The simmering feud between President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and President Trump escalated on Wednesday when Mr. Trump mocked his counterpart in a post filled with falsehoods, calling him a “dictator without elections.”

His comments came hours after Mr. Zelensky said the American leader had been “caught in a web of disinformation” from Russia over the war in Ukraine.

The pointed exchange was set off by a meeting of American and Russian officials to open talks on ending the war in Ukraine that excluded the Ukrainian government. After that meeting in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, Mr. Trump suggested that Ukraine had started the war, a comment that brought a strong rebuttal from Mr. Zelensky on Wednesday morning.

“I would like to have more truth with the Trump team,” Mr. Zelensky said in some of the most overt criticism yet of Mr. Trump and his view of the war in Ukraine.

Mr. Zelensky, summoning reporters to his presidential office in Kyiv, a building still fortified with sandbags, said that the U.S. president was living in a “web of disinformation.”

In a post on his Truth Social account, Mr. Trump responded with a scathing attack on Mr. Zelensky.

“Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and “TRUMP,” will never be able to settle,” Mr. Trump wrote.

As he did in making his assertions a day earlier, he misrepresented verifiable facts. The United States, for instance, has allocated $119 billion for aid to Ukraine, according to a research organization in Germany, the Kiel Institute, not $350 billion.

Mr. Trump also suggested that future security of Ukraine would not be an American problem. “This War is far more important to Europe than it is to us,” he wrote. “We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation.”

The deepening feud threatens to undermine Ukraine’s war effort and further weaken its position in the peace talks that have already started between the U.S. and Russia — notably without Kyiv’s involvement.

Mr. Trump’s fixation on the United States’ being repaid for military and financial assistance over three years of war could put a stop on any future aid package to the war-torn country. Ukraine has long been dependent on regular American deliveries of air-defense weapons, shells and other type of ammunition to sustain its fight against Russia.

“Let’s be honest: Without the U.S., it will be very difficult for us,” Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, said on Wednesday.

Kyiv has pushed for a seat at the negotiating table with Russia. But Mr. Trump’s portrayal of Moscow as a willing partner in peace talks, and his dismissal of Mr. Zelensky as an illegitimate and ineffective leader, risks further sidelining Ukraine.

In his social media post Wednesday, Mr. Trump said in a menacing tone that Mr. Zelensky had “better move fast” to secure peace “or he is not going to have a Country left.”

His comments followed up similarly accusatory statements he made on Tuesday. Mr. Trump said Ukraine “should have never started” the war, and appeared to embrace what has been a Russian demand that Ukraine hold elections as a necessary step in the settlement talks. Elections were suspended under martial law after Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

Mr. Trump also said Tuesday 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 his leadership.

“So, if anyone wants to replace me right now — that’s not going to happen,” Mr. Zelensky said, referring to his approval ratings.

Mr. Trump’s false statements, Mr. Zelensky said, stemmed from misinformation spread by people around him. “Such rhetoric doesn’t help Ukraine — it only helps in bringing Putin out of isolation,” he said.

Until this week, Mr. Zelensky had 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 a war that is nearing the three-year mark. But after the initial cease-fire talks between Russia and the United States on Tuesday, Mr. Zelensky starkly laid out his refusal to accept terms negotiated without Ukrainian participation.

His comments on Wednesday — pushing back on Mr. Trump’s false assertions while refraining from direct criticism by attributing them to a broader disinformation bubble — were in line with his efforts to maintain a balancing act and maintain ties with the U.S.

At the news conference Wednesday, 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 toward the Russians, whose government set off the largest war in Europe since World War II, one that has killed or wounded about a million people on both sides. “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 any 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 toll 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,” he said. “We haven’t seen each other in a while. 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.

Mr. Zelensky delivered his comments on the same day that Keith Kellogg, the retired general appointed by Mr. Trump as his special envoy to Ukraine and Russia, arrived in Kyiv for a three-day visit to discuss possible ways to end the war.

Speaking from Kyiv’s railway station upon arrival, Mr. Kellogg said his mission would be “to sit and listen” to Ukraine’s concerns. The United States, he said, understands Ukraine’s “need for security guarantees” and the “importance of sovereignty of this nation” — remarks that contrasted sharply with Mr. Trump’s disparaging comments from the day before.

