President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine appealed to the Trump administration on Wednesday to respect the truth and avoid disinformation in discussing the war that began with a Russian invasion of his country, in his first response to President Trump’s suggestion that Ukraine had started the war.

“I would like to have more truth with the Trump team,” Mr. Zelensky said in some of the most pointed criticism yet of Mr. Trump and the new American administration, which on Tuesday opened peace talks with Russia that excluded Ukraine. Mr. Zelensky said that the U.S. president was “living in a disinformation space” and in a “circle of disinformation.”

Mr. Zelensky made the remarks to a group of reporters he had summoned to his presidential office in Kyiv, a building still fortified with sandbags to avoid blasts from Russian missiles.

He was responding to a flurry of accusatory statements on Tuesday, some of them false, by Mr. Trump. He said of Ukraine’s leadership and the war, “You should have never started it,” and appeared to embrace what has been a Russian demand that Ukraine hold elections before some stages of talks. Elections were suspended under martial law after Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

Mr. Trump also said that Mr. Zelensky’s approval rating was 4 percent. Mr. Zelensky said that was not true, citing polls showing far higher support. In one conducted in December by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, for example, 52 percent of Ukrainians said that they trusted Mr. Zelensky’s leadership.

Mr. Zelensky had until this week walked a fine line of staking out Ukrainian positions while avoiding any suggestion of an open breach with the United States, Ukraine’s most important ally in the now nearly three-year war. After the initial cease-fire talks between Russia and the United States, Mr. Zelensky on Tuesday had starkly laid out his refusal to accept terms negotiated without Ukrainian participation.

At the news conference, Mr. Zelensky was focused and spoke with intensity. He said he was not personally ruffled by the negotiations with the Trump administration. “This is not my first dialogue or fight,” he said. “I take it calmly.”

Russia, he said, is clearly pleased with the turn of diplomatic developments. “I think Putin and the Russians are very happy, because questions are discussed with them,” Mr. Zelensky said.

“Yesterday, there were signals of speaking with them as victims,” he said of the Trump officials’ tone in discussing the Russian officials, whose government prompted the largest war in Europe since World War II, which has killed or wounded about a million people on both sides over three years. “That is something new.”

Ukrainians, Mr. Zelensky said, are not likely to trust promises Russian negotiators offer in talks. “Nobody in Ukraine trusts Putin,” he said.

Mr. Zelensky also laid out efforts to coordinate from allies security guarantees intended to prevent Russia from violating a cease-fire. This has been an overriding focus of Ukrainian diplomacy going into any peace talks.

For Russia, a continuation of the war also carries costs, including by the estimate of military analysts a staggering casualty count of 1,000 soldiers or more killed or wounded daily, as well as punishing economic sanctions. Ukraine wants to trade this pressure on Russia for acceptance of a peacekeeping force or other guarantee of security to prevent the war, already the bloodiest in Europe in generations, from restarting.

Mr. Zelensky repeated that one option would be membership in NATO, a possibility that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has rejected and that the United States has said it does not support. The Ukrainian leader also mentioned maintaining the country’s standing army of about one million soldiers and a peacekeeping contingent from European countries, or some combination of these measures.

Mr. Putin on Wednesday praised the Trump administration officials in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for having fostered a “very friendly” atmosphere. Unlike past American administrations, he suggested, the Trump team did not criticize Russia’s actions.

“On the American side, there were completely different people who were open to the negotiation process without any bias, without any condemnation of what was done in the past,” Mr. Putin said, speaking to reporters while on a visit to St. Petersburg.

Mr. Putin said he looked forward to a meeting with Mr. Trump, but declined to give a date, cautioning that there was still a lot of preparatory work to be done, “including on the Ukrainian track.”

“I’ll be happy to meet with Donald. We haven’t seen each other in a while,” Mr. Putin said. “But we’re in a situation where it’s not enough to meet just to have tea or coffee and sit and talk about the future.”

Mr. Putin dismissed fears that American allies in Europe were being excluded from the U.S.-Russia talks, arguing that the two countries had bilateral issues to discuss, such as the expiration of the New START nuclear arms control treaty next year.

“Why are they being hysterical?” Mr. Putin said, apparently referring to the Europeans. “Hysteria is not appropriate here.”

Mr. Putin said that Mr. Trump told him in their phone call last week that “the United States expects that the negotiating process will take place with the participation of both Russia and Ukraine.”

“No one is excluding Ukraine from this process,” Mr. Putin said.

Over three years of war, the Ukrainian Army succeeded in repelling Russia’s military from about half of the territory it captured in the initial invasion, but the fighting then bogged down in bloody but mostly static trench warfare, with Russian forces pressing forward slowly.

Several Ukrainian soldiers in telephone interviews on Wednesday expressed worry about Mr. Trump’s misstatements about Ukraine, including Mr. Zelensky’s approval rating, but said nothing had changed in the conduct of the war.

