 2023 — when the civil war began — and November of that year. Its fighters, who are mostly ethnic Arabs, targeted members of the Masalit, a non-Arab ethnic group, in a brutal assault that became a central element of the American genocide determination, said two senior U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters.

The toll of that violence is unclear. The Sudanese Red Crescent said it counted 2,000 bodies in a single day, then stopped counting. U.N. investigators later estimated that as many as 15,000 people were killed in the city of Geneina alone.

Hundreds of thousands of Masalit have since fled into Chad, where they live in squalid and overcrowded camps — part of an exodus of three million Sudanese pushed into neighboring countries by the war, the United Nations says.

General Hamdan, the R.S.F. leader, is a one-time camel trader who rose to prominence as a mid-ranking Janjaweed commander in the 2000s. Once a loyal ally of Sudan’s autocratic ruler, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who was overthrown in 2019, General Hamdan got rich after he seized Sudan’s biggest gold mine, and by sending mercenaries to Yemen.

Only a year ago, General Hamdan’s troops were storming across Sudan, and he embarked on a tour of six African nations where he presented himself as a leader in waiting.

But more recently, his forces have lost some territory, and the new American measures could restrict his ability to travel, use the international financial system, or present himself as a champion of democratic ambitions, as he has often done. In light of mass rape committed by soldiers in Darfur under General Hamdan’s control, the State Department said it was also barring him and his family from traveling to the United States.

The genocide determination followed months of deliberation inside the U.S. government, as lawyers and intelligence officials evaluated the merits of the case, said the two senior U.S. officials. Some officials hesitated to support the determination because they feared it might draw further criticism of the Biden administration over its refusal to declare Israel’s campaign in the Gaza Strip a genocide against Palestinians, the officials said.

But on Monday, while traveling in Asia, Mr. Blinken signed off on the genocide determination.

Under international law, the finding does not oblige the U.S. to take action, although officials said the sanctions provide some immediate teeth to the measure. Experts said it could propel a new drive for accountability in a war that has killed as many as 150,000 people, by American estimates, and caused one of the world’s worst famines in decades.

Last month the global hunger watchdog, known as the I.P.C., confirmed that famine was underway in five districts of Sudan, and said it was likely to spread to another five areas in the coming months. Across the country, 25 million people are experiencing acute hunger, the body said.

The R.S.F. has used aid as a weapon of war, denying help in some areas and violating an agreement signed during failed U.S.-led peace talks in Switzerland in August, the Treasury Department said in a statement.

The genocide determination may also bring new scrutiny to the role of the United Arab Emirates in the war. The Emirates has supplied the R.S.F. with smuggled weapons and powerful drones, according to American officials and visual evidence collected by The New York Times.

The Emirates also provides a crucial financial and logistical hub where the R.S.F. can trade gold and procure weapons through a vast network of companies.

Capital Tap Holding, one of the seven Emirati companies sanctioned on Tuesday, manages another 50 companies in 10 countries that have supplied the R.S.F. with money and military equipment, the Treasury Department said. Another company, AZ Gold, traded millions of dollars in gold.

The Treasury Department also sanctioned a Sudanese businessman, Abu Dharr, listed as the owner of at least five of the seven companies.

Mr. Blinken said the genocide finding did not mean the United States was supporting Sudan’s army in the war. “Both belligerents bear responsibility for the violence and suffering in Sudan and lack the legitimacy to govern a future peaceful Sudan,” he said.

Tom Perriello, the U.S. special envoy to Sudan, said that to end the war, the two sides must “agree to a cessation of hostilities so that a civilian political transition can take place.”

Critics who have accused the United States of acting too slowly on Sudan welcomed the finding, with caveats.

“This attempt to position the administration on the right side of history won’t work,” Cameron Hudson, a former American diplomat and Sudan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said on social media of the Biden administration. “It’s too late and too many people have died for that to happen.”

Ireland has formally joined South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, according to a statement on Tuesday from the International Court of Justice.

The filing, made on Monday, comes months after Ireland announced plans to intervene in the case before the United Nations’ highest judicial body.

“Ireland, invoking Article 63 of the Statute of the Court, filed in the Registry of the Court a declaration of intervention in the case concerning Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip,” the court said in a statement on Tuesday.

South Africa brought its case to the I.C.J. in December 2023, accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. Israel has strongly rejected the allegation, describing South Africa’s filing as a “despicable and contemptuous exploitation of the Court.”