Mr. Zelensky said he wanted to take Mr. Kellogg to the front line so he could see the war firsthand. Hoping the visit might pierce Mr. Trump’s disinformation bubble, he urged the American envoy to speak with civilians and soldiers, and ask them “whether they trust their president, what they think of Putin, and what they think of Trump after his statements.”

Nearly 100 migrants, recently deported by the United States to Panama where they had been locked in a hotel, were loaded onto buses Tuesday night and moved to a detention camp on the outskirts of the jungle, several of the migrants said.

It is unclear how long the group, which was deported under the Trump administration’s sweeping effort to expel unauthorized migrants, will be detained at the jungle camp.

Conditions at the site are primitive, the detainees said. Diseases, including dengue are endemic to the region, and the government has denied access to journalists and aid organizations.

“It looks like a zoo, there are fenced cages,” said one deportee, Artemis Ghasemzadeh, a 27-year-old migrant from Iran, after arriving at the camp following a four-hour drive from Panama City. “They gave us a stale piece of bread. We are sitting on the floor.”

The group includes eight children, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who was not authorized to speak on the record. Lawyers have said it is illegal to detain people in Panama for more than 24 hours without a court order.

Panama’s deputy foreign minister, Carlos Ruiz-Hernández, confirmed that 97 people had been transferred to the camp. “They are not detainees,’’ he said. “It’s a migrant camp where they will be taken care off — not a detention camp.”

Mr. Ruiz-Hernández said the camp was the best option available to the government for housing migrants and noted that the migrants had food, water and access to medical and psychological care. He said there were no cages.

In a broadcast interview on Wednesday with the news program Panamá En Directo, the country’s security minister, Frank Ábrego, said that migrants were being held by Panama “for their own protection” and because officials “need to verify who they are.”

The transfer is the latest move in a weeklong saga for a group of about 300 migrants who arrived in the United States hoping to to seek asylum. The group was sent to Panama, which has agreed to aid President Trump in his plan to deport millions of undocumented migrants.

The agreement is part of a larger strategy by the Trump administration to export some of its most difficult migration challenges to other nations. The United States, for varying reasons, cannot easily deport people to countries like Afghanistan, Iran and China, but by applying intense pressure it has managed to convince Panama to take some of them.

Last week, Mr. Ruiz-Hernández, the deputy foreign minister, said Panama was complying with a direct request from the Trump administration to accept the migrants.

Analysts say Panama is also under intense pressure from Mr. Trump, who has threatened to seize the Panama Canal over what he believes is Chinese influence in the waterway, a claim that Panama’s president has repeatedly refuted.

After being sent to Panama, the deported migrants are no longer subject to United States law.

Costa Rica is also taking some deportees, including migrants originally from Central Asia and India, and has said it plans to repatriate them. A flight from the United States was expected to arrive in Costa Rica on Thursday.

Upon arrival in Panama City last week, the 300 or so migrants were taken to a downtown hotel, called the Decapolis, and barred from leaving, several of them told The New York Times in calls and text messages.

A lawyer seeking to represent many of them, Jenny Soto Fernández, was blocked at least four times from visiting them in the hotel, she said. At the hotel, the United Nations International Organization for Migration has been speaking with migrants about their options, according to the government, and offering flights to their home countries to those who want them.

Some, including a group of Iranian Christians and a man from China, told The New York Times that they risk reprisals if returned to their native countries, and have refused to sign documents that would pave the way for their repatriation.

Under Iranian law, converting from Islam is considered apostasy and is a crime punishable by death.

On Tuesday morning, an article published by The Times attracted enormous attention to the migrants’ situation, and members of the Panamanian news media began surrounding the hotel.

That night, guards at the hotel told people to pack their bags, said Ms. Ghasemzadeh, one of the Christian converts from Iran. Several buses arrived and guards led them aboard, as witnessed by a reporter working for The New York Times.

The migrants were initially told they would be taken to another hotel, Ms. Ghasemzadeh said, and some feared they were really being deported back to Iran.

Instead, the buses passed the airport and then snaked their way to a highway, traveling out of Panama City, east and then farther east, to the province of Darién.

Two migrants used their cellphones to share their real-time location with The Times, allowing reporters to track their movements.

The camp where the 100 or so migrants will stay is called San Vicente, and sits at the end of a jungle, also called the Darién, which links Panama to Colombia. The camp was built years ago as a stopover point for migrants coming north from Colombia through the Darién jungle and into Panama, a harrowing part of the journey north to the United States.