One officer in the 82nd Air Assault Brigade, who declined to give his name for security reasons, said in a telephone interview that the Ukrainian forces would keep fighting, regardless of what Mr. Trump “says he’ll give us or won’t, what funds have been sent or haven’t, where we’ve been invited or not.”

After President Trump shocked the Arab world last month by suggesting the entire population of Gaza be expelled from the territory, his aides reframed the idea as an invitation to the leaders of the Middle East: Come up with a better plan, or do it our way.

“All these countries say how much they care about the Palestinians,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week. “If the Arab countries have a better plan, then that’s great,” Mr. Rubio added.

Now, the governments of several Arab states are attempting to do exactly that. Representatives of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are quietly coordinating to form an alternative vision for Gaza in which Arab countries would help fund and oversee the reconstruction of Gaza, while keeping its residents in place and preserving the possibility of a Palestinian state, according to diplomats and officials briefed on the endeavor.

Envoys from all five countries are set to flesh out the details on Friday in Saudi Arabia, and then again at a bigger summit on March 4 in Cairo. At those meetings, Egypt will likely propose forming a committee of Palestinian technocrats and community leaders, all unaffiliated with Hamas, who could run Gaza after the war, according to two Arab diplomats, a senior Western official and Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland. Mr. Van Hollen said he spoke over the last week with the Egyptian, Saudi and Jordanian foreign ministers about the evolving proposal.

“A lot of the focus will be to demonstrate to Trump and others that, ‘Yes, there is a viable plan to rebuild, we will invest the resources there,’” Mr. Van Hollen said.

“Their view is that Trump’s a real estate guy, he talked about redeveloping Gaza, they want to put together a viable plan that shows Trump that you can rebuild Gaza and provide a future for two million Palestinians” without forcing them to leave the territory, Mr. Van Hollen added.

While the ideas might be presented as a fresh alternative, they are hardly new. For months, Egypt has promoted the idea of a technocratic committee and has hosted Palestinian leaders in Cairo to discuss the idea. For decades, Arab leaders have called for the establishment of a Palestinian state that includes Gaza. Even the Israeli government has privately signaled for more than a year that it is open to Arab leaders playing an oversight role in postwar Gaza.

The challenge is that the obstacles to these ideas are as old as the ideas themselves.

Israeli leaders oppose postwar plans that would pave the way to Palestinian sovereignty. But Arab leaders will only support a framework that at least nominally forges a path toward Palestinian statehood.

They also want the blessing of the Palestinian Authority, the internationally recognized body that administered Gaza until Hamas wrested control of the territory nearly two decades ago. But the authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, has appeared wary of a postwar governance structure that does not unequivocally give him full control of the territory — a position that puts him at odds with a technocratic committee. Hamas officials have said they would be willing to cede control over civil affairs to such a body. But they have refused to disband their military wing, an unacceptable position for both Israel and Mr. Trump, who seek Hamas’s complete disarmament.

“The biggest challenge that the Arab leaders face is to present a realistic plan that can be imposed on the Palestinian factions as well as also being acceptable to both the U.S. and Israel,” said Ibrahim Dalalsha, director of the Horizon Center, a political research group in Ramallah, West Bank. “It’s going to be a very complicated process.”

Among the uncertainties is whom the Arab leaders would entrust to secure Gaza and prevent Hamas from attacking Israel. Israeli officials also want the Israeli military to have operational freedom in Gaza for the long term, but that arrangement would be hard for the Arab leadership to publicly support.

Some hope that Egypt and the Gulf countries would provide their own troops. Last month, Egypt allowed a private Egyptian security firm to help staff a checkpoint inside Gaza — an arrangement that some diplomats and analysts viewed as a prototype for a broader operation. But it is unclear whether Arab leaders would be prepared to send a larger force to secure a wider territory. And it is unlikely that Hamas would accept that intervention.

“Whoever wants to take Israel’s place will be treated just like Israel,” Osama Hamdan, a senior Hamas official, said during a conference in Qatar last weekend.

The firmest element of the Egyptian plan centers on rebuilding Gaza while keeping Palestinians inside the enclave instead of forcing them out to Egypt and Jordan, as Mr. Trump has suggested.

President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt outlined the proposal in broad strokes in meetings on Sunday with Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, and Crown Prince Hussein of Jordan. Mr. el-Sisi discussed with the Jordanian prince “the necessity of immediately starting the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, without displacing the Palestinians from their land,” according to a statement from Egypt’s presidency.

But the details of the plan remain unclear.

Samir Farag, a retired Egyptian military general, said in an interview that Egypt would call on an array of companies, both domestic and international, to reconstruct Gaza over the next three to five years. A first phase of increasing humanitarian aid to Gaza and clearing rubble would be followed by building hospitals, schools and other infrastructure, said Mr. Farag, who is close to Egyptian officials.

The question of who will pay for it remains unanswered.

Egypt will call on other Arab countries to contribute reconstruction funds at an upcoming conference, Mr. Farag said.