In an initial ruling in January 2024, the court ordered Israel to restrain its attacks in Gaza, and in May it ordered the country to immediately halt its military offensive in the city of Rafah, in southern Gaza.

The United Nations allows countries to “intervene” in proceedings if they are parties to the United Nations’ 1948 Genocide Convention.

A spokesperson for Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed the filing on Tuesday. “It is important for the Court, in its consideration of any multilateral convention, to understand how other parties to that convention interpret and apply it,” it said in a statement.

The filing was long anticipated. Last month, the government approved a plan to file its argument in the case, with Micheál Martin, the deputy prime minister and minister for foreign affairs, saying that it would be filed in The Hague, where the court is based, within weeks.

“There has been a collective punishment of the Palestinian people through the intent and impact of military actions of Israel in Gaza, leaving 44,000 dead and millions of civilians displaced,” Mr. Martin said in December, adding that Ireland would ask the court to broaden its interpretation of what constitutes the commission of genocide by a state.

“We are concerned that a very narrow interpretation of what constitutes genocide leads to a culture of impunity in which the protection of civilians is minimized,” he added.

Experts say the court is not expected to rule on the genocide charge for years.

The decision to intervene in the case reflects Ireland’s longstanding support for Palestinian civilians, rooted in part in a shared history of British colonialism and in Ireland’s own experience with a seemingly intractable sectarian conflict — The Troubles, which came to a close with the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

Last month, Israel announced it was closing its embassy in Dublin, citing what it said were “the extreme anti-Israel policies of the Irish government.” Israeli officials said the action did not mean that Israel was severing diplomatic relations with Ireland.

The business owners arrived one by one, but all were united in their mission on a chilly December morning: Salvage anything from the pulverized market in this hillside city in southern Lebanon.

A photo studio operator and his son trudged through debris and twisted metal to recover dust-coated negatives and camera lenses. A clothes shop proprietor dragged a garbage bag holding leggings, retrieved from under mangled rebar. And an optical store owner stood atop crushed concrete slabs that were once the rooftop of his business’s building.

“Everything is gone,” said Raed Mokaled, 58, who, along with the eyeglasses business, co-owned a gold and watches store in the same building with his brother. “An orange ball of fire took out everything.”

Israel conducted intense air raids and then began a ground invasion into south Lebanon in late September to retaliate against Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group that had been attacking it in solidarity with Hamas after the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks on Israel. A fragile 60-day truce, signed in November, has suspended the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.

In the city of Nabatieh, which shares its name with the surrounding governorate where Hezbollah largely held sway, Israeli strikes obliterated the historic market on Oct. 12, at the height of the war. Another strike hit the nearby municipal building a few days later, killing at least 16 people, including the city’s mayor, according to Lebanese officials.

Israel said it had attacked Hezbollah targets in the area, but its claim could not be independently confirmed. Amnesty International said it did not find any evidence of a military target at the city’s headquarters.

The strikes across the governorate, which borders both Israel and Syria, have left behind scenes of desolation and ruin that many Lebanese say are unlike any they have seen. A World Bank report estimated the Nabatieh governorate incurred $1.5 billion in economic losses during the war with Israel.

On a recent morning, two weeks after the cease-fire, reporters with The New York Times arrived in the market as residents and business owners came to survey and deal with the wreckage. One by one, they said, they drove across rutted and bombed-out roads to arrive at the centuries-old market they fondly called the souk. Once a bustling center for vendors and shoppers from across Lebanon, it was now a shell of its glorious past.

Iconic shops, like the decades-old sweets store, were wiped out. Collapsed walls, shattered glass and twisted steel lay everywhere. Instead of the fragrant herbs and fresh produce that many people once sought in the market, a smoky and charred smell still swirled in the air.

Mannequins perched atop the mound of rubble and wires. Receipts, CDs and tattered sneakers littered the scorched pavements.

“This is a catastrophe,” said Niran Ali, 58, while standing amid the wreckage.

For 16 years, she co-owned a children’s clothing shop in the market and used it to support her family of four. Now, almost everything — about $100,000 in goods, she said — was gone.

“The destruction is painful to look at,” she said. “Our only hope is with God.”

Just across the street, Abed Al Raouf Farhat, 34, inspected the damage to his father’s photo studio. The strikes hadn’t entirely crumbled the building, but left it marred with deep cracks, exposed beams and a leaking roof. Inside, thick dust coated everything: the damaged photocopier, the cameras, the wooden photo frames.

