Above the harbor, where little boats splattered with fish blood putter back to shore and men with ice-encrusted mustaches butcher seals, sits a two-story building where Palle Jeremiassen works. He is the mayor of Ilulissat, a small town in the Arctic Circle, and he’s got a busy day.

Howling winds just wiped out the path to the best ice-fishing spot and the fishermen, some of whom still stomp around in pants made of polar-bear fur, are getting upset.

In another settlement farther north, the ice is too thin to cross. Greenlanders call this “young ice,” and it shouldn’t be this young this deep into winter — another worrying sign of climate change. Unless Mayor Jeremiassen quickly organizes emergency shipments by helicopter, the villagers who usually cruise around on snowmobiles and dog sleds could run out of food.

Out here on the western coast of Greenland, ice defines life. The endless snowfields glitter with millions of ice crystals. A skyline of sapphire icebergs rises from the semi-frozen sea. But something even bigger is occupying the mayor’s mind at the moment, and that of many people here. It boils down to one word: Trump.

Denmark, which once colonized Greenland, still oversees many of its affairs. But now President Trump says the United States will take over Greenland, and he has not ruled out using force to do so.

“What can we do when he comes?” the mayor asks. “We will not be Americans. We don’t want to be Europeans. We want to be Greenlandic.”

That’s the refrain that echoed across Greenland during a nearly two-week trip in which New York Times journalists traveled by plane, boat, jeep, snowmobile and dog sled, speaking to dozens of Greenlanders from bartenders and fishermen to the political class. We asked them what they thought about Mr. Trump’s covetousness and his confidence that Greenlanders “want to be with us.”

The consensus was clear: Greenlanders feel they have been under Danish control for too long and they don’t want a new colonial master, especially a bigger and bossier one. A recent poll showed that 85 percent of the tiny population of 56,000 don’t want to be part of the United States. Still, many people expressed a desire to forge a closer relationship to Washington.

These competing tensions have thrust Greenland — a vast, enigmatic island that drew little attention for most of its existence — into an extraordinary geopolitical maelstrom it cannot control. The situation has deeply rattled Europe, which is now also alarmed by Mr. Trump’s warm embrace of Russia, and could carry consequences that go far beyond Greenland.

Denmark is anxious over a possible showdown. Europe’s leaders, alarmed at the president’s suggestion that he might take Greenland by force, have responded by lining up behind Denmark. France even offered to send in troops.

Superpowers like the United States, Russia and China are assessing the military and economic opportunities in the Arctic waterways around Greenland, and jockeying for position.

At the same time, there’s a sudden fever for the island’s untapped mineral resources. Major American investors, including Trump allies, are involved with companies prospecting nickel, iron and rare earth elements, even though much of it is trapped far under frozen ground or ice (in some parts of Greenland, the ice is two miles thick). China has set its sights on Greenland’s mineral riches, too, and Greenlanders aren’t used to feeling like everyone wants a piece of them.

They’re part of a wider Inuit community stretching from Russia across Alaska and Canada where many people still follow a traditional life, hunting seals and the occasional whale and scraping a living from one of the most hostile environments on the planet. They have long felt marginalized and disrespected, and their resentment has been steadily building toward their former colonial overseers, the Danes, who first came to the island in 1721 and still control its foreign policy, defense and police forces.

Now that Mr. Trump has declared his intentions to control the island, Greenlanders are extracting some major concessions from the Danes, whom Mr. Trump keeps ridiculing.

“They put two dog sleds there two weeks ago,” Mr. Trump said recently, referring to Denmark’s efforts to safeguard Greenland. “They thought that was protection.”

Even though many Greenlanders said they are not fans of Mr. Trump, they enjoy watching him push Denmark around. In interviews, they expressed confidence that this would ultimately help them get a sovereign state of their own — something no other Inuit community has achieved — unless America swallows them first.

“Everyone I know is saying, ‘This is all so hilarious, it’s all so absurd, but it’s also so nice,’” said Svend Hardenberg, a mining executive and, more recently, a star in a hot Danish Netflix series that, serendipitously, had a whole season about Greenland.

“There’s going to be a lot of people trying to sway us, this way or that,” he said. “So now we have to figure how to do the best for ourselves, to really see what the U.S. and Denmark can offer.”

“This,” he added, “is our moment.”

The Political Question

One afternoon last month in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, Kuno Fencker, a member of Parliament, marched out of a news conference, the frustration showing on his face. Greenland’s prime minister, Múte B. Egede, had ducked a question about independence, refusing to answer clearly why the government should not push for it now.

Mr. Fencker wants Greenland to start divorce negotiations with Denmark immediately.

