A Russian special forces commander served on four battlefronts across eastern Ukraine after joining Russia’s invasion nearly three years ago. He said the most ferocious fighting he has seen is now unfolding back home, as the Russian Army he serves struggles to liberate a sliver of national territory from Ukrainian forces.

The protracted battle for the occupied Russian town of Sudzha and the surrounding countryside has unexpectedly emerged as one of the focal points of a war fought over the fate of the Ukrainian state. Both sides have committed a significant share of their limited reserves to control Sudzha, a once sleepy county seat in the Kursk region, near the two countries’ border.

“These are the most brutal battles — I haven’t seen anything like this during the entire special military operation,” the commander, who leads about 200 men fighting in Kursk, said in an interview near the front line late last year, using the Kremlin’s euphemism for the war. He requested that he be identified only by his call sign, Hades, according to military protocol.

Both sides see Kursk as must-have territory, an important element in the expected peace talks promised by President Trump. Military analysts say the Ukrainian forces have since poured some of their best reserves into Kursk, hoping to use its conquest as a bargaining chip in negotiations.

For President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the Ukrainian incursion — the first invasion of Russian territory since World War II — has been an ongoing embarrassment. He is determined to push Ukraine out so he does not have to make any concession to get the territory back, and Moscow has deployed tens of thousands of soldiers, including conscripts and North Korean allies, to repel the invaders, according to U.S. officials.

Ukrainians “wanted to conduct the talks from a position of strength,” Lt. Gen. Apti Alaudinov, the commander of the Akhmat special forces unit from Russia’s Chechnya region, said in an interview in the Kursk region in December. “When the time comes for the talks, it is not clear if they can still say that they are here.”

With the stakes so high, Russian soldiers fighting in Kursk believe the fighting is about to become even bloodier.

“We are expecting Bakhmut 2.0,” said Hades, the Russian commander serving in Akhmat, which is made up in large part from the remnants of Wagner paramilitaries.

Bakhmut is a Ukrainian town whose ruins Wagner captured in 2023 after a nine-month assault at the cost of tens of thousands of casualties. The standoff was emblematic of Ukraine’s stand-and-fight strategy even in the face of Russia’s superior manpower and firepower.

Another Russian commander, who insisted on anonymity for security reasons, said the cost of a showdown would be staggering. The bloodshed, the casualties, it’s “unimaginable,” he said.

A photographer working for The New York Times was given access to Kursk late last year and was allowed to interview and photograph Russian soldiers at a hospital and near the front line, as well as civilians, some who had fled their villages and others who stayed behind.

Some of the interviewed soldiers were Wagner veterans who joined Akhmat after the failed mutiny of the mercenaries’ leader, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin. They said the Chechnya-based special forces unit most closely resembled the loose structure of their former paramilitary force.

Other interviewed soldiers were recent volunteers who joined to take advantage of rising sign-up bonuses. They said an opportunity to fight inside their own country provided an additional incentive to join a war whose broader goals or causes they struggled to articulate.

“This is our land, these are our people and our values,” Aleksandr, a Russian contract soldier who was injured by a mortar fighting in Kursk, said in an interview at a medical center. “We must fight for them.”

Since the Ukrainian invasion began six months ago, both sides have taken heavy losses in Kursk’s exposed, flat terrain punctuated by small villages, although the armies closely guard their casualty rates. Russia, in glacial advances, has been able to recover about 60 percent of about 500 square miles initially captured by Ukraine.

Between the two armies are an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 Russian civilians, who were trapped by the speed of the initial Ukrainian advance and the Russian government’s failure to mount an evacuation.

The two sides have blamed each other for failing to provide conditions for the remaining residents to leave, forcing those civilians to endure the Russian winter with dwindling food supplies and without running water, heating or electricity. As the Russian forces close in, they are being subjected to escalating bombardment.

The analysts and relatives of Sudzha residents fear that the Russian military’s reliance on heavy bombing and Ukraine’s determination to defend the town threaten a humanitarian catastrophe at a level not seen in Russia since the civil war in Chechnya in the 1990s. By late January, Russian forces stood just a few miles from the town center.

In Ukraine, the Russian invasion has caused civilian suffering on a much larger scale, with strikes on residential buildings, hospitals, churches and an array of energy facilities.

Pasi Paroinen, a military analyst at Finland-based research company Black Bird Group, said the Russian assault on Sudzha would be costly for both soldiers and civilians, because Ukraine had deployed in Kursk its strongest force.

Lyubov, a mother of four, is part of a group of Kursk residents who for months have been publicly calling for a humanitarian corridor to evacuate relatives trapped in Sudzha. She said she feared that the impeding assault on the town would leave her parents and others there with little chance of survival.

“By the time Russian troops enter the settlements, only ruins and ashes remain of the houses,” she said in an interview, adding: “This is an awful rescue system.”

The apocalyptic scenes described by civilians who have escaped Sudzha’s surrounding villages foreshadow the intensity of the impending battle for the town.

In interviews, these civilians provided mixed accounts of Ukrainian occupation.

Zoya, 64, described the initial friendliness of Ukrainian soldiers who occupied her village, Pogrebki, on Aug. 12. She said the first soldiers who came to her house gave her husband a pack of cigarettes and offered their help.

“They were really nice lads,” she said.

(Zoya and other civilians who were interviewed are being identified by their first names only to protect them against Russian censorship laws.)

That camaraderie waned as the fighting intensified, according to those who fled. The Ukrainian soldiers began to see Russian civilians as a hindrance — or worse, as potential informers who could give away their positions.

Zoya and her husband ran out of food and subsisted on occasional frozen potatoes that they dug out from their garden. During one of those sorties, a drone exploded near her husband. He died in her arms minutes later, she said.

Zoya spent most of her time sheltering from constant bombing in her basement, a stretch of darkness that made her hallucinate and temporarily lose her sense of sight and time. Hunger eventually drove her to attempt an escape.

“There was nowhere left to live — it was so scary there, everything was destroyed,” she said in an interview.

She said she walked five miles through fields littered with destroyed Russian tanks and dead soldiers before reaching the Russian positions in November.

Another woman named Natalia, 69, who uses a wheelchair, recounted a similar experience.