But even the timing of such summits has been the subject of confusion. Egypt originally invited Arab leaders to an “emergency” summit on Feb. 27.

Then it was delayed by a week.

Rania Khaled contributed reporting from Cairo and Ismaeel Naar from Riyadh.

On one side of the lake, lovers glide on canoes, friends ride jet-skis and families pose for pictures in the hazy sunset. On the other side, less than two miles away, dead bodies washed ashore while ammunition and discarded weapons littered the water.

The shore of Lake Kivu in Rwanda offers leisure and relaxation. Across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the same lake displayed devastation and misery after an armed group called M23 captured the lakeside city of Goma last month. Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the January offensive, according to the United Nations.

“It is peaceful here, unlike over there,” said Exauce Shalako, a 20-year-old man from Goma who was lounging on the shore of Lake Kivu in Rwanda one afternoon this month. Mr. Shalako, who said he had lost a friend in the fighting, had crossed into Rwanda for a day at the beach. “We need to unwind, to have a change of scene,” he said.

But while Rwanda appears peaceful at home, it is fueling war across the border. Thousands of Rwandan troops have invaded eastern Congo alongside fighters from M23, which is under Rwanda’s control, according to the United States and United Nations experts. Rwanda denies backing the rebels.

To cross from Goma to its sister city Gisenyi in Rwanda takes just minutes by land, but the two places feel worlds apart. In Gisenyi, a town of 50,000, restaurant owners adorn their beachfront properties with colorful decorations as the smell of roasted chicken fills the air. In Goma, a city of two million, the stench of death and the sounds of sirens wafted over the streets for days.

The neighboring countries share a painful history but have little in common these days.

Rwanda is seen as a model of development across Africa. A country nearly 90 times smaller than Congo, it sponsors top European soccer teams and is known for its high-end resorts, where affluent tourists stay during expeditions to marvel at gorillas. Being here can give an impression of political stability and affluence, but many say beneath that veneer lies widespread surveillance, repression and unequal development.

Congo, despite its dizzying natural resources, remains plagued by instability. Its eastern region is home to one of the world’s largest displacement crises, dating back to the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide 30 years ago.

“The living standards are so different,” said Théoneste Bitangimana, a Rwandan real estate agent and pastor who lives in Gisenyi and works on both sides of the border. “In Congo the rich get richer and the government doesn’t care. In Rwanda we’re constantly trying to improve the way we live.”

The Congolese have a different way of describing the wealth gap between the two nations: exploitation.

United Nations experts found that 150 tons of coltan — from which key minerals used in smartphone manufacturing are extracted — was smuggled out of Congo and into Rwanda by M23 last year.

“We’re being looted for others to get rich,” said Didier Kambale, a pastor in Goma walking on a debris-littered street this month. “Why are they coming here?” he asked about Rwandan troops. “Do Congolese wage war abroad?”

Though Rwanda’s leader has said that the war in eastern Congo is a Congolese problem, the M23 offensive on Goma brought it one step closer to Rwanda.

In its attempt to defend Goma, the Congolese army launched shells and bombs across the border in January, puncturing Rwandan homes and tearing roofs open. Sixteen people were killed and 160 injured in Rwanda. Thousands of people fleeing Goma found refuge in Rwanda.

Shattered glass and wood still littered the floors as rain fell into Mr. Bitangimana’s home this month. A shell had hit the roof of the real estate agent’s brick and cement house.

“We’re praying for the two countries, because we need to live in harmony,” he said.

In Gisenyi, children at school now talk of the war between Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, and his Congolese counterpart, Felix Tshisekedi.

“I don’t pick a side, it’s too complicated,” said Ariella, a 10-year-old living in Rwanda with a Congolese father and a Rwandan mother. Sitting at her home yards away from the border, Ariella said she played dead in her bed for hours one morning during the M23 offensive, fearing soldiers might “come to kill us.” The fighting paused shortly after.

Despite the two different worlds on each side of Lake Kivu’s shores, the beach in Gisenyi is also where people from Rwanda and Congo gather in peace. Mr. Shalako, the 20-year-old, said he crossed the border to tell his Rwandan friends that he was safe.

“Politicians want to make us believe that we are enemies, but we’re brothers,” he said.

In her living room, Ariella stopped her math homework to discuss the war. She said she was longing to visit her aunt who lives in Goma on her upcoming vacation, and “do all kinds of silly things over there.”

Sitting in her Spider-Man pajamas, Ariella asked a question about the presidents from both countries that left a silence in the room: “Why can’t they just make peace?”

Israelis waited anxiously on Wednesday for the expected release of the bodies of four hostages by Hamas the following day as part of the cease-fire deal in Gaza.

Israelis and Palestinians have been gripped by emotional homecomings during the truce, which began in late January. As part of the deal’s first phase, Hamas committed to returning 25 Israelis held hostage in Gaza and the remains of eight others in exchange for 1,500 Palestinian prisoners jailed by Israel.