Mr. Farhat’s father, Hamzah, opened the Amal Photo Studio Lab in 1982. Since then, generations of families across Nabatieh had been coming to take wedding and graduation photos. The elder Mr. Farhat, who is 65, also trained young photographers — including his own son, who has since gone to work as a photographer and videographer across the Middle East and Africa.

With the damage from the latest strikes, Mr. Farhat said, an establishment that was a symbol of community and collective memory has become a grim reminder of the war’s heavy toll. “Everything is gone,” Mr. Farhat said. “But my dad and Nabatieh are still standing, and he will start again from zero.”

The photo studio’s story — and the larger market’s — is closely intertwined with the city’s tumultuous past. Israel attacked Nabatieh in 1974 and 1978 and occupied it for three years beginning in 1982 following its invasion of southern Lebanon in retaliation for the Palestine Liberation Organization’s shelling of northern Israel. It also bombarded Nabatieh in 1993, 1996 and during the monthlong 2006 war as it clashed with Hezbollah in the region.

Hezbollah is a dominant force in Nabatieh, which has a majority Shiite population, though the group doesn’t have unanimous public backing. In several streets across the city, images of Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader assassinated by Israel in September, are pasted on walls and electricity poles.

When Israel attacked the market in 2006, business owners said the Iran-backed group gave them some money to rebuild. This time — with Hezbollah weakened, its military abilities and infrastructure degraded and its ally in Syria deposed — no one had approached them to make assessments or lend support, several business owners said.

Hezbollah announced in late December that it had a program to rebuild the southern villages pummeled by Israeli raids. Hezbollah officials said priority would be given to families whose homes were completely or partly destroyed, but didn’t say when or if businesses would get financial support.

Hezbollah also said the task of reconstruction was a national one and that the state — over which it holds significant power — also had a responsibility to help citizens rebuild.

“Every few years, we lose everything,” said Khalil Tarhini, 67, whose lingerie and underwear shop was flattened. When his shop was damaged in 2006, Hezbollah, he said, gave him $18,000 in compensation — a fraction of the more than $100,000 he lost, he said. He had to sell his property to rebuild the business, he said.

“We will be back, but it will take a while,” Mr. Tarhini said as he stared at bulldozers clearing debris where his shop once stood.

For now, the slow and grueling process of rebuilding has begun. Across Nabatieh, advertisements and signs in Arabic declare, “We will rebuild together,” or, “It will come back better.”

Hassan Jamal Sabboury and his family returned to the city from the capital, Beirut, hours after the cease-fire took effect in late November.

What he found, he said, brought him to tears. The gas station and carwash, which his grandfather first built decades ago, were gone. His apartment down the street, which he had outfitted with plush, cream-colored furniture, was ravaged.

But the strikes didn’t hit the fuel tanks underground, he said, allowing him the chance to restart somewhere.

“We are staying strong and resilient,” he said as he managed workers moving debris and mixing cement. He hoped the gas station would reopen in a month.

Mr. Mokaled, who ran the glasses business, was not so lucky.

When he and his family returned to the market, they realized they had lost goods worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Glasses, eyewear repair kits and gold cleaning equipment were wrecked. Out of 1,200 watches in the store, they were able to recover just over 100, he said. His home was also hit in a strike, and he was now staying in a one-bedroom guesthouse.

Despite an overwhelming sense of disbelief, he said, he had no choice but to rebuild. He and his brother have rented another store and plan to restart the optical business on a smaller scale.

“Life has to go on,” he said, his face pale and drawn. “If you stop, that means you are dead.”

Aleksandr had only two weeks of training in Russia before being sent to the front lines in Ukraine in the summer of 2023. About a month later, he became an amputee.

Learning to live without his right leg is taking much longer than two weeks.

“There was a lot of pain at the beginning,” said Aleksandr, 38, referred to only by his first name in accordance with military protocol. But, he added, “eventually, your brain just rewires itself and you get used to it.”

Aleksandr spoke in an interview at a sanitarium in the Moscow suburbs while a doctor refitted his prosthetic leg. He is one of hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers returning home from a third year of war to government institutions and a society scrambling to provide for veterans at a time of sanctions, and to the parallel realities of the seemingly unaffected hustle and bustle of big cities and the hardships on the front.

The veterans have both visible and invisible needs that they bring back to their families, who experienced the trauma of waiting for them to come home alive and now must learn to care for them.