She said Ukrainian soldiers initially brought her bread, water and insulin for her diabetes after occupying her village of Novoivanovka. The soldiers stopped occasionally to chat over a cup of tea.

The treatment worsened as the fighting drew closer.

She said in an interview that her husband had died after being summarily shot by a Ukrainian soldier. Her account could not be independently verified and Ukraine has repeatedly said that it adheres to humanitarian laws in Kursk.

By November, Natalia was sheltering in a basement in no man’s land. One day, she said, a Russian reconnaissance group reached her house and told her that her only chance of survival was escape.

“They said, ‘Please leave, however you can — otherwise you will die,’” said Natalia.

She said other surviving residents helped to carry her to another village, where their group was eventually rescued by Russian troops.

Sudzha residents now fear similar hardships are coming to their trapped relatives.

Earlier in February, a missile hit Sudzha’s boarding school, which sheltered about 100 people displaced from the outlying villages. Both sides have blamed each other for the strike.

The attack killed at least four people; Ukrainian soldiers evacuated survivors to Ukraine.

“We don’t know where the rocket came from,” said Yulia, a Russian woman whose parents survived the strike. She said that Ukrainian soldiers “came and helped dig people from the rubble, and saved our people.”

A Russian man named Sergei said that video messages from family in the town had sometimes reached him following its occupation. Over the months, he said, he watched their hair grow white, their bodies grow thin and the sounds of explosions grow louder.

“I’m sorry that I am crying,” said his sister in a video that was viewed by The Times, congratulating Sergei on his birthday. “I wish I could’ve done it in person, at least by telephone. You have always complained that I call too little.”

“Mother can’t congratulate you, because she struggles to come up the stairs. She is almost always in the basement,” the sister added. “She joins my congratulations.”

Eventually, the videos became too painful to watch, said Sergei, leading him to switch to passing occasional texts.

Constant Méheut and Yurii Shyvala contributed reporting from Kyiv and Milana Mazaeva from Tbilisi, Georgia.

Finding themselves in the fickle cross hairs of President Trump, Jordan and Egypt are moving with speed — and uncertain prospects of success — to dissuade, distract and divert him from forcing them to take in Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.

For the two Arab governments, who view Mr. Trump’s proposal that they take in two million Palestinians as an existential threat, the strategy appears to be to placate the U.S. president with offers to work together to rebuild Gaza, bring peace to the region and expand humanitarian aid efforts. That could help them buy time, analysts say — perhaps enough for Mr. Trump to discard the idea as too complicated, or to recognize the strategic and security drawbacks of destabilizing two of the closest allies of the United States in the region.

Jordan’s King Abdullah employed a conciliatory tone in his meeting with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office on Tuesday, telling the U.S. president that his country would take in 2,000 Palestinian children with cancer and other illnesses from Gaza. Still, he otherwise gave no ground on the question of resettling more Gazans, and later repeated Jordan’s rejection of the plan in a statement on social media.

Jordan has been treating some cancer patients from Gaza for months already, making the offer more of a token than a real concession. But Mr. Trump called it a “beautiful gesture.”

Other world leaders have found that flattering Mr. Trump tends to help them get their way. King Abdullah seemed to be following their example on Tuesday, heaping praise on the president as “somebody that can take us across the finish line to bring stability, peace and prosperity” to the Middle East.

Even as the king pushed back against Mr. Trump in the post to make clear he was rejecting the mass displacement of Palestinians, he noted that the United States had a key role to play. “Achieving just peace on the basis of the two-state solution is the way to ensure regional stability,” he said in the post. “This requires U.S. leadership.”

Egypt, too, said it wanted to work with Mr. Trump to “achieve a comprehensive and just peace in the region by reaching a just settlement of the Palestinian cause,” according to an Egyptian statement released later Tuesday.

But the statement made no mention of participating in Mr. Trump’s proposal, and reiterated Egypt’s position that peace could be achieved only by giving the Palestinians statehood. Palestinians and many other Arabs have rejected Mr. Trump’s proposed forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza not only as ethnic cleansing, a war crime that flies in the face of international law, but also as the death knell for their long-held dream of a Palestinian state.

Egypt sought instead to serve up an alternative plan for Mr. Trump, saying in the statement that it would “present a comprehensive vision for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip in a manner that ensures the Palestinian people remain in their homeland.” The Palestinian Authority joined in with its own plan for helping Gaza recover from the war on Wednesday.

In recent days, as alarm over the president’s idea has mounted in Cairo, Egyptian officials have emphasized that Egypt stands ready to help rebuild Gaza, with which it shares a vital border crossing, as it did after previous conflicts there.

An Egyptian real estate tycoon, Hisham Talaat Moustafa, who like Mr. Trump has developed a chain of residential properties and hotels, went on an evening news show on Sunday to outline a $20 billion proposal for building 200,000 housing units in Gaza, as if trying to talk to Mr. Trump developer to developer.

But Mr. Moustafa, who is closely linked to the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, said he envisioned reconstructing Gaza without moving any Palestinians out of the strip.

During the Tuesday meeting, King Abdullah also alluded several times to the need for consultations with Egypt and other Arab countries before responding to Mr. Trump’s proposal, mentioning an upcoming meeting in Riyadh with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. Egypt has also called for a summit of Arab leaders to discuss the issue in Cairo on Feb. 27.

Despite the pushback from Egypt and Jordan, Mr. Trump seems to be sticking to the core of his out-of-left-field proposal for the United States to “own” Gaza and redevelop it into a “Riviera” for tourism and jobs. During the Tuesday meeting with King Abdullah and his son, Crown Prince Hussein, he said that “we will have Gaza” and “we’re going to take it.”

But he appeared to soften his previous threat to cut funding to Jordan and Egypt, two of the top recipients of U.S. aid, if they did not accept Gaza’s Palestinians, saying, “We’re above that.”

Mr. Trump also suggested that he was looking at a broader group of countries that could receive Gazans. “We have other countries that want to get involved,” he said, and when a journalist asked whether two of those countries could be Albania and Indonesia, he responded, “Yeah, sure.” (The leaders of both countries have dismissed any such possibility.)