For the past few weeks, Israelis have watched tearful parents and siblings embrace their freed loved ones, many of whom had scarcely been heard from since they were kidnapped by Hamas and its allies during the Oct. 7, 2023, assault on southern Israel.

Palestinians have greeted released prisoners, some of whom spent decades in Israeli jails for militant attacks. Many others, including women and minors, were detained indefinitely without charges.

The scenes anticipated on Thursday in Israel are likely to be much more somber.

The bodies of the Israeli hostages will be ferried by the International Committee of the Red Cross to Israeli forces. They will then be brought back to Israel for forensic testing to verify their identity and, if possible, establish the cause of death, which could take time.

Hamas has yet to formally announce the names of all the captives whose bodies will be returned. But Khalil al-Hayya, a senior Hamas leader, said on Tuesday that they would include members of the Bibas family, whose abduction shocked and horrified Israelis and others around the world.

Shiri Bibas, 32, was kidnapped alongside her two redheaded children, one of whom was not yet nine months old. In November 2023, Hamas said all three had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. Israeli officials have expressed concern for their fate but have not confirmed their deaths.

Ms. Bibas’s husband, Yarden, was abducted separately and taken, wounded, to the Gaza Strip. He was finally freed as part of the cease-fire in early February in a highly choreographed Hamas release ceremony.

Under the terms of the agreement, in exchange for the four bodies, Israel will release Gazan women and minors in Israeli detention facilities, except for those accused of participating in the Oct. 7 attacks.

Hamas is expected to release six living Israeli hostages on Saturday. The following week, it will send back the remains of four more Israeli hostages, which will round out the list that the two sides agreed upon under the terms of the cease-fire deal. They will be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners.

Assuming the releases go forward as planned, dozens of living hostages and more than 30 others presumed dead by Israel will remain in Gaza by early March. Hamas abducted more than 250 people — mostly civilians — during the Oct. 2023 attack.

Israel and Hamas agreed that the initial phase of the deal would last six weeks, during which they would negotiate the next step. The first phase is set to end on March 2, but talks to extend the agreement into a second phase have yet to begin, according to the Qatari government, which has been brokering the truce alongside Egypt and the United States.

Analysts say it is far from clear that both sides will reach an agreement on the second phase, which is supposed to end the war, free the remaining living hostages and ensure a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.

Israeli leaders have said they will not countenance anything short of the end of Hamas’s rule and the demilitarization of Gaza. Hamas has shown little appetite to take apart its military wing or send its Gaza leaders into exile.

When Vice President JD Vance criticized his German hosts last week for sidelining far-right parties, he did not mention by name the Alternative for Germany, known as the AfD.

But soon after his speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which he stunned the room by comparing democracy in today’s Europe to Soviet-era totalitarianism, Mr. Vance met with Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD.

A former investment analyst who is raising two sons with her Sri Lankan-born wife in Switzerland, Ms. Weidel, 46, has become the unlikely face of the AfD. Her nationalist party campaigns on a platform that is anti-immigrant and defines family as a father and a mother raising children.

A favorite of the new American administration — receiving an endorsement from Elon Musk — she has been essential to AfD’s effort to break into the mainstream, helping to vault the party into a comfortable second place ahead of Sunday’s national election.

Ms. Weidel, whose turtleneck sweaters or open-collared shirts and pearl necklaces have become signatures, has lent a more cosmopolitan image to a party that has been linked to neo-Nazis and plots to overthrow the state.

But her AfD is no less extreme. “With Alice Weidel at the helm, the AfD has steadily become more radical,” said Ann-Katrin Müller, an expert on the AfD who reports for Der Spiegel, one of Germany’s most prominent news outlets.

The AfD is polling well ahead of the center-left Social Democrats of the incumbent chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and behind the conservative Christian Democrats of Friedrich Merz, the front-runner to be the next chancellor.

Those parties insist that they would never partner with Ms. Weidel’s party to form a government. But Ms. Weidel’s latest success in presenting the AfD as just another party came on Sunday, when she joined a televised debate with her mainstream rivals, who also included Robert Habeck, running for the Greens.

Ms. Weidel’s performance was widely judged to be uneven, but she left the event a winner nonetheless — it was the first time that AfD had been invited to such a debate, watched by millions of voters. At one point in the campaign, polls ranked her as the most popular chancellor candidate, across all parties.

But if Ms. Weidel’s professorial air and personal story suggest a softening of the party line, her language does not. She has promised to tear down wind turbines and to dismiss gender-studies professors. She has spoken about “remigration,” a term used by the far right that is widely interpreted as code for deportations.

“Make it absolutely clear to the whole world: German borders are closed,” she told a cheering crowd when the AfD officially nominated her as its candidate last month.

Ms. Weidel declined to speak to The New York Times for this article. In interviews with the German news media, she has been alternately charming and biting.

She has consistently refused to distance herself from her party’s most extreme members, some of whom have minimized the Holocaust and Germany’s Nazi past.