“Why shouldn’t we be a part of the global world?” he asked. “Why are we not allowed to become members of the U.N.? Why shouldn’t we be able to be members of the international organizations regarding our fisheries, whales, everything? Why is it that a Danish guy or woman in Denmark has to decide that?”

He spoke from his office, a modern, clean-lined Scandinavian-designed building, as a bulldozer outside his window lifted away chunks of snow. Nuuk’s streets and sidewalks were coated in ice, and newcomers, including me, needed to strap plastic spikes on our boots to keep from suddenly finding ourselves airborne. Greenlanders, meanwhile, tramped quietly across the same sidewalks as if they were strolling across a carpet.

Mr. Fencker recently returned from Washington, where he managed to finagle a tour of the West Wing. He’s part of Greenland’s small pro-Trump group, which helped organize a visit by Donald Trump Jr. in January.

Rival politicians were quick to call him a traitor and there is a contingent of Greenlandic politicians who are wary of Mr. Trump, seeing him as imperious and unpredictable. But Mr. Fencker says that engaging with the Trump team is “necessary if Greenland wants to take its future into its own hands.”

Like many Greenlanders, he believes the island should become independent. But just as important, he and many other Greenlanders argue, is establishing their own close relationship with the United States. They believe this will open up more opportunities for investment and trade and ensure that no other country like Russia or China will cause trouble for them.

The hope among Mr. Fencker’s camp is that when Greenland breaks free from Denmark, it will sign a free association agreement with Washington, similar to what the United States has arranged with the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau, three small independent countries in the South Pacific that rely heavily on American military protection and millions of dollars in subsidies.

That scenario is different from Mr. Trump’s insistence that America should simply take over. He hasn’t fully explained his fixation on Greenland, which goes back to his first term, when he unsuccessfully tried to buy it from Denmark, except to say that it’s important for “economic security” and “freedom throughout the world.” No one really knows what kind of arrangement Mr. Trump would ultimately accept.

As it is, the island gets some American protection: There’s a small U.S. base in the north with around 150 personnel focused on missile defense and space surveillance.

But researchers say that the Arctic region is warming at nearly four times the pace of the rest of the planet, and as the polar ice melts, this whole area is becoming more accessible — and more contested. This includes the shipping lanes around Greenland coveted by Russia and China.

Denmark keeps stressing that Greenland is entitled to determine its own fate. Under Danish and Greenlandic law, the island has the right to hold a referendum on independence. And there’s a simple reason it hasn’t yet.

Greenland’s economy is small, based mostly on fishing and still dependent on Denmark for hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance each year. That money pays for good roads, cheap gas, nice schools and free medical care, a Scandinavian standard of living that many Greenlanders are reluctant to give up.

“We are fortunate here,” said Finn Damgaard, a retired office worker who was warming up the other day on a bench in one of Nuuk’s few malls. The weather was horrendous — vicious winds and subzero temperatures — and he was taking a break on his way to the library.

He said he had learned, by reading and watching TV, about inequality in America and the way Inuit people have been treated in Alaska.

“It’s not good,” he said.

Like others, Mr. Damgaard believes Greenland should pursue independence — but not right now.

“I don’t think we’re ready yet,” he said. “We need to develop a form of income.”

His answer: mining.

Greenland’s Mines

“Greenland is like a paradise for geologists,” said Qupanuk Olsen, a Greenlander who wears many hats — mining engineer, social media influencer, mother, hunter, shaman-follower. “We have gold, we have iron, we have titanium, we have even diamonds,” she said. “We have rubies. We have rare earth elements. We have uranium. We have so many minerals. But the thing is, they’re not profitable at this moment because of the infrastructure.”

The few ports in Greenland are often blocked by ice. The entire 800,000-square mile island has less than 100 miles of paved roads. Many promising mining areas are so hard to reach that it’s extremely difficult simply drilling for samples, let alone getting loaded ships out of ports boxed in by icebergs.

Still, some international mining companies are trying. Lumina, owned by European and Canadian investment firms, is digging out anorthosite, a grayish mineral used in paints and glass fibers.

Several hundred miles up the west coast from Nuuk sits Disko Island, where KoBold, a mining start-up backed by investments from Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, among other billionaires, has explored for nickel.

Another player is Critical Metals Corporation, which has a rare earth mine in southern Greenland and has drawn a significant investment from the New York financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald. Howard Lutnick, Mr. Trump’s commerce secretary, has been the firm’s chief executive for years.

These days, there’s a huge appetite for rare earth elements, which are used in new technologies like electric cars. Greenland is rich in them.

China bought a stake in another promising rare earth mine, but operations are now blocked because of environmental concerns.