Middle East experts say Mr. Trump appears to be ignoring previous U.S. calculations about the importance of stability in Egypt and Jordan, Arab neighbors of Israel who both made peace with Israel years ago and cooperate closely with the United States on security matters.

“The way that he talks about these relationships, it is as if these countries are takers, and that we get very little out of them,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute who focuses on Egypt, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians.

In fact, many human rights advocates and critics of Egypt have questioned how wise the U.S. investment in Egypt is, arguing that it props up a repressive regime that often goes against U.S. interests. But analysts say the cooperation of Egypt and especially Jordan on regional security has been valuable to the United States.

Egypt, which receives $1.3 billion a year in U.S. military assistance to buy weapons, making it the second-largest recipient of such financing after Israel, has worked with the United States on counterterrorism efforts.

Jordan has been the United States’ gateway to the Middle East for decades, hosting a U.S. military base and a large Central Intelligence Agency station and acting as a diplomatic hub. Like Egypt, the Jordanian monarchy shares the U.S. view of militant Islam as a major threat and has supported the United States in its fight against Al Qaeda and then the Islamic State, among other common enemies.

When Iran targeted Israel with missiles and drones last year, Jordan also helped to shoot some of them down.

Jordan has “been with us lock step,” Mr. Katulis said.

Egypt and Jordan both accepted Palestinian refugees after they were displaced during the 1948 war surrounding the creation of the state of Israel, and Egypt has now taken in at least 100,000 Palestinian medical evacuees and other people who fled Gaza.

But analysts say both countries would rather risk losing U.S. aid than alienating their populations by appearing complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

For Jordan, taking in large numbers of Palestinians forced out of Gaza is unacceptable because it could widen an existing rift between citizens who are of Palestinian descent and those who are not, destabilizing the monarchy, analysts say. More than half of King Abdullah’s 12 million subjects are of Palestinian descent.

Jordan already hosts about 700,000 refugees, including Syrians and Iraqis as well as Palestinians. That largely impoverished population has all but overwhelmed the small country’s limited resources.

Mr. Trump’s proposal also inflames fears that Israel will next drive Palestinians out of the occupied West Bank into Jordan, a long-held ambition of far-right Israelis.

The secretary general of the Arab League, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, alluded to such fears on Wednesday, saying, “Today the focus is on Gaza and tomorrow it will shift to the West Bank, with the objective of emptying historic Palestine of its indigenous people, something that is unacceptable.”

Egypt also sees the possibility of Palestinians resettling in Egypt as a serious security threat. Forcibly displaced Palestinians could launch attacks on Israel from Egyptian soil, officials say, inviting Israeli military retaliation.

Rania Khaled contributed reporting from Cairo.

In a remote corner of northeast Colombia, where dirt roads lead to lush hills lined with banana trees, farmers and their families have become the victims of a spate of violence unlike anything the country has seen in a generation.

As two rebel groups battle for territory, more than 54,000 people have fled their homes, and an estimated 80 people died in a matter of days, with the death toll expected to climb.

At the root of this conflict are decades-old battles over land and drug money, and the failure of past deals to lead to lasting peace. But analysts, diplomats and even Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, point to another, newer factor helping foment the chaos in Colombia: neighboring Venezuela.

Over the past decade, as Venezuela has descended into autocracy, its government has also drawn closer to the principal aggressor in the current conflict next door, a longstanding rebel group called the National Liberation Army, or ELN.

Born as a Marxist group in Santander, Colombia, in the 1960s, the ELN has increasingly used Venezuela as a place of refuge, moving deeper into the country, enriching itself through drug trafficking and other illicit activities, tripling in size to roughly 6,000 fighters and strengthening relationships with Venezuelan officials.

In return, the Colombian authorities say, the country’s autocratic president, Nicolás Maduro, who has become more isolated on the global stage, has benefited from having a powerful armed group as a buffer against domestic and foreign threats, including the possibility of a coup.

For years, the disintegration of Venezuela’s democracy has put a strain on neighboring Colombia, sending some three million refugees fleeing into the nation of just 50 million.

Now, some say, Mr. Maduro’s Venezuela is being used as a base to unleash something far more destabilizing: a new wave of destruction in Colombia.

Mr. Petro went as far as accusing the ELN of becoming a “foreign force” that had invaded Colombia. “This is a problem of national sovereignty,” he said, “not just an internal conflict, which we’ve had since long ago.”

Venezuela’s defense minister, Vladimir Padrino López, in a statement in late January, said it was “essential to state with crystal clarity that Venezuela does not serve, nor will it ever serve, as a platform for armed groups outside the law, whatever their nature, ideology or nationality.”

Why the ELN decided to attack now is unclear, but the relationship between Mr. Petro and Mr. Maduro, once friendly, has soured significantly over the last few months.

Mr. Petro is Colombia’s first leftist president, a former guerrilla himself and seemingly a natural ally of Mr. Maduro, who calls himself a socialist. Two years ago, they held a high-profile meeting in Caracas, where the two promised to work together on issues of mutual interest.

That included the security of their 1,300-mile shared border.

Then in July, Mr. Maduro declared himself the winner of a tainted presidential election, refusing to produce tallies to back up this claim and imprisoning roughly 2,000 people amid a wave of protest.

The United Nations and other independent monitors questioned the result. The United States recognized the opposition candidate as the winner.

Soon, Mr. Petro, one of few leaders to still be somewhat amicable with Mr. Maduro, took a more critical tone, publicly urging him to publish election results and release political prisoners. Mr. Maduro responded by ordering a “punch in the face” to anyone who meddled in Venezuela’s affairs.

When Mr. Maduro was sworn in for a third term on Jan. 10, Mr. Petro refused to attend the ceremony or to recognize the Venezuelan as president.

Five days later, the ELN sent fighters from a more southern point in Colombia into northern Colombia, to a strategically important region called Catatumbo, saying on X that it sought to oust a rival armed group called the 33rd Front.

The two groups had long divided control of the region, home to vast fields of coca, the base product in cocaine. Now, a fragile power-sharing accord had broken.