“She and the people behind her now dominate the party — and they are ideologically very close to Björn Höcke,” Ms. Müller said, referring to an AfD state leader who has been fined by a court for using Nazi language.

On Sunday Ms. Weidel told Bild, Germany’s largest tabloid, that she would put Mr. Höcke into her cabinet if she were to become chancellor.

Ms. Weidel grew up in a middle-class Catholic family in Harsewinkel, a town in North Rhine-Westphalia, in the country’s west, with two siblings and a dachshund. Her father was a salesman and her mother was homemaker.

Her grandfather was a Nazi party member and was named a military judge in occupied Warsaw, Die Welt, a conservative daily, reported. Ms. Weidel responded that she did not know her grandfather, who died when she was 6, and that the Nazi past was never a topic of discussion in her family.

While finishing a Ph.D. in economics in Bavaria, she spent time in China. By her own account, she learned Mandarin. She later worked at Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs as an analyst. In interviews with the German news media, she has spoken about her love of feng shui, and of swimming and tennis when she was a girl.

Officially she divides her time between her home in a small town in central Switzerland and a house in her voting district on Lake Constance, in southern Germany. But Ms. Weidel admitted that she does not spend much time at the German address.

She says it is because of safety concerns. Despite her party’s gains, she remains a lightning rod of public outrage in a country where a majority of Germans believe the AfD should be shunned.

Her absence from Germany has become something of a sore subject for the leader of a nationalist party. She walked out of an interview aired this week with a public broadcaster when she was asked how many nights she had slept at her German address. In the same interview, she admitted she did not know how many people lived in the district she represents as a member of Parliament.

In November, Ms. Weidel told a group of business leaders in Zurich that her security situation had grown so difficult that it was hard even to spontaneously go out dancing or to dinner with her spouse, Sarah Bossard, a filmmaker.

“I am incredibly grateful to my wife for putting up with it,” she said.

Despite having been asked many times, Ms. Weidel refuses to explain how she reconciles the apparent contradiction between her personal life and the vision of society her party represents.

“I am not queer,” Ms. Weidel told an interviewer this summer, using the English word, “but I am married to a woman I have known for 20 years,” she said.

Experts say the fact that Ms. Weidel’s personal life defies party orthodoxy actually enhances her claim to carry the AfD banner and makes the party appear more mainstream.

“Ms. Weidel has become the face of the party because of her biography and her background, and also because of her ability to speak clearly — even if it is without much empathy, ” said Werner Patzelt, a political scientist who has long studied the AfD.

Ms. Weidel joined the AfD in 2013, when it was virtually a single-issue party built on opposition to the common European currency, before working her way up to become its chancellor candidate — the party’s first.

Partially owing to the fact that no one will work with her party, she’s never held any government post before. She was elected to Parliament for the first time in 2017.

Even before her prominent new role, she was a fixture on political debate shows on German television. She argues that her party is libertarian, not right-wing nationalist, a position that puts her at odds with some of the AfD’s more fervent members.

Her fluent English has helped her build a relationship with Mr. Musk, President Donald J. Trump’s billionaire adviser, who interviewed Ms. Weidel on his social media platform X.

Mr. Musk surprised the party in December when he was beamed onto a big screen, at a campaign event in Halle, where endorsed the AfD and told assembled members that Germans had “too much of a focus on past guilt.”

Mr. Musk himself stirred controversy by giving what was widely interpreted as a Nazi salute to a rally of supporters after Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

Throughout the X interview, Mr. Musk portrayed Ms. Weidel as “a very reasonable person” and distanced her and the AfD from the Nazis.

Despite efforts to downplay associations with the Nazi past, some party faithful seem to have missed the message.

As Ms. Weidel took the stage in Halle, the crowd started a chant that was a not-too-subtle play on a Nazi slogan, “Everything for Germany,” a phrase once carved on the knives of Nazi storm troopers. It is banned in Germany.

The crowd tweaked it ever so slightly. “Alice for Germany!” they cried.

Jim Tankersley contributed reporting.

President Trump’s media company sued a Brazilian Supreme Court justice on Wednesday, accusing him of illegally censoring right-wing voices on social media.

The unusual move was made all the more extraordinary by its timing: Just hours earlier, the Brazilian justice had received an indictment that would force him to decide whether to order the arrest of Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president and an ally of Mr. Trump. The justice is overseeing multiple criminal investigations into Mr. Bolsonaro.

The Trump Media & Technology Group — which is majority owned by Mr. Trump and runs his Truth Social site — sued the Brazilian justice, Alexandre de Moraes, in U.S. federal court in Tampa, Fla., on Wednesday morning. Joining as a plaintiff was Rumble, a Florida-based video platform that, like Truth Social, pitches itself as a home for free speech.

The lawsuit appeared to represent an astonishing effort by Mr. Trump to pressure a foreign judge as he weighed the fate of a fellow right-wing leader who, like him, was indicted on charges that he tried to overturn his election loss.