Now, the Panamanian government is using it for deportees.

One Iranian woman, the mother of an 8-year-old, cried during the bus ride. Her child had been sick with a sore throat for days, she said, and the uncertainty and constant displacement was taking a toll on her.

Upon arrival, Ms. Ghasemzadeh said she could see large containers that appeared to be the migrants’ new homes. Officials instructed them to fill out forms with their names, and asked for fingerprints, she said.

On Tuesday, Mr. Ábrego told reporters at a news conference that 170 of the 300 or so migrants had volunteered to be sent back to their countries of origin, journeys that would be arranged by the International Organization for Migration. He described the decision to hold the migrants as part of an accord with the United States.

“What we agreed with the United States government is that they remain and are in our temporary custody for their protection,” he said.

Responding to migrants’ accounts that many people’s cellphones and documents, including passports, had been confiscated, Mr. Ábrego said that those items had been taken while the migrants were in U.S. custody.

On Wednesday he said that 12 people from Uzbekistan and India had been repatriated with the help of the International Organization for Migration.

Officials also said on Wednesday that one of the migrants in their custody, a woman from China, had escaped from the hotel, where dozens of migrants remain.

In a message posted to X, the country’s migration service asked for help in finding her, saying the authorities feared she would fall into the hands of human traffickers.

“As a State security entity,” authorities wrote on X, “our commitment is to combat illegal migration,” while complying with “national and international principles and regulations on human rights.”

The Panamanian government has previously said the migrants had no criminal records.

Many migrants who remain in the hotel — including some from India and Eastern Europe — have signed documents authorizing their deportation and are expected to be sent to their countries of origin in the coming days.

On Wednesday morning, from the Darién region, Ms. Ghasemzadeh described a sweltering encampment, overrun with cats and dogs.

Then, she sent a text message saying that she feared authorities would soon take her phone. “Please try to help us,” she said.

Alex E. Hernández contributed reporting from Panama City.

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 probably 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 Persian 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?”

Dreams of direct flights to Miami, Los Angeles and New York by July. Hopes that Western brands will soon reopen their stores. Speculation that companies like Visa and Mastercard are on their way back to process payments.

While none of that has yet come to pass, Russians are hoping that a return to normalcy in their country is on the horizon now that Washington and Moscow are moving to reset their relationship after three years of hostility because of the war in Ukraine.

News of the first round of talks between Russia and the United States in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday sent many Russians into a state of glee, and anticipation, that the hardships of war, and the shunning of Russia by much of the world, might soon end.

On Tuesday, speaking on the main political news show on state television, Yuri Afonin, a Communist lawmaker, said that direct talks between Moscow and Washington were a reward for Russia’s resilience over the past three years.

“Russia has proved that it can hold talks about the future of the world on par with the U.S.,” Mr. Afonin said.

“This is not just about negotiating an end to the conflict,” he added. “It is about a new world order.”

But for some people in Moscow, a potential settlement is less about geopolitics and more about the end of bloody fighting in a war that has claimed thousands of lives.

“I’m feeling better now that we see that the issue is going to be solved at the negotiating table, not on a battlefield,” said Dmitri, 31, a marketing specialist.

In a phone interview, Dmitri, who asked that his last name not be used to speak candidly about the war, said that although he did not support President Vladimir V. Putin and his policies, he believed some of the Kremlin’s claims that the government in Kyiv had been pressuring the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine.

Most of all, Dmitri said, he wanted the war to stop. He said Mr. Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons during the war had made him “weak in the knees.”

“Both sides are very entrenched right now,” he said. “I can’t wait for it to end.”

The Kremlin has portrayed the end of the war in terms of a grand deal that should cement its hold over at least parts of Ukraine. But many Russians see it as a return to a time when people did not have to worry that their children would get drafted to fight or fear being detained for antiwar posts on social media. And they are expressing hope that an end to the war will also bring an end to sanctions that have battered the economy.

According to estimates by groups tracking war deaths, more than 150,000 Russian soldiers have been killed and many more wounded in a conflict that has ground on for three years. Hundreds of thousands of people fled the country fearing a forced mobilization or crackdowns on those opposing the invasion or expressing other forms of dissent.

On the home front, Russians have had to cope with shortages of commodities, and soaring prices and interest rates.

On social media, some whose relatives and friends have been devastated by the war are still preoccupied with familiar questions: How can they get loved ones away from the front lines? Can they get benefits for partners who have been killed in the fighting?