The violence has crushed Mr. Petro’s chances at accomplishing one of his most important policy goals: a peace deal with the ELN, a key part of an ambitious campaign promise — “total peace,” he called it — that he made to end all conflict in Colombia.

The country has suffered decades of internal violence that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

“‘Total peace’ was already in a bad spot,” said Kyle Johnson, co-founder of Foundation Conflict Responses, a nonprofit research group in Bogotá. “With this outbreak of violence it feels politically like the final nail in the coffin.”

Today, tens of thousands of civilians are trapped in the middle of the violence. Some families in Catatumbo have sought refuge in the forest, surviving on whatever they managed to carry with them.

Others have streamed into Tibú, a small Colombian town on the Venezuelan border, sleeping in a school that has become a shelter. Still others have crowded into a coliseum in Cúcuta, the region’s main city, lining up each morning for food and assistance.

On a recent day at the school in Tibú, classrooms had become bedrooms, and children played while a young woman, overcome with emotion, cried and wheezed until she fainted on a patio floor.

“Sow what you dream,” read a mural on one wall. Military helicopters buzzed overhead.

Venezuela’s powerful interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, had just paid a visit to the border, while a new wave of Colombian troops were moving in to fight the ELN.

As the sun set, Luz, 45, and her husband Francisco, 40, sat in the doorway of one of the classrooms, describing the home they had abandoned: dirt floor, wood construction, a small patio, a barrel for collecting rainwater.

Just days before, as armed men had stormed the region, a man had arrived at the school where Francisco worked and told him that he had five minutes to leave.

The couple and their two sons ran.

The Times is publishing only their first names, out of concern for their safety.

That night in Tibú, Luz was struggling to understand how they had gotten there.

“All of us civilians are saying: What are they fighting for?” she said. “What are they looking for? What is the reason for this?”

At his office in Cúcuta, Gen. Mario Contreras, the regional commander for the Colombian Army, said the violence had begun with the killing of a single family, which angered the ELN. The following day, he said, the ELN entered town centers — “because they know people are defenseless there” — armed with pistols and dressed as civilians, looking for suspected collaborators of the 33rd Front.

A generation ago, the ELN was so weak it was near extinction, battered by the Colombian state and paramilitaries. In a recent academic paper, two researchers, Jorge Mantilla and Andreas Feldmann, argued that “the support of neighboring Venezuela” has been the most important factor in the rebels’ “improbable resurgence.”

Bram Ebus, a consultant for the International Crisis Group, said that the Venezuelan government had in recent years even used the ELN as “an extension” of its security forces. “We know that there is a tacit alliance on the federal level in Venezuela,” he said.

The Colombian military says ELN fighters passed through Venezuela to get to the scene of their first attacks. In a message on X, signed by the Central Command of the ELN, the group called this “fake news” invented by the Colombian government to justify a possible invasion of Venezuela.

The group has focused its anger on the Colombian government, which it accused of uniting with the 33rd Front to “annihilate” the ELN.

The 33rd Front is a faction of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, who remain in arms despite a 2016 peace deal signed by the FARC and the Colombian government.

In late January, Colombia’s defense minister traveled to Venezuela to meet with his Venezuelan counterpart and said afterward that the two had discussed “cooperation” in capturing ELN leaders and containing the group.

As the violence unfolded in recent days, something remarkable started happening at the River Tarra, a muddy strip dividing Colombia and Venezuela. For years, Venezuelans had poured across it, seeking sanctuary in Colombia. Now, the flow was going in reverse.

At one crossing, a makeshift ferry carrying roughly nearly 3,000 people into Venezuela in the first three days of the fighting.

Jackline, 42, was one of them. Wearing a red skirt adorned with buttons and a blue blouse — more suitable for church than an escape — she was with her son, 7, and daughter, 17.

Jackline had been displaced once before by violence, she said. And though she is Colombian, she was now considering staying in Venezuela for good.

“It’s really nice there,” she said. “There is no war.”

Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting from Bogotá.

As he prepared to go to Washington this week, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, spoke of building on the warm relations he shared with President Trump during his first term in the White House.

But Mr. Trump can be a fickle friend. So when Mr. Modi meets with him on Thursday, he is expected to bear offerings designed to ease emerging points of friction and preserve growing U.S.-India ties.

One major focus is trade. Indian officials have said that domestic companies are in talks to increase purchases of American energy supplies, particularly liquefied natural gas. The two leaders are also expected to discuss expanded spending on U.S. defense equipment and potentially announce new deals.

In addition, Mr. Modi can point to recent reductions in Indian tariffs on high-end American motorcycles — namely Harley-Davidsons — and the prospect of lower duties on goods like bourbon and pecans, which are produced mainly in Republican states.

These moves, though largely symbolic in some cases, are intended to placate Mr. Trump’s irritation over the American trade deficit with India and the high import duties that make India a difficult market to enter.

On another big source of tension, illegal immigration, Mr. Modi has already offered concessions. India accounts for the largest group of illegal migrants to the United States outside Latin America. The Indian government has made clear it will cooperate with Mr. Trump’s deportation drive, even as it caused a political headache for Mr. Modi last week.

The arrival of 100 shackled and handcuffed Indians on an American military plane, just days before Mr. Modi was to go to Washington, left his government scrambling to play down the episode and contain a domestic backlash.

India is acutely aware that the trade and immigration issues are a potential double whammy in Mr. Trump’s universe of preoccupations.

So far, while Mr. Trump has threatened even close allies with punitive tariffs over these issues, India has managed to stay out of his cross hairs. If any country can walk the tightrope of Mr. Trump’s hurricane-force return to power, India believes it is the one.

The two countries, the world’s largest democracies, have grown more closely aligned economically and geopolitically as they see a shared threat in an increasingly assertive China.

Mr. Modi will be the fourth world leader to meet with Mr. Trump since he took office about three weeks ago, after a visit to the White House by the Japanese prime minister and talks with the Israeli and Jordanian leaders over war in the Middle East.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Modi share much in common. Both are strongman leaders who hold largely transactional views of foreign policy, with a populist’s sense of what plays well with the base.

Even as Mr. Modi has shown a willingness to go along with Mr. Trump’s muscle-flexing, he is working to get what India needs out of the relationship. That is particularly true with Mr. Trump’s push to undo a range of Biden-era legal actions.