Mr. Bolsonaro had explicitly called on Mr. Trump to take action against Justice Moraes in an interview with The New York Times last month. At the time, it was not clear how Mr. Trump might be able to influence Brazil’s domestic politics.

Mr. Bolsonaro was indicted on charges Tuesday that he plotted to hold on to power after he lost Brazil’s 2022 election, including by participating in plans to assassinate Justice Moraes. The indictment said that Mr. Bolsonaro effectively approved the plot and that military agents had begun tracking the movements of the judge.

Mr. Bolsonaro has denied the accusations, saying that he peacefully transferred power and had no knowledge of any assassination plot.

Trump Media and Rumble accused Justice Moraes of censoring political discourse in the United States by ordering Rumble last week to remove the account of a prominent supporter of Mr. Bolsonaro. That person is a Brazilian who has sought political asylum in Florida after Justice Moraes ordered his arrest on accusations that he spread misinformation and threatened judges.

The companies argued that the order against Rumble is “extraterritorial censorship” that illegally restricts their “ability to deliver First-Amendment protected content” in the United States. Mr. Trump’s company has not been subject to Justice Moraes’s orders, but it argued in the lawsuit that it relied on Rumble’s technology and therefore could be harmed if Rumble’s operations were affected.

Justice Moraes has argued that his actions are necessary to protect Brazil from the anti-democratic acts of Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters. His spokeswoman said that Justice Moraes did not have immediate comment.

It was unclear how or whether the lawsuit would affect the proceedings against Mr. Bolsonaro in Brazil. The civil suit has no legal standing on the justice’s actions in Brazil. It seeks an injunction against Justice Moraes’s recent order against Rumble. The suit also seeks to prevent Justice Moraes from ordering Apple and Google to remove the Rumble app from their app stores.

“This case is about holding Alexandre de Moraes accountable in an American courtroom,” said Martin De Luca, the lead lawyer on the case, a former U.S. attorney who now works at the New York law firm Boies Schiller Flexner. “He has used the judiciary not as a neutral arbiter of justice, but as a weapon to silence political opponents — whether it’s Jair Bolsonaro or a political dissident in the United States.”

Mr. De Luca is both a lawyer for Trump Media Group and an adviser to Mr. Bolsonaro. He is helping Mr. Bolsonaro spread his complaints about Justice Moraes internationally, including by helping to organize The Times’s interview with Mr. Bolsonaro last month.

Justice Moraes has largely proved immune to years of intense criticism and pressure from the Brazilian right as he aggressively investigated Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters.

As part of investigations into attacks against Brazil’s democracy, Justice Moraes has ordered arrests of Mr. Bolsonaro’s allies and the confiscation of the former president’s passport, as well as the suspension of hundreds of social media accounts belonging to his supporters.

Last year, Justice Moraes faced off against Elon Musk — and won — blocking Mr. Musk’s social network, X, in Brazil until the billionaire backed down in his refusal to comply with the judge’s orders to suspend accounts.

Those actions have raised questions, even among moderate Brazilians, about whether Justice Moraes was posing his own threat to democracy.

The moves have also arguably made the judge Mr. Bolsonaro’s political archrival — and a target. In 2023, a mob of Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters raided Brazil’s Supreme Court. Late last year, a Bolsonaro supporter tried to bomb the Supreme Court but instead killed only himself. And on Tuesday, new details emerged in the indictment of Mr. Bolsonaro showing that, according to Brazilian investigators, the former president had met with military agents about a detailed plot to fatally shoot Justice Moraes as part of their bid to hold on to power.

As the head of the federal investigation into the former president, Justice Moraes will now decide how the case against Mr. Bolsonaro proceeds. One of his next major decisions will be weighing whether Mr. Bolsonaro represents a flight risk and thus should be jailed until his trial. Justice Moraes has already used such measures against Mr. Bolsonaro’s allies, including his former running mate, who has been jailed since December. Justice Moraes could also order the former president to wear an ankle monitor.

The charges against Mr. Trump that he sought to overturn the 2020 U.S. election have been dropped since he returned to power.

Mr. Trump owns 53 percent of Trump Media, a stake worth more than $3 billion. That stake is in a trust overseen by his son, Donald Trump Jr., who is a Trump Media board member.

Devin Nunes, the former Republican congressman who is now Trump Media’s chief executive, said in a statement that the company is “proud to join our partner Rumble in standing against unjust demands for political censorship regardless of who makes them.”

The lawsuit reflects the close relationship between Trump Media and Rumble, which cater to the same right-wing audience and are headquartered within a few miles of each other on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

The case at the center of the lawsuit does not name the Brazilian whose Rumble account Justice Moraes has sought to block, but the details are identical to those of Allan dos Santos, a right-wing Brazilian provocateur who has been living in the United States since 2021.

Justice Moraes has sought to block Mr. Santos’ accounts across the social-media landscape for what the judge said were threats against the Supreme Court and efforts to spread misinformation. Mr. Santos is a prominent supporter of Mr. Bolsonaro and much of his online content is standard political fare, though he has spread conspiracy theories, such as claims that the 2022 Brazilian election was rigged.