There are at least 300,000 severely injured veterans, according to calculations by the independent Russian media outlets Mediazona and Meduza, as well as the BBC, which all use open source statistics to calculate the war’s toll of deaths and injuries. Since 2023, the authorities have made it more difficult to estimate the number of severely injured because they have designated so many statistics as classified, journalists said.

Aleksandr said that after being sent to the outskirts of Kupiansk, in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, he had been commanded to dig trenches in an area where recruits had laid mines the day before. He doesn’t know whether the mine he stepped on was Ukrainian or Russian, but his right leg was amputated below the knee and he spent half a year being shuttled from hospital to hospital before he was fitted with an artificial limb.

Back at work as a welder in Russia, he now endures 12-hour shifts that require him to stand for the duration, even though amputees are advised not to wear their prostheses for more than a few hours at a time. Still, he is thankful to be alive and considers himself lucky.

Aleksandr’s prosthetist, Yuri A. Pogorelov, said that Rus Sanitarium, a health resort combining medical treatment and recreation where the former soldier was being treated, had made about 100 prosthetic limbs in the past year, relying on imported materials from Germany, as well as some homegrown technology. Only a handful of the prosthetics were for veterans of the war in Ukraine.

The sanitarium, built in Soviet days for the country’s political elite, offers a wide range of physical and psychological therapies. Demobilized veterans from all of Russia’s recent wars and their relatives can come for rest and treatment for two weeks per year. About 10 percent of patrons are Ukraine war veterans.

In late 2023, Moscow estimated that Russians would need a record 70,000 prosthetic limbs yearly, a drastic increase. That number includes civilian victims and those who lost limbs from causes that were not conflict related. But a deputy labor minister estimated then that more than half of injured veterans were amputees.

Aleksandr said he was grateful for the free medical assistance he has received, but he emphasized that he was not struggling psychologically.

“Thank God, I have preserved my mental health in my own way,” he said. “I’ve survived all these explosions and bombings, and I am normal.”

But many veterans do return with post-traumatic stress disorder, psychologists and experts say.

“Everyone here has a little bit of post-traumatic stress disorder, whether they are wounded or psychologically injured, or families whose siblings, sons and fathers died,” said Col. Andrei V. Demurenko, 69, who was the deputy commander of a volunteer brigade during the monthslong Battle for Bakhmut. In May 2023, after his skull was fractured, he returned to Moscow to find that psychological help for veterans was sorely lacking.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have a system, at least not an orderly one built on an organized, understandable psychological recovery system,” he said.

At present, there are not enough professionals with the training to treat veterans or to provide regular consultations for them, said Svetlana Artemeva, who is working on a project to train dozens of therapists across 16 Russian regions to help soldiers struggling with post-traumatic stress.

“You have to teach them how to live from scratch; they need to relearn how to sleep because they don’t sleep at night,” said Ms. Artemeva, who works with the Union of Veterans of the Special Military Operation, a nonprofit group. “They need not to twitch at every rustle, not to shudder, not to be suspicious of everyone.”

At the Rus Sanitarium, Elena Khamaganova, a psychologist, said every soldier who fought in Ukraine undergoes a psychological screening upon arrival, and then attends group and individual counseling. Many will struggle for life, she said, mentioning a recent patient, a veteran with a spinal injury, who will have to urinate into a bag for the rest of his life. The man struggled to be intimate with his wife; despite sharing a child, they were talking about divorce.

Once they leave the sanitarium, the veterans can visit other centers, but they are not eligible to revisit it for at least a year, meaning they will not see the same mental health professionals consistently.

“Rehabilitation cannot end with two, 10 or even 15 visits to a psychologist,” Ms. Artemeva said. “A person’s rehabilitation must last a lifetime, because the experience will echo for the rest of his life.”

Just convincing veterans to speak with therapists is a big part of the struggle. One machine gunner from the western Kursk region, who gave his call sign as Tuba, said he had bad experiences with two therapists and wasn’t keen to speak to any more.

Tuba, 34, was sweating profusely and seemed agitated during the interview. His mother and sister disagreed with his choice to volunteer for the army, and he was not in a romantic relationship. All he wanted, he said, was to heal his arm, injured by a drone in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, so he could return to his comrades in the trenches. He said he didn’t like the contrast between his hardscrabble life as a soldier and what he considers the decadence of big cities, where daily life hardly seems affected by the fighting.

“I didn’t meet a single Muscovite over there,” he said derisively, referring to the front lines. “They’re busy having concerts — that’s rude and out of place.”