There has been speculation that the Justice Department could drop criminal charges of fraud and bribery against Gautam Adani, a billionaire ally of Mr. Modi.

India is also hoping to move on from U.S. legal actions related to accusations of an Indian government plot to assassinate an American citizen on U.S. soil.

Even during the Biden administration, officials took pains to deal with the assassination case largely privately, a sign of how important the countries’ trade and defense ties have become.

The relationship has enjoyed bipartisan support in Washington, including among lawmakers who are now in Mr. Trump’s inner circle and view India as important in sharing the burden of containing China.

In addition to the “very close rapport” between Mr. Trump and Mr. Modi, Vikram Misri, India’s foreign secretary, has listed several areas of “convergence of interest” between the two nations.

Mr. Misri pointed to expanding technology and trade connections, as well as joint efforts on counterterrorism and on security in the Indo-Pacific region. He also highlighted the increasingly influential Indian diaspora in the United States, as well as the large numbers of Indian students studying there.

An important area of alignment that could help both leaders claim victories is defense cooperation, particularly weapons spending.

India is the world’s largest importer of military arms, accounting for nearly 10 percent of the global total, according to the Stockholm Institute of Peace Research.

For decades, cheap and reliable Russian equipment made up the bulk of India’s defense purchases. American equipment was expensive and out of reach because of longstanding U.S. suspicions over India’s ties to Russia.

U.S. defense sales to India now approach $25 billion a year, up from almost nothing in 2008. With India expected to spend more than $200 billion over the next decade to modernize its military, according to the Congressional Research Service, purchases from the United States are likely to only grow.

When Mr. Modi spoke with Mr. Trump by phone shortly after his inauguration last month, “the president emphasized the importance of India increasing its procurement of American-made security equipment,” the White House said in a statement.

India, however, has been trying to move past simple purchases of U.S. equipment so that the deals generate much-needed jobs and industrial capacity at home.

“If India is to become a net security provider in this part of the world, you have to build capacities as well,” said Ashok Malik, the India chair at the Asia Group and a former foreign policy adviser to the Modi government.

Some of the biggest deals in recent years have brought India into the development and production of equipment. In 2023, General Electric announced that it would jointly produce jet engines in India. In its final weeks, the Biden administration also announced that India would become “the first global producer” of Stryker combat vehicles.

Concrete steps on these deals, as well as finalizing other purchases — including of patrol and reconnaissance aircraft for the Indian Navy — could be among the announcements that follow Mr. Modi’s meeting with Mr. Trump.

“All options are under discussion,” Sanjeev Kumar, India’s defense production secretary, said ahead of the trip. “We certainly wish to expedite the transactions with the U.S.”

Alex Travelli contributed reporting.

The Trump administration is preparing to release a Russian cybercriminal as part of a prisoner exchange that led to the release of an American schoolteacher from a Russian prison, three U.S. officials said on Wednesday.

Officials were preparing to release Alexander Vinnik, who pleaded guilty to money laundering in 2024, to Russia as part of a swap for Marc Fogel, according to the three officials. Mr. Vinnik is a nonviolent offender and is forfeiting tens of millions of dollars in assets in the exchange, one of the officials said.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private diplomatic negotiations.

In a post on his website Truth Social, President Trump said late Wednesday morning that he had just had a “highly productive” call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to begin working toward a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.

Mr. Trump told reporters on Tuesday, as he awaited Mr. Fogel’s arrival back in the United States, that his administration had traded for “not much” — suggesting he had gotten the better of the deal — and later described it as a “very fair” exchange.

But they did see the exchange as an effort to establish good will as the administration looks for ways to bring about a peace settlement in the war in Ukraine that Russia began almost three years ago.

Mr. Fogel’s release was negotiated by Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s decades-long friend and his Mideast envoy, whose portfolio has expanded to helping find a way to end the war in Ukraine. Mr. Witkoff flew to Russia on his private jet, then brought Mr. Fogel home on that plane, and to the White House to meet with Mr. Trump.

“I think they had a great friendship,” Mr. Witkoff said outside the White House on Wednesday, referring to Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump. “I think now it’s going to continue, and I think it’s a really good thing for the world.”

Mr. Witkoff’s visit to Russia was the first by a senior American official since before Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The trip, according to two people with knowledge of the events, was part of a new outreach by the Trump administration to the Kremlin, one that could result in the rebuilding of a channel for communication between the White House and Mr. Putin.

The Fox News host Sean Hannity, who is a close friend of both Mr. Trump and Mr. Witkoff, reported on Tuesday that Mr. Witkoff held a meeting with Mr. Putin that lasted more than three hours. Mr. Witkoff declined to address that in a separate interview with Fox News on Wednesday morning, but he credited several Trump administration officials with helping work toward the exchange, including the White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and the C.I.A. director John Ratcliffe.

Mr. Trump has appointed Keith Kellogg, a retired three-star general, to be his special envoy for Ukraine and Russia. But he has also assigned Mr. Witkoff a role in trying to work the Russian side of the peace deal. Mr. Witkoff has discussed the conflict with some of his contacts in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Mr. Witkoff told reporters that Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, as well as a “gentleman from Russia, his name is Kirill” were key to securing Mr. Fogel’s release. Mr. Witkoff appeared to be referring to Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, who is a close associate of Mr. Putin, has long fostered ties with Mr. bin Salman, and sought a back channel to Mr. Trump during his first term.

Mr. Trump has promised to end the war in Ukraine with talks between the two sides and has said he wants to stop the loss of life by both sides and stem the huge amount of money the United States has spent supporting Ukraine’s defense.

Mr. Zelensky is preparing for key meetings with senior American officials at a major security conference in Germany later this week.

Mr. Vinnik was being prepared to travel to Russia early Wednesday, according to one of the U.S. officials. Mr. Vinnik was charged in 2017 with overseeing a black market Bitcoin exchange, known as BTC-E, that laundered money. Federal prosecutors said the exchange facilitated ransomware attacks, identity theft and other crimes.

Mr. Vinnik was arrested in Greece in July 2017, and the indictment against him said he had directed the operations of the exchange.