He has also faced criminal complaints in Brazil for threatening judges. One complaint focused on a case in 2020 when he said that a Supreme Court justice who called him a “digital terrorist” would “see what would be done with him.”

Justice Moraes sought Mr. Santos’ extradition from the United States, but was denied by the U.S. government last year.

Matthew Goldstein contributed reporting from New York.

The Russian government’s top investment manager, who has Harvard and McKinsey credentials and fluent English, brought a simple printout to Tuesday’s talks with the Trump administration in Saudi Arabia.

Its message: By pulling out of Russia in outrage over the invasion of Ukraine, American companies had walked away from piles of cold, hard cash.

“Losses of U.S. companies by industry,” read the document, which Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, showed to a New York Times reporter. “Total losses,” one of the columns said. The sum at the bottom: $324 billion.

In appealing to President Trump, the Kremlin has zeroed in on his desire to make a profit. President Vladimir V. Putin on Wednesday praised the U.S. delegation in Riyadh for not criticizing Russia as previous administrations did — there was no “condemnation of what was done in the past, he said.” He added that beyond geopolitics, the two countries were now moving toward deeper engagement on space, the economy and “our joint work on global energy markets.”

Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said after Tuesday’s meeting that “there was great interest” in the room “in removing artificial barriers to the development of mutually beneficial economic cooperation” — an apparent reference to lifting American sanctions.

Remarkably, the Trump administration appears to be engaging with Russia’s message without demanding payment up front. After Ukraine suggested the possibility of natural resource deals to Mr. Trump, his treasury secretary pushed to have the country sign away half its mineral wealth. And Mr. Trump continues to portray American allies as freeloaders, threatening more tariffs and demanding they pay more for their own defense.

With Russia, by contrast, the administration seems to be signaling that the one thing Mr. Putin has to do to pave the way for a full reset in Moscow’s relationship with Washington is end the war in Ukraine. Many Europeans and Ukrainians fear Mr. Trump will seek a peace deal on Russia’s terms, especially after the American president suggested on Tuesday that Ukraine was to blame for the Russian invasion.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday that an end to the war would be “the key that unlocks the door” for “potentially historic economic partnerships.” He echoed Mr. Lavrov in hinting that the United States could drop sanctions against Russia as part of such a deal.

“There are sanctions that were imposed as a result of this conflict,” Mr. Rubio said. “I would say to you that in order to bring an end to any conflict there has to be concessions made by all sides.”

For the Kremlin, a key emissary to Mr. Trump’s pecuniary mind-set has been Mr. Dmitriev, a youthful Putin ally and former banker who has specialized in developing Russian business ventures around the world. He has close ties to Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and he pushed the development and global distribution of Russia’s Covid-19 vaccine, Sputnik V.

In 2016, Mr. Dmitriev tried to use business contacts to build a back channel to Mr. Trump in the name of “reconciliation” between the United States and Russia, according to the report into Russian interference in that year’s election by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel.

In Mr. Trump’s first term, that reconciliation never came. This time around, Mr. Dmitriev has already had better luck.

Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, praised Mr. Dmitriev and Prince Mohammed for their role in helping secure Russia’s release last week of Marc Vogel, an American schoolteacher imprisoned in Moscow. In Tuesday’s talks, Mr. Dmitriev was part of Russia’s delegation, using interviews with Western media outlets to promote business opportunities in Russia’s oil sector and in the Arctic.

“The economic track allows diplomacy, allows communication, allows joint wins, allows joint success,” Mr. Dmitriev said. “And we saw that President Trump is focused on having success.”

He said that U.S. oil companies had “really benefited from the Russian oil sector,” adding, “we believe at some point they will be coming back.” The document that he brought into Tuesday’s meeting with the United States showed that the industries with the greatest purported losses among American companies that left Russia were “I.T. and Media,” at $123 billion, and “Consumer and Healthcare,” at $94 billion.

While American trade with Russia before Ukraine-related sanctions began in 2014 was tiny compared with trade with China or the European Union, big energy companies made huge investments, and American consumer goods and tech companies saw Russia as a significant market.

Mr. Dmitriev said the calculation took into account not only fire sales and write-downs, but also “forgone profits.” Western companies that left Russia have officially declared more than $100 billion in losses since the start of the war, with many of their prized assets sold under onerous terms dictated by the Russian state.

Many world leaders have shifted to a business-focused message to cater to an American president whose foreign policy has little in common with his predecessors’ emphasis on democracy, human rights and the trans-Atlantic alliance. But among the governments scrambling to influence Mr. Trump’s view of the war in Ukraine, Moscow stands alone in its success in getting him to bite.

Ukrainian officials made the possibility of lucrative U.S. energy and mineral deals after the war’s end a centerpiece of a charm offensive with Mr. Trump that began last fall. Rather than take the invitation to cooperate, Mr. Trump appeared to decide that Ukraine’s natural resources should serve as payback for past American support.