For many Russians, Washington’s sudden about-face toward their country appears to have led to a surge of admiration for and interest in President Trump.

In Moscow, sales of Mr. Trump’s books and books about geopolitics have soared since January, one of the leading bookstore chains told Kommersant, a Russian business daily. A leading Russian publisher said that it had run out of copies of “Trump: The Art of The Deal” and that sales of “Think Like a Champion,” another book by the U.S. president, had increased threefold.

So far, reports about brands and direct flights to the U.S. returning to Russia have been purely speculative. There are no plans yet to restore direct flights between Moscow and American cities, and no Western brands have officially announced their return to Russia.

Still, rumors that they would be back — speculation that was amplified by state media as signals that Russia had prevailed in the conflict with the West — were indicative of the overall mood.

Anatoly Aksakov, a Russian lawmaker in the lower house of Parliament, expressed confidence that the likes of Visa and Mastercard would want to re-enter the country’s market.

“Obviously, they want to return to the Russian market faster, so that they can make money on it,” Mr. Aksakov said.

And since a phone call between President Trump and Mr. Putin last week, state television has been trumpeting what it portrays as Russia’s restored stature on the global stage.

Dmitri Kiselyov, host of Vesti Nedeli, the flagship Sunday news show on Russian state television, said the call between the two presidents was “a political earthquake, or more precisely, a devastating tsunami for America’s European allies.”

He added, “The White House struck them in the heart by declaring the system of current European values false and even harmful.”

Others were more cautious.

Artyom Sheynin, the host of a political talk show on Channel One, started his broadcast on Tuesday by examining a picture of Russian and American officials meeting in Riyadh, the Saudi capital.

“Everyone sat nearly impenetrably stone-faced,” Mr. Sheynin said. “This indicates symbolically where our attempt to turn the clock back starts from,” he added. “We are doing it without any 100 percent guarantee that we will be able to succeed.”

Dmitri, the marketing specialist in Moscow, said that he regarded the meeting in Riyadh with “a lot of caution.”

“We’ve been sworn enemies for the past 10 years, and now they are also strangling each other in an embrace,” he said.

Some conservatives, whose nationalist views have become highly influential in Russia over the course of the war, have also expressed skepticism that the talks will produce quick results. They have even suggested that the negotiations could undermine their country’s self-reliance.

Zakhar Prilepin, a popular conservative writer, warned in a post on Tuesday that the return of Western brands could hurt Russian companies that have been stepping up production in response to the sanctions and shortages of Western goods.

Maria, a resident of Moscow, said she had mixed feelings about the talks.

“It doesn’t end in accordance with the laws of justice,” said Maria, referring to the war. She refused to give her last name, fearing repercussions from authorities.

“I can’t say that I’m experiencing any incredible euphoria,” she said. “It’s more like some kind of joy with a hint of something nasty.”

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 were detained indefinitely without charges.

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

“Tomorrow is going to be a difficult day for Israel. It will be a harrowing day, a day of grief,” Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said in a short statement Wednesday.

The Israeli government has said that more than 30 of the hostages in Gaza are presumed dead, their remains still held by Palestinian militants. Some hostages were killed during the Oct. 7 attack and brought dead into Gaza; others died in Israeli airstrikes; and some were executed by their captors, among other fates, according to the Israeli military.

Hamas said on Wednesday night that it would turn over the bodies of Shiri Bibas and her two young children, as well the remains of an elderly Israeli man. The Israeli government confirmed that it had received the list of names.

Ms. Bibas, 32 at the time, was kidnapped alongside her two redheaded children — Ariel, 4, and Kfir, who 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 freed as part of the cease-fire earlier this month in a highly choreographed Hamas release ceremony. For Israelis and others, the family’s ordeal was emblematic of the cruelty of the 2023 Hamas attack that ignited the war in Gaza.

Hamas said the fourth dead hostage to be returned is Oded Lifshitz, 84, who was abducted alongside his wife, Yocheved Lifshitz, during the Hamas attack. Like the Bibas family, he was kidnapped from Nir Oz, an Israeli community near the Gaza Strip.

Mr. Lifshitz, a retired journalist, was a volunteer who ferried Gazans who had received Israeli entry permits for medical treatment to hospitals. Hamas released Ms. Lifshitz in late October 2023 for “humanitarian reasons” but kept her husband in captivity.