Several years ago the Chinese government commissioned a geological study of Greenland, saying it had “great potential for minerals.” But “potential” remains the operative word.

“Greenland is like a huge deposit just sitting there waiting for the prices to rise dramatically enough so we can sell it,” Mrs. Olsen said.

A Complicated Relationship

Mrs. Olsen spoke from her beautiful, new, airy house overlooking Nuuk’s port and the thin slices of what is called “pancake ice” floating in the harbor. (Greenlanders have a lot of categories of ice: pancake ice, young ice, old ice, pack ice, black ice, glacier ice and sea ice, to name a few.)

“I don’t want to become part of the U.S.,” said Mrs. Olsen, who is running in the next parliamentary elections, in March. “But at some point we need to do business with them.”

As with many Greenlanders, Mrs. Olsen’s feelings toward America are complicated. She knows that American attention on Greenland could deliver benefits — it already has.

Just in the past few weeks, with Mr. Trump breathing down their necks, the Danes have agreed to things that Greenlanders have been demanding for years. Greenlandic, for example, will be recognized as a legitimate national identity on passports, and Greenland can now export fish more easily to foreign markets.

Denmark also just announced a major increase in military spending for the Arctic, something Greenlanders say should have been done long ago.

People on the island are increasingly critical of Denmark, part of a broader reinterpretation of the 300-year-old relationship between mainland Denmark and an island 50 times as big.

What is important to Greenlanders, our interviews revealed, is their strong sense of identity. They come from a small group of people who have survived for centuries in a bleak but beautiful homeland. They are proud of their icebergs, their red and white flag that represents the sun and the ice, and their traditions like ice fishing and dog sledding. They want to make sure that whatever happens in this next chapter of their history, they get the respect they deserve.

Many felt insulted by a visit from the Nelk Boys, a group of pro-Trump social media influencers known for their prank videos, who descended on Nuuk a few weeks ago, passing out red MAGA hats and crisp $100 bills. “You think you can buy us?” one man yelled, tearing a $100 bill in half.

If Mr. Trump were trying to win them over, his presumptuous tone hasn’t helped.

“We know full well that he sees us as nothing — because, at the end of the day, he’s just a businessman trying to make deals,” Mrs. Olsen said.

“We are not furniture,” she added. “We have been colonized enough already, and we are tired of it.”

Chris Buckley contributed reporting from Taiwan, Kate Kelly from Washington and Maya Tekeli from Greenland. Graphics by Samuel Granados.

Only a few years ago, Washington was calling Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over its headline-making human rights violations. Western business leaders canceled investments in the kingdom. Celebrities and sports stars took flack for doing events there.

With its oil and its regional clout, however, Saudi Arabia proved too useful for the Biden administration to push the kingdom away for too long. And just a few weeks into the second term of President Trump, who nurtured a cozy relationship with the kingdom when he was last in office, Saudi Arabia’s stock is once again on the rise — even if Mr. Trump’s approach to the region is not always to the Saudis’ liking.

This week, all of the diplomacy is in Riyadh, the kingdom’s capital. On Friday, Arab leaders are expected to gather to hammer out a counterproposal meant to persuade Mr. Trump not to deport all of the some two million people in Gaza to Arab countries, mainly Egypt and Jordan, and transform the strip into a “Riviera of the Middle East.”

On Tuesday, senior American and Russian officials met in Riyadh for opening talks over ending the war in Ukraine and re-establishing normal relations, another major foreign policy priority of Mr. Trump’s. The Russian delegation was based at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, where Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, once locked up hundreds of powerful businessmen and royal family members in an early quest to consolidate power. (Saudi Arabia said it was a crackdown on corruption.)

This time, Saudi Arabia was presenting a very different image, facilitating the talks on Tuesday with a lunch menu of Arab and Western specialties that included a “symphony of scallop, shrimps and salmon” and knafeh cheesecake, according to Russian state television.

“Country of peace,” read the hashtag accompanying some social media posts about the Tuesday talks from government and state media accounts. Others had a hashtag calling the kingdom “capital of world decisions.”

Meeting Mr. Trump’s handpicked envoys in Riyadh on Monday night, Prince Mohammed told them: “We would be more than glad to work with you and with President Trump and his administration. I believe we can achieve positive things, for Saudi Arabia and for many countries around the world.”

Mr. Trump also spoke late Wednesday at an investment summit in Miami Beach hosted by Saudi Arabia’s affluent sovereign wealth fund in which he praised Riyadh’s role in the Russia-U.S. talks.