In Kyiv last week, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine rejected a proposal from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent under which the United States would take a 50 percent interest in all of Ukraine’s mineral resources.

Europeans have also tried to use talk of deals to get Mr. Trump’s attention. During the World Economic Forum in Davos in late January, NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, said Europe would be willing to foot the bill for the United States to continue supplying arms to Ukraine using its defense industrial base.

Such entreaties did little to shift Mr. Trump’s view of Europe as taking advantage of American security assistance, nor did they stop him from excluding the Europeans from his administration’s talks with Russia.

Russia, on the other hand, has gotten the Trump administration’s attention — both with the prospect of business deals and with the prospect of Mr. Trump being seen as a peacemaker by ending the war in Ukraine.

“Trump doesn’t care much about long-term strategic goals,” said Boris Bondarev, a former Russian diplomat who resigned over the war in Ukraine. “Putin is trying to play on this feeling and get him interested in very quick material gains that are immediately clear to Trump.”

Nataliya Vasilyeva contributed reporting from Istanbul and Paul Sonne from Berlin.

In 2019, two North Korean fishermen confessed to murdering 16 shipmates ​before they fled to South Korea by boat​ and sought asylum.​ The then-progressive government in ​the South denied them refugee status ​or a trial there and, in an unprecedented move, sent them back to the North​.

​That decision triggered ​not only a political firestorm at the time​ but also criminal charges against four senior officials prosecuted after the current conservative government, with a more hard-line stance against North Korea, took power in Seoul in 2022.

On Tuesday, a three-judge panel in the Seoul Central District Court found the four top national security aides to former President Moon Jae-in guilty of abusing their official power when they sent the fleeing North Korean fishermen back. The court announced prison sentences but decided not to impose them immediately, indicating in its verdict that it considered the criminal charges against the​ officials to be politically motivated under Mr. Moon’s successor, President Yoon Suk Yeol.

The four former officials — Mr. Moon’s national security adviser, Chung Eui-yong; his director of national intelligence, Suh Hoon; his presidential chief of staff, Noh Young-min; and his unification minister, Kim Yeon-chul — were sentenced to six to 10 months in prison. But the sentences were suspended for two years, after which they will be removed.

The criminal charges the four faced were the first of their kind in South Korea and reflect the polarization between the country’s two main political parties when it comes to dealing with its decades-old foe North Korea.​

When South Korea captured the two North Korean fishermen, then ages 22 and 23, in its waters in 2019​, they were no ordinary defectors. They confessed that they fled after killing the captain and 15 other crewmen on their boat with ​hammers, dumping​ their bodies into the sea.

South Korea had no treaty with North Korea for extraditing criminal suspects. Under its Constitution, it must treat North Koreans as its citizens and, until then, had accepted all North Korean asylum-seekers, regardless of their background. But this time, Mr. Moon’s government decided to repatriate them to the North, calling them “heinous criminals.”

The two were denied access to lawyers or a chance​ at court to appeal the government’s decision to repatriate them. ​Five days after they were captured​, they were taken​, ​blindfolded and with their hands tied, to the ​inter-Korean border​. One of them​ resisted when he saw what was happening, and had to be dragged​ by South Korean officials to be handed over to their North Korean counterparts.

Critics of Mr. Moon’s government accused it of denying the two fishermen a fair trial in the South​ and sending them to certain executions in the North in order to advance its policy of improving ties with ​the North. Mr. Moon’s government argued that there was no way for South Korea to serve justice ​for the two North Koreans through its judicia​l system because all ​key criminal evidence ​against them was in ​the North​.

Prosecutors ​initially decided not to bring charges against the aides to Mr. Moon who were involved in the decision. But things changed after Mr. Yoon took office in 2022.

Mr. Yoon​, a fierce critic of Mr. Moon’s North Korea policy, ​cited the case of the ​fishermen as a prime example of ignoring the human rights of asylum seekers for the sake of political appeasement.​ Under Mr. Yoon, the Unification Ministry, which ​had supported the repatriation, released​ video footage and photos showing the two North Koreans being led, against their will, to the borderline.

In their ruling on Tuesday, the judges said that the former officials denied the fishermen their right to a fair trial in South Korea. But they also suspected a political motive behind the charges, citing Mr. Yoon’s comments on the case and the prosecutors’ decision to reverse their earlier position not to press charges.

​In South Korea, sitting presidents have long been accused of weaponizing prosecutors to discredit their predecessors’ governments with criminal charges, creating a vicious circle of political vengeance. Mr. Yoon himself is now suspended from office and faces criminal charges tied to his ill-fated declaration of martial law in December.

The judges said South Korea should develop guidelines that could help its officials deal with cases like the two North Korean fishermen.

Without such rules, “there is no guarantee that similar confusion won’t repeat itself should the same or ​a similar case happen again,” th​e judges said.

Prosecutors have a week to appeal the ruling.