At the time of the arrest, the Justice Department said the Bitcoin exchange had laundered more than $4 billion and was used by more than 700,000 people. The arrest of Mr. Vinnik led to the exchange, one of the largest at the time, being shut down.

Mr. Vinnik pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering last May. Justice Department officials said Mr. Vinnik ran the exchange with the intent to promote cybercrime.

He had earlier, in December 2020, been convicted by a French court and sentenced to five years in prison. He was extradited to the United States in 2024 and was then held in U.S. prisons.

Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said earlier Wednesday that intense talks between the United States and Russia had led to “both the release of Fogel as well as one of the citizens of the Russian Federation currently held in detention facilities in the United States.” He said Russia would not identify the prisoner until after his release.

Mr. Fogel, who had spent more than three years in a Russian prison, was greeted at the White House Tuesday night by Mr. Trump, whom he praised and thanked for arranging his release.

Mr. Fogel, 63, had worked at the Anglo-American School of Moscow for almost 10 years before being arrested at a Moscow airport in August 2021. He was found to have been traveling with cannabis, which his lawyer has said was intended to alleviate back pain. Mr. Fogel was convicted in June 2022 for what the Russian authorities said was engaging in “large-scale drug smuggling” and sentenced to 14 years in a high-security prison.

The U.S. State Department publicly declared Mr. Fogel “wrongfully detained” in December. The designation — described by his family as long overdue — meant that Mr. Fogel’s case shifted to a special State Department office focusing on the release of hostages held abroad.

Mr. Fogel’s family said in December that he had endured “unimaginable hardship” in prison while other Americans held in Russia were brought home in three different prisoner swaps.

Mr. Vinnik’s expected release in exchange for Mr. Fogel marks a striking departure from the tight choreography of prisoner swaps between Moscow and Washington during the Biden administration.

In high-profile deals like the ones that freed the basketball star Brittney Griner in 2022 and the journalist Evan Gershkovich in 2024, the Americans were flown to airports in a third country, where they were exchanged for Russians on the tarmac.

The delayed approach allowed Mr. Trump to claim an unalloyed win on Tuesday without discussing what the United States gave up in return for Mr. Fogel.

Mr. Trump said that “we were treated very nicely by Russia,” and that the deal could pave the way to an end to the war in Ukraine. He added, “I hope that’s the beginning of a relationship where we can end that war.”

Mr. Trump’s warm words toward Russia after Mr. Fogel’s release were shown extensively on Russian state television on Wednesday. Russian commentators praised Mr. Fogel’s release as a clever step by Mr. Putin to give Mr. Trump the political cover he needs to move forward with policies favorable to Russia.

Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political analyst in Moscow, said in a telephone interview that by winning Mr. Fogel’s release, “Trump got the right to do something good for Russia.”

Mr. Markov suggested that Mr. Trump could start lifting sanctions against Russia and push for a Ukraine peace deal on Russia’s terms — or simply stop delivering weapons to Ukraine.

A return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is “an unrealistic objective” and an “illusionary goal” in the peace settlement between Ukraine and Russia that President Trump wants to accomplish, Pete Hegseth, the U.S. defense secretary, said on Wednesday at a meeting of countries supporting Ukraine.

In his first meeting that included NATO and Ukrainian defense ministers, Mr. Hegseth told them that Mr. Trump “intends to end this war by diplomacy and bringing both Russia and Ukraine to the table.” But for Ukraine to try to regain all of the territory Russia has seized since 2014, as it insists it must do, “will only prolong the war and cause more suffering,” he said.

“We will only end this devastating war and establish a durable peace by coupling allied strength with a realistic assessment of the battlefield,” he said.

Hours later, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that he had a long phone call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and they had agreed to “start negotiations immediately” to end the war.

Mr. Hegseth, at NATO headquarters in Brussels, said that Mr. Trump expected Europe to bear more financial and military responsibility for Ukraine’s defense. He is scheduled to take part in a meeting of NATO defense ministers there on Thursday.

Europe, he said, must take more responsibility for its conventional defense and spend more money on its armed forces, up to 5 percent of national output, as the United States deals with its own security risks and the challenge of China.

Mr. Trump, he added, does not support Ukraine’s membership in NATO as part of a realistic peace plan.

After a settlement, “a durable peace for Ukraine must include robust security guarantees to ensure that the war will not begin again,” but that would be the responsibility, he said, of European and non-European troops in a “non-NATO mission” unprotected by NATO’s Article Five commitment to collective defense.

No American troops will be deployed to Ukraine, Mr. Hegseth said, and Europe should provide “the overwhelming share of future lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine.”

European and alliance leaders have been anxiously waiting to hear what Mr. Trump’s goals for a Ukraine settlement might be.

On Wednesday night, foreign ministers and other officials from several European countries, including France, Spain, Germany and Britain, who were meeting in Paris, put out a statement of support for Ukraine.

“We are looking forward to discussing the way ahead together with our American allies,” they said. “Our shared objectives should be to put Ukraine in a position of strength. Ukraine and Europe must be part of any negotiations. Ukraine should be provided with strong security guarantees. A just and lasting peace in Ukraine is a necessary condition for a strong transatlantic security.”

Mr. Hegseth’s comments, at the opening of a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group — more than 50 nations, including all 32 NATO member states — will not come as a great surprise.

But they mark a major change from former President Biden’s policy that it was up to Ukraine to decide whether to make concessions in exchange for peace — and so far, Ukraine has made no concessions publicly on its claim to sovereignty within its internationally recognized borders.

Recently, Ukrainian officials have said that security guarantees to prevent further Russian gains would be their top priority in negotiation, perhaps even ahead of recovering all their lost territory. Militarily, the strategy has been to inflict as many casualties as possible, in hopes that it will pressure Mr. Putin to negotiate.

Mr. Trump said this week that he would exchange continued aid to Ukraine for some $500 billion in Ukrainian rare earth minerals used in high-tech manufacturing. He has sent Scott Bessent, the new treasury secretary, to make the administration’s first high-level visit to Kyiv, because, Mr. Trump wrote on social media, “this war must and will end soon.”