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.

Under the terms of the agreement, in exchange for the four bodies, Israel will release Gazan prisoners, including women and minors who have not been 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 October 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.

In comments that stunned America’s allies in Europe and angered Ukraine’s government, President Trump on Tuesday appeared to blame Ukraine’s leaders for Russia’s invasion.

He also suggested that they do not deserve a seat at the table for the peace talks that he has initiated with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

“You should have never started it,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Ukraine’s leaders. “You could have made a deal.” He followed up on Wednesday in a post on social media, calling Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a “dictator without elections” and saying he had “done a terrible job” in office.

Here’s a look at how the war began, the state of the peace talks and Ukraine’s election record.

What caused the war in Ukraine?

There is no doubt that Russia started the war by invading Ukraine. Russian troops stormed over the border almost exactly three years ago, with the explicit aim of toppling the pro-Western government of Mr. Zelensky in Kyiv, the capital. Russia’s military attacked from the east and north, including from Belarus, as well as from the Russian-occupied southern province of Crimea. That attack started the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II.

Leaders around the world, including former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., denounced Russia’s invasion as an act of unprovoked aggression against a sovereign state, and the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution calling for Russia’s immediate withdrawal. Since then, Russian firepower has leveled whole cities and killed more than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians, according to the United Nations.

Hundreds of thousands of soldiers have also been killed and wounded, and Russian soldiers have committed a series of atrocities, not least in the city of Bucha, north of Kyiv. The Kremlin has said its soldiers do not commit war crimes.

The International Criminal Court has also accused Mr. Putin of war crimes in Ukraine and issued a warrant for his arrest, along with another senior Russian official. Last year it also issued warrants for the arrest of two Russian commanders.

Mr. Putin and the Kremlin have referred to the invasion as a “special military operation,” avoiding the term “war,” and he has said he sought to demilitarize but not occupy Ukraine. He put forward several explanations for the move, saying that in part he was acting to protect civilians in Ukraine’s east.

He also characterized the invasion as a last-ditch effort to thwart what he called the West’s expansion toward Russia’s borders. The enlargement of the NATO military alliance to incorporate countries in Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War, he claimed, was effectively a plot to destroy Russia.

And Mr. Putin said that Russia, and specifically the Bolshevik revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, created modern Ukraine, a position historians deride as false. Ukrainians voted in 1991 in a democratic referendum to leave the Soviet Union. Mr. Putin also said that the invasion aimed to demilitarize Ukraine and combat “Nazis,” an apparent reference to far-right parties and elements of the Ukrainian Army. Far-right parties won about 2 percent of the vote in the country’s 2019 election. Mr. Zelensky, who is Jewish, signed a law several months before the invasion combating antisemitism.

In a speech on the war’s first day, Mr. Zelensky vowed that his country would resist Russian aggression and framed Moscow’s invasion as an attack on freedom itself. “Putin began a war against Ukraine, and against the entire democratic world,” he said. Since then, Mr. Zelensky has repeatedly said that Ukraine stood as Europe’s first line of defense against Russian encroachment.

Before the full-scale invasion, Russia seized the Ukrainian province of Crimea, which it annexed illegally in 2014, and also took territory in the eastern Donbas region, including the provincial capitals of Donetsk and Luhansk.

What is happening on the battlefield?

In all, Russia now occupies around 20 percent of Ukraine, but so far it has failed in its key objectives of breaking Ukraine’s military and securing Kyiv. The fighting is largely confined to a front line in the east and south of the country, with Russian forces creeping forward amid heavy losses.

Last August, Ukraine launched a surprise incursion into the Russian region of Kursk, where Russian forces assisted by soldiers from North Korea have been fighting back.

Military experts say that in the immediate term, Ukraine has little chance of recapturing its lost territory, particularly if the United States slows or stops the flow of military aid.

What has happened in the peace talks so far?

Representatives of Ukraine and Russia held talks in the weeks after the start of the war in 2022 but failed to reach a cease-fire agreement. Since then, Ukraine has tried to gain international support for its own 10-point Peace Formula, which demands a full withdrawal of Russian forces, the prosecution of war crimes and the payment of reparations.

The prospect of peace talks, however, has gathered pace since President Trump’s inauguration last month. Mr. Trump held a lengthy call with Mr. Putin last week, which blindsided Ukraine’s government and allies in Europe and suggested that the two men intended to negotiate Ukraine’s fate directly without their involvement, a priority for the Kremlin.