Some civilians have a different view, citing instances where returning veterans — some of them former prisoners freed to fight in Ukraine — have committed heinous crimes.

On a train from the western city of Rostov, a hub for soldiers transiting from the long front line, women spoke recently of paying extra to sleep in female-only compartments, citing unpleasant experiences with drunk veterans who had made sexual advances and inappropriate comments.

At the sanitarium, many soldiers who fought in the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan or the wars in Chechnya said Russian society has become more accepting of veterans than in previous conflicts. In Afghanistan, men were mobilized — and returned in coffins — largely in secret, a major contrast to the way the Kremlin has sought to celebrate new veterans on television shows, billboards and in special leadership programs.

President Vladimir V. Putin has visited rehabilitation centers and instructed subordinates to create more opportunities for injured servicemen — a contrast, experts say, from previous Russian wars.

“The arrival home of a large number of Afghan soldiers came when the Soviet Union collapsed, and, to put it mildly, the whole society had no time for them,” said Mr. Pogorelov, the prosthetist who fit Aleksandr’s artificial leg.

“The economy was in ruins,” he said. “What kind of rehabilitation or pensions could there be in a country that waited for food donations from George Bush Sr. like manna from the heavens?”

But like some veterans, he said he was pleased that the Russian economy felt much more stable than it had in the tumultuous 1980s and 90s, allowing civilians to “go shopping even though the country is at war.”

Aleksandr was at the sanitarium with his father, Vyacheslav, who was wounded in Afghanistan. As his father expounded on what he claimed was Washington’s culpability for the Ukraine war, repeating the Kremlin’s narrative, Aleksandr made clear that he was not angry at Mr. Putin for the loss of his leg. Instead, the two men expressed gratitude for the leader who has been at the helm of Russia for 25 years.

“Thank God we have Putin,” Vyacheslav said, as his son nodded in agreement.

At a gala dinner held soon after South Africa’s most contested election since the end of apartheid, a singer reminded the gathered politicians how to do their jobs.

“I want to implore you to think of the people of this country, and to think about why you have been chosen,” the singer, Thandiswa Mazwai, told the political elite at the June gala, put on by the Independent Electoral Commission in Johannesburg to mark the release of the vote’s final results.

Many of those listening were members of the African National Congress, the long-governing party that had just suffered stinging losses at the polls, a rebuke from voters frustrated by corruption and mismanagement after three decades of the A.N.C. being in charge.

Then, Ms. Mazwai, after her brief spoken remarks, burst into a set of songs whose lyrics, rather than offering light entertainment, instead doubled down on her determination to call out political malpractice. She sang of “fools for leaders” and “thieves” who “should leave Parliament.”

Chastising her influential audience is unlikely to cost Ms. Mazwai any future gigs — she’s simply too popular to cancel. At 48, she has performed for South Africans — from everyday fans to Nelson Mandela — for 30 years, as long as the country has been a multiracial democracy.

With her music reaching a wide audience and often containing sharp social commentary, Ms. Mazwai has emerged as the voice of a generation born during apartheid’s violent twilight: the first group of Black South Africans to enjoy the freedoms of a democratic South Africa but also to be confronted with its disappointments.

In a country that holds dear the right to protest after the crushing rule of the apartheid regime, Ms. Mazwai has used her mezzo-soprano voice to amplify South Africa’s struggles, just as her predecessors — activist performers like Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela — did during apartheid.

“I don’t take my job lightly,” she told the politicians that night. “My calling is to sing the people’s joy, to sing the people’s sadness.”

Born in 1976, a year when an uprising by school children and the brutal response by the apartheid police roiled South Africa, Ms. Mazwai’s life has been marked by political turmoil.

Her singing career began in 1994, when South Africa held its first democratic election. Since then, three of her four solo albums have been released during elections years, a synchrony which she described as “serendipitous.”

“The energy was kind of right for me to bring my voice into it,” she said of her latest album, Sankofa, released earlier this election year. The album’s title is taken from Ghana’s Twi language and means “to go back and fetch what has been left behind.”

Ms. Mazwai’s music often longs for an idyllic past, unspoiled by racism and colonialism, but maintains the urgency of the present.

In the song, “Dark Side of the Rainbow,” one of the new album’s 11 tracks, she sings of leaders with “minds left destitute by greed” and sampled an audio recording of a chaotic session in South Africa’s Parliament. The song’s title is a subversive reference to Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s optimistic description of post-apartheid South Africa as “the Rainbow Nation.”