NATO has promised that Ukraine will one day become a member of NATO, but without specifying a date. Mr. Hegseth’s comments would appear to put that date very far into the unforeseeable future, if it arrives at all.

His remarks will create political difficulties for President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and are likely to please Mr. Putin, who seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and launched an all-out invasion in 2022. Russia now occupies about 20 percent of Ukraine.

Mr. Putin has demanded that Russia keep its occupied territories and take control of additional land it claims, that Ukraine not join NATO, that Ukraine’s military capacity be limited and that NATO enlargement halt. He has said he is willing to join negotiations on a settlement with Ukraine, but only on his terms.

To help bring Mr. Putin to the negotiating table, Mr. Hegseth urged lower energy prices, “coupled with more effective enforcement of energy sanctions.”

“The real conversation has started,” said Camille Grand, a former NATO assistant secretary general. After quiet hints from Trump officials, Mr. Hegseth “has now presented the American ask and the terms are clear,” Mr. Grand said. “Now the Europeans need to respond.”

“Either the Europeans say, ‘Oh my god, we can’t do this without you Americans,’ and add to the Trump perception that they are useless and security free-riders,” he said, “or more likely, ‘We’re ready to look into this and mobilize troops and resources, but these are our conditions to do it.’”

Then there can be a serious conversation about the solidity of any cease-fire, about a peacekeeping force, command and control, air cover, and worst-case scenarios, if Russia tests the peacekeepers, Mr. Grand said.

Mr. Hegseth did not question American commitment to NATO, as President Trump has sometimes done in the past.

The United States “remains committed to the NATO alliance and to the defense partnership with Europe, full stop, but the United States will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency,” Mr. Hegseth said.

So Europe must step up to take responsibility for its own conventional defense, he said, while implying that the American nuclear umbrella that helps protect NATO and Europe would remain in place.

He urged Europeans to keep their commitments on military spending and increase them. “We challenge your countries and your citizens to double down and recommit yourselves not only to Ukraine’s immediate security needs, but to Europe’s long term defense and deterrence goals,” he said.

“We hear you,” said John Healey, Britain’s defense secretary, in response to Mr. Hegseth’s remarks before the meeting was closed to the media.

Speaking at a news conference after the meeting, Mr. Healey pointed to shared goals with the United States, including a durable peace in Ukraine with security guarantees, and increased European military spending and responsibility both for Ukraine and for its own defense.

Asked if Mr. Trump had now broken Western unity on Ukraine, Mr. Healey did not answer but repeated these shared goals, emphasizing the American commitment to NATO and refusing to rule out Ukraine joining NATO one day.

“That is a process that will take some time,” he said. But for now, he said, “the duty of the nations around that table is to make sure that Ukraine is in the strongest possible position going into any talks in the future.”

As for Europe taking responsibility for the bulk of aid to Ukraine, he noted that Europe is already providing more aid in total than the United States. “We are stepping up the support for Ukraine,” Mr. Healey said. “We will do more. We’ll do that alongside the Americans.”

Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting.

Belarus, Russia’s closest ally, has released an American prisoner and two others from jail, an exiled opposition group said on Wednesday, in the latest sign that the autocratic Belarusian president, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, was looking for ways to improve frozen relations with the West.

The releases, announced by an opposition group led by Svetlana Tikhanovskaya in Lithuania, a neighbor of Belarus, followed what Western diplomats said was a secret visit on Wednesday to Minsk, the Belarusian capital, by a U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state, Christopher W. Smith. The group did not identify the American who was freed.

The State Department did not respond to messages seeking comment on whether Mr. Smith had traveled to Minsk, in what would be the highest-level visit to Belarus by an American official since Mike Pompeo, a secretary of state during President Trump’s first administration, went there in 2020 seeking to “normalize” ties.

Mr. Smith, a holdover from the Biden administration, last month helped secure the release of another American citizen held in Belarus, Anastassia Nuhfer.

Franak Viacorka, chief of staff to Ms. Tikhanovskaya, said in a video posted on Telegram that he had visited the U.S. Embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania, and picked up one of the people he said had been released, Alena Movshuk, whom he described as an activist.

He did not name the freed American but said the third person set free was Andrey Kuznechyk, a journalist with the Belarus service of Radio Free Europe, an American-funded news organization.

Lithuanian government officials said that an American citizen had on Wednesday entered that Baltic nation from Belarus. They did not give a name, either. They said that Mr. Smith was now in Vilnius and would hold meetings there on Thursday with European diplomats.

Since Mr. Pompeo’s trip to Minsk in February 2020, relations between Belarus and the West have gone from bad to worse, poisoned by Mr. Lukashenko’s brutal crackdown on nationwide street protests following what his opponents and Western governments say was a rigged presidential election in August 2020.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which was launched in part from Belarusian territory, frayed relations further. The United States shut its embassy in Minsk soon after the start of the invasion.

In recent months, however, a slow but steady stream of prisoners, mostly people jailed for involvement in the 2020 protests, have been released in what analysts and opposition activists see as an effort by Mr. Lukashenko to get his country in from the cold.

Mr. Lukashenko, long wary of becoming too dependent on Russia for economic and security support, has a long history of maneuvering between East and West, a game that ended abruptly after the post-election crackdown in 2020 but which he now appears eager to revive.

An early opponent in the 2020 race was Sergei Tikhanovsky, but he was arrested shortly after announcing his candidacy and later sentenced to 18 years in prison, where he remains. Ms. Tikhanovskaya, his wife, became a candidate in his place, but she fled the country shortly after the election and was sentenced in absentia to 15 years.

With all of his prominent critics either driven into exile or jailed, and all potential rivals kept off the ballot in a presidential election last month, Mr. Lukashenko cruised to yet another landslide victory, his seventh in a row, with 87 percent of the vote — even more than the 81 percent he claimed in the disputed 2020 election.

The family of four refugees filled seven suitcases for their new life in America. They packed blankets, tin plates, one blade for clearing the land in their future home and one for chopping meat. They left behind what they were not supposed to bring: slingshots, fish paste, traditional medicines from their native Myanmar.

But the family never made it to Ohio. Last month, their flights were abruptly canceled. Now with President Trump’s order to pause refugee resettlement, even for thousands of those who have gone through the yearslong approval process, they say they have lost hope in ever becoming Americans.