In a major change from former President Biden’s policy that Ukraine would decide whether to make concessions in exchange for peace, the U.S. defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, said that it was unrealistic for Ukraine to regain the territory it held before Russia’s 2014 invasion, and that Mr. Trump did not support Ukraine’s entry into NATO. In a further blow to Ukraine, Mr. Hegseth said that after a peace deal, the responsibility for guaranteeing the country’s security would fall mainly on European countries rather than on NATO.

At a meeting in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, agreed to reset their countries’ relationship and to work on a peace plan for Ukraine. Mr. Zelensky, who was not invited to the meeting, sharply criticized it and said his country would “never” accept a peace deal if Ukraine did not have a seat at the negotiating table.

Why haven’t elections been held in Ukraine?

The Kremlin has called Mr. Zelensky an illegitimate leader because his five-year term has elapsed. Elections in Ukraine were suspended under martial law after Russia’s invasion, with frontline towns and cities governed solely by military administrations.

Mr. Trump also appeared to cast doubt on Mr. Zelensky’s legitimacy as president on Tuesday, and appeared to use that doubt to justify not inviting the Ukrainian leader to peace talks. “I would say that when they want a seat at the table, you could say the people have to — wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have to say, like, you know, it’s been a long time since we had an election?” Mr. Trump said. “That’s not a Russia thing. That’s something coming from me and coming from many other countries also.”

Mr. Trump also said Mr. Zelensky was “down at 4 percent in approval rating.” Although Mr. Zelensky’s approval rating has fallen from once-lofty heights, it is at around 50 percent in recent polls, not too far from Mr. Trump’s rating.

Mr. Zelensky became president after winning an election in 2019 by a landslide. A fresh election was due in 2024, but under the country’s constitution, it cannot be held while martial law is in force. Holding an election would also be a logistical nightmare, as Russian missiles rain down on the country and fighting rages.

Election experts say that any vote held during wartime would effectively disenfranchise citizens living in Russian-occupied areas, those who have fled the country as refugees and soldiers in combat.

However, internal political tensions over the use of martial law have been rising, and the mayor of Kyiv is among the officials who have accused the president’s office of abusing its powers. At the same time, Ukraine’s leaders have been under pressure from their allies over the issue, not least as part of wider efforts to demonstrate good governance.

Nataliia Klymyuk, who has been volunteering for 11 years to look after a memorial to war dead in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, said she had never had any illusions about President Trump.

On Wednesday, she stood among a crowd of people at the memorial, on Independence Square in central Kyiv, where tens of thousands of little flags fluttered, each representing a soldier killed during Russia’s relentless invasion. The mood was especially somber.

A day earlier, Mr. Trump, from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, had blamed Ukraine for the violence. “You should have never started it,” he said, referring to Ukrainian leaders who did not, in fact, start the war.

His comment stunned many Ukrainians, who saw it as a blatant betrayal.

“I don’t believe in negotiations,” said Ms. Klymyuk, 51, who plants new flags at the site daily and clears away snow. Referring to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, she added: “Trump has always been a friend to Putin, and I don’t believe that he suddenly became our friend. He is only pursuing his own interests behind Zelensky’s back.”

Marina Ivashyna, 30, who was passing through the square, said that her father had died in the war and that her husband was missing in action. “It is tough for me — I don’t believe anything good will happen,” she said, bursting into tears. “I don’t believe in these negotiations.”

Ms. Klymyuk’s and Ms. Ivashyna’s refrain represents a growing sentiment in Ukraine as the United States and Russia have moved toward a head-spinning reset of their relationship that could disadvantage Ukraine in the war. Ukrainians are becoming disillusioned with the Trump administration, many analysts say.

In December, a large percentage of Ukrainians said they trusted Mr. Trump, who was then the president-elect. On Wednesday, expressions of disappointment and even rage were everywhere: from the front in the east to the streets of Kyiv, from social media to the halls of government buildings.

“Many people were tired of Biden’s indecisiveness and had hopes that Trump would be able to force Russia to end the war, and we can see that they are now disappointed,” said Oleh Saakyan, a political analyst and co-founder of the National Platform for Resilience and Social Cohesion, a Ukrainian think tank.