Ms. Mazwai has not always been a critic of South Africa’s leaders. Her career took off during the euphoria of the Mandela presidency, from 1994 to 1999, and she performed for Mr. Mandela several times.

She was among a pioneering group of young musicians who created the sound of the new democracy: the rebellious dance music, known as kwaito, that drew on hip-hop, R&B and African pop. With the band Bongo Maffin, for which she was a lead vocalist, Ms. Mazwai took kwaito, and the new South Africa, to the rest of the world.

Ms. Mazwai grew up in Soweto, in one of the historic township’s neighborhoods where residents had middle-class aspirations, signified by what she said were known locally as “big window” houses. Her parents were politically active journalists; her mother had been one of the few Black students at the University of the Witwatersrand. As South Africa slowly integrated, her parents enrolled her in a prestigious girls’ school in Johannesburg’s wealthy suburbs.

The experience was a culture shock, and not just because the young Ms. Mazwai was regarded with suspicion whenever another student misplaced something. She was the only Black child in her class and teachers sometimes brought up her father’s politically charged newspaper articles. “No Black child could survive that world,” she said.

She transferred to a more diverse school, one with a Pan-African outlook, and then followed her mother to the University of the Witwatersrand but dropped out to pursue her music career with Bongo Maffin.

The group, founded in 1996, quickly garnered celebrity status. Ms. Mazwai’s relationship with a bandmate and the child they had together made headlines. Young people copied her contemporary African fashion sense, wearing a turban with a formal suit or painting tribal dots on her face as part of her makeup. The impact of the band was so enduring that their music is still on the playlist at parties and weddings all over South Africa.

An upbeat sample of Miriam Makeba’s “Pata Pata” brought them to the attention of the doyenne of South African music. Ms. Makeba, the celebrated singer and anti-apartheid activist, effectively anointed Ms. Mazwai as her successor, but set her a challenge, too: What kind of artist did she want to be?

Ms. Mazwai answered in her first solo album, “Zabalaza,” a word that means rebellion or revolution in the Xhosa language. In the album, released in 2004, Ms. Mazwai stretched her vocal cords across jazz, funk and soul. South Africa’s revolution was no longer against the apartheid regime, but against the H.I.V.-pandemic, against grinding poverty and joblessness — all mismanaged by the governing party. Ms. Mazwai’s early fame did not shield her from these maladies, so she sang about them.

“I think the role of the artist is to use their gifts intentionally to free people from suffering,” she said in a recent interview with The New York Times, reflecting on her career.

Her 2009 album “Ibokwe,” or goat (an animal with ritual significance) featured another legendary South African musician, Hugh Masekela. He became what Ms. Mazwai described as her “industry dad,” and she regularly performed with him.

Her next album, “Belede,” the only one not released in an election year, explored grief: for her mother Belede Mazwai, who died in 1992 and never saw a free South Africa, and for Ms. Mazwai’s other mentor, the singer Busi Mhlongo.

“Belede” also grieved for the life South Africans thought they would have but have yet to attain, and in the song “Ndiyahamba” (“I’m Leaving”), Ms. Mazwai imagines leaving an unforgiving city life for a bucolic setting.

Despite this hankering for escape in her songs, Ms. Mazwai said she won’t turn away from a troubled society. A queer woman in a country where Black lesbians still live in fear, Ms. Mazwai describes her life as “political.”

“The lives of those I love is political and I cannot escape the telling of our collective stories,” she said.

Ms. Mazwai’s music and fashion also deliberately embrace the aesthetic of the rest of the African continent. Her latest album was partly recorded in Dakar, and the cowrie shell has become a signature accessory. It’s another act of defiance when South Africa still struggles to integrate with the rest of the continent and African immigrants are often the targets of attacks.

That anti-immigrant animosity is driven by a desperation in poor townships and shanty towns where voting and protest seem to make no difference, Ms. Mazwai said.

“The real indictment is on our governments,” she said. “Whether it’s the Zimbabwean government or the South African government or the Congolese government, our governments are failing us.”

Despite the gravity of her music, her live performances are also joyful, and cheeky. In a packed London venue recently, a fan threw a bra on the stage, and Ms. Mazwai wore it as a hat.

The anger and suffering of her albums are always tempered with love, and on “Sankofa” Ms. Mazwai offers a soothing balm, the result, she said, of her own healing. Singing to her younger self — and to all of us — she sings “Kulungile”: It’s going to be all right.