“I don’t have an opinion about American politics,” said Saw Steel Wah Doh, a 35-year-old lab technician, who is now back in a refugee camp in Thailand with his wife and two children. “I want to become American, work hard, love democracy.”

The Trump administration’s refugee suspension and foreign aid freeze are upending efforts to address one of the world’s most dire humanitarian crises. Not too long ago, Myanmar was an icon of democratic reform lauded by the West. Today, four years after the military toppled an elected government, it is an international pariah largely unchecked as it bombs its own civilians.

On Wednesday, nongovernmental organizations that promote democracy and provide lifesaving treatment for refugees and people displaced by conflict in Myanmar said they were told that grants from the National Endowment for Democracy had been suspended, effective immediately.

The N.E.D. was set up by Congress during the Reagan era to strengthen democracy worldwide. Three representatives of Myanmar-related aid groups said they were told that the N.E.D. has not been able to draw funds from the U.S. Treasury to pay for grants that had already been approved.

The N.E.D. stoppage comes two weeks after President Trump’s order to freeze most foreign aid, including funds disbursed by the United States Agency for International Development. Myanmar-related programs received about $150 million in pledges from U.S.A.I.D., according to local monitors. The aid money was to be used for benefits including H.I.V. treatment and support for exiled media reporting on Myanmar’s civil war.

In 2024, Myanmar was the second-most-dangerous and violent place on earth, according to a global conflict monitor. More than 3 million people are now displaced; thousands have been killed.

The United States has long offered a legal path to immigration for refugees fleeing persecution, war or other threats to their lives. Mr. Trump’s directive has shut the door to Afghan interpreters who risked their lives for American soldiers and to those fleeing religious persecution. It has also dashed the dreams of people from Myanmar, some of whom escaped persecution decades ago.

In Bangladesh, a sprawling tent settlement for Rohingya Muslims expelled from Myanmar constitutes the world’s largest refugee camp. Mohammad Islam was supposed to be resettled in the United States on Feb. 13, along with his family. That dream has withered.

Mr. Islam, 43, has been a refugee since he was 7, but he speaks fluent English and serves as a teacher in the camps.

“I have never been in a classroom, I only studied in tent shelters,” he said. “I want my children to learn in a real school, with walls and desks, in the United States.”

The 2021 coup, which put Myanmar’s generals back in charge, drew bipartisan condemnation in Washington. During Mr. Trump’s first term as president, his administration formally labeled the Myanmar military’s campaign of violence against the Rohingya a genocide. He also honored religious minorities from Myanmar at the White House.

But American support for those fighting Myanmar’s junta has never approached the monetary commitment made to Ukraine, Israel or other top aid recipients. In Myanmar’s jungles, university students, young professionals and even poets who have taken up arms to oust the generals have expressed frustration at how little international attention their plight garners.

In late 2022, President Biden signed into law the BURMA Act, which aims to punish those abusing human rights in the country and to provide assistance to those opposing the junta. (Burma is Myanmar’s former name.)

Last month, Mr. Trump singled out for elimination a $45 million scholarship program that helps Myanmar students fleeing civil war and hoping to study conflict resolution and peace building. Supported by U.S.A.I.D., the educational fund is called the Development and Inclusive Scholarship Program.

“We also blocked $45 million from diversity scholarships in Burma,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “you can imagine where that money went.”

In a post on X, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency labeled the program a “DEI scholarship” and said it had been canceled. Mr. Trump has said federal funds should not be used to support diversity, equity and inclusion.

“It feels like they just shut it down because they could,” said Ko Hlwan Paing Thiha, a scholarship recipient. He has been studying for a master’s in public policy in Thailand.

While opposition militias have pushed the Myanmar military from vast swathes of territory, the junta’s forces have exacted revenge on civilians through a brutal aerial campaign and the scattering of land mines in thousands of villages. The military has enforced conscription and is kidnapping young men from the streets to fill its ranks.

For the hundreds of Myanmar refugees already cleared to go to the United States, the prospect of an indefinite immigration halt is yet another hardship in lives beset by conflict, poverty and insecurity. Saw Htun Htun said his wife and two daughters are already resettled in Vermont. He is supposed to fly to the United States in late February but said he has little hope the trip will go forward.

“My heart is weak, and I am scared that I will never see my family again,” he said. “Please pray for me to go to the U.S.”

Thinking he was on his way to America, Mr. Steel Wah Doh quit his laboratory job at his refugee camp in Thailand. His father, who also hopes to be resettled in the United States, cannot get the medical checkups he needs for his immigration paperwork because camp clinics have been shut by Mr. Trump’s funding freeze.

Lifesaving American aid is supposed to be exempted from the spending ban, but health facilities remain closed. Two nonprofit representatives said they have been told that they will need to fund programs themselves before receiving reimbursements from American aid agencies. What constitutes lifesaving aid has not been made clear to them, they said.

In the Rohingya refugee camps, health clinics, learning centers and sanitation programs funded by the United States have also shut down. In one of the most densely packed places on earth, sewers are overflowing, posing the threat of disease, residents say.

Suffering from heart and kidney disease, Gul Bahar has walked through the muck to an American-funded clinic several times over the past two weeks, only to be turned away.

“I have no hope,” she said.

In Lakewood, Ohio, Mr. Steel Wah Doh’s cousin, Lay Htoo, 19, said he felt terrible for his relatives who didn’t show up as expected.

Mr. Htoo was nearly 8 when he and his family moved to the United States. He spoke no English.

His father is now a mechanic at a factory that makes gambling materials. Mr. Htoo is studying health at a community college, the first in his family to access higher education.

Now an American citizen, Mr. Htoo said he did not vote in last year’s elections. Some of the other Myanmar refugees in town, including family friends, he said, support Mr. Trump because they consider him to be a talented businessman.

“To be honest, living in those refugee camps, I remember it, and it’s not even 100 percent living,” Mr. Htoo said. “If I were still stuck there and I knew that other people voted for a guy who overturned my opportunity for a new life, I’d be extremely livid.”

Saiful Arakani contributed reporting from Teknaf, Bangladesh.