In his news conference on Tuesday, Mr. Trump also denigrated Mr. Zelensky and suggested that new elections in Ukraine should play a part in the country’s negotiations with Russia. He deepened his criticism on Wednesday, calling Mr. Zelensky a “dictator” who took money from the United States to go to war with Russia.

“Ukrainians might not like their government, but they are fanatically devoted to the value of freedom of choice,” Mr. Saakyan said. “People in Ukraine get angry when freedom of choice is taken away from them, and that’s exactly what Trump did when he started dictating to Ukrainians that they need elections.”

A 36-year-old special operations soldier fighting in eastern Ukraine, who asked to be identified only by his call sign, Cap, for security reasons, went a step further. “I can be blunt: Trump is like Putin,” he said. “He’ll never tell the truth and will make up whatever he wants.” He added that Ukraine should not rely on Mr. Trump.

“Whenever soldiers hear what Trump is saying, it gives them a nervous twitch,” he said.

Yulia Hrebnyeva, a member of the City Council in the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv, said she had “no understanding whatsoever” of Mr. Trump’s speech on Tuesday, with its echoes of Russian propaganda.

“We were expecting from him actions that could help us win, not that he would just sit and talk with our enemy,” she said. Early in the invasion, Ms. Hrebnyeva’s house was hit by a falling Russian fighter jet. At the time, she was hiding in the basement with her children.

For many, Mr. Trump’s news conference on Tuesday was a moment of truth. They hoped he would uphold the United States’ commitment to Ukraine’s war effort. Instead, the president blamed Ukraine for the war and made several false claims, including that Mr. Zelensky had an approval rating of just 4 percent. In fact, recent polls put his approval rating between 42 and 57 percent.

For other Ukrainians, their confidence in the United States had already buckled over the weekend when it became clear that peace talks with Russia would begin without Ukrainian participation.

“Goodbye America,” Yevhen Dykyi, a political analyst and Ukrainian veteran, wrote on Facebook. “We must accept the reality that we no longer have an ally on the other side of the Atlantic.”

Even opponents of Mr. Zelensky have been angered by Mr. Trump’s comments. Oleksandr Notevskyi, an analyst at the Center for Policy Formation and a vocal critic of the Ukrainian president, lashed out at Mr. Trump for interfering in Ukraine’s domestic politics.

As much as he hoped that another leader would soon replace Mr. Zelensky, Mr. Notevskyi said, he believed strongly that such decisions should be made only by the Ukrainian people. Foreign criticism like Mr. Trump’s, Mr. Notevskyi said on social media, was not just “an attack on Volodymyr Zelensky.”

“It’s an attack on the President of Ukraine, on our sovereign government, and on the Ukrainian state,” he wrote.

“The most important trait of Ukrainians is our ability to unite under pressure and defend our choice,” Mr. Notevskyi later said in an interview. “The vibes are the same. But this time, the target of our rage will be someone else. No one will impose anything on us.”

Ukrainians worry that they have lost the United States as an ally.

“Several factors indicate that the U.S. is no longer a key partner for Ukraine,” said Mariia Zolkina, a Ukrainian political analyst at the London School of Economics. “Even before the start of the negotiations, Trump sacrificed those positions that were fundamental for Ukraine,” including NATO membership and control of territory. Mr. Trump, she said, “gave carte blanche to the occupation.”

Ihor Lachenkov, a Ukrainian civil activist and volunteer, wrote an angry post on Facebook criticizing Mr. Trump’s assertion that Mr. Zelensky could have negotiated. “I am so sick of all this,” he said. “Of course, it’s the bad Ukrainians who just refused to surrender and give up,” he added sarcastically.

Soldiers are also monitoring Mr. Trump’s speeches. His latest comments have left many enraged.

But a soldier from the 82nd Air Assault Brigade, who asked to not be identified as he was not authorized to speak to the news media, said Mr. Trump’s statements would not deter him and his friends.

“The primary task of the 82nd Air Assault Brigade is to liberate Ukrainian territory from occupiers and defend our country,” he said. “We will continue doing that, regardless of Trump’s statements.”

Oleksandr Merezhko, a member of Ukraine’s Parliament from Mr. Zelensky’s party and chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said that despite Mr. Trump’s words it was important for Ukraine to remain in dialogue with the United States. “The situation is difficult, but not hopeless,” he said. “Trump himself gives advice in such situations: Never give up!”

Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed reporting from Kyiv and Yurii Shyvala from Lviv, Ukraine.