The Saudis’ big week in international diplomacy has been long in the making. The Arab world’s traditional leaders, including Egypt, Iraq and Syria, are weakened by years of internal turmoil. Under Prince Mohammed, Saudi Arabia has taken advantage of its size, wealth and status as the guardian of some of Islam’s holiest sites to fill that gap.

The high-profile diplomacy “serves to showcase the kingdom’s global influence and regional leadership,” said Hasan Alhasan, a senior fellow for Middle East Policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a policy analysis group. He noted that waning U.S. influence on the global stage had allowed “agile actors” like Saudi Arabia to step up.

Analysts, including some close to the royal court, said a canny Saudi strategy to cultivate relations beyond the United States during the years of strain with the Biden administration had paid off in the U.S.-Russia talks on Tuesday.

In recent years, Saudi Arabia has built economic links with China and avoided taking sides in the war in Ukraine. Its neutrality allowed it to help broker prisoner exchanges between Russia and Ukraine and Russia and the United States, and to host both Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky — though Mr. Zelensky canceled a planned visit to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday out of frustration at being excluded from the previous day’s talks.

Saudi Arabia has also positioned itself as the biggest prize in Israel’s pursuit of normalized relations with Arab neighbors, giving the Saudis leverage to push for a defense pact with the United States. As Israel’s assault on Gaza intensified after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack, the Saudis also increasingly conditioned the deal on a pathway toward statehood for the Palestinians, a long-held dream for most of the Arab world.

Its continuing talks with the United States and Israel over normalization, along with the fact that it is expected to help fund any reconstruction of Gaza, makes Saudi Arabia a natural choice to convene Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar on Friday to discuss a reconstruction proposal for Gaza that they hope will serve as an alternative to Mr. Trump’s ideas for the territory.

The proposed grand bargain between Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United States was first shepherded by the Biden administration. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. saw opportunity in the agreement even though, as a candidate, he declared Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over its bombings of civilians in Yemen and Saudi agents’ gruesome killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Washington Post columnist and Virginia resident.

Still, it is Mr. Trump, whose first visit to a foreign country in his first term was to Saudi Arabia, who has elevated the Gulf kingdom to the status of trusted friend and partner in global affairs.

“Trump is recognizing them as the Arab leader,” said Hussein Ibish, a senior scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “They wanted to be treated like that, and under Trump they are being treated like that.”

Mr. Trump has said the kingdom was chosen for his potential first meeting with Mr. Putin since returning to the White House because of the two presidents’ relationship with Prince Mohammed. Mr. Trump proposed the country in his phone call last week with Mr. Putin as a venue, according to Dmitri S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman.

“We know the crown prince, and I think it’d be a very good place to be,” Mr. Trump said last week.

Yet if Mr. Trump handed Saudi Arabia an unqualified win by selecting it to host the U.S.-Russia talks, his return to the White House has also imperiled another major priority for Prince Mohammed: securing a defense pact and help with developing a civilian nuclear program from the United States in exchange for normalizing relations with Israel.

Forcibly expelling Palestinians from Gaza, as Mr. Trump has proposed, would be not only a war crime that violates international law, according to experts, but would also erase any remaining hope of a Palestinian state on existing Palestinian land. The Saudi population overwhelmingly supports Palestinian statehood, and Prince Mohammed has shown he will not go against its wishes: The Saudi government responded to Mr. Trump’s proposal by announcing that it would not normalize with Israel without a Palestinian state being established.

The precondition, which the Saudis have insisted on for the past year, is “nonnegotiable and not subject to compromises,” the Saudi Foreign Ministry said in a statement this month.

Given Israel’s opposition to Palestinian statehood, the chances of a Saudi-Israeli normalization deal, along with the Saudi-U.S. defense agreement, look increasingly remote, at least in the near term, Mr. Ibish said.

Even so, Saudi officials may have reaped benefits on that front from the time they spent with senior Trump administration officials in Riyadh this week.

Fostering ties with Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, and especially Steve Witkoff, a longtime friend of Mr. Trump’s who serves as his special envoy to the Middle East, may help Saudi Arabia in its dealings with the United States over Gaza and normalization, Saudi political analysts said. Prince Mohammed spoke to Mr. Rubio about Gaza and Ukraine on Monday.

Mr. Witkoff, who, like his boss, is a New York real estate magnate, has emerged as a key figure at the heart of Mr. Trump’s foreign deal-making. He stepped beyond his ostensible job title to attend the Russia-U.S. talks in Riyadh on Tuesday and help secure the release last week of Marc Fogel, an American teacher held in Russia since 2021.

Mr. Witkoff will “undoubtedly listen carefully to what the Saudis have to say about Gaza,” said Salman al-Ansari, a Saudi analyst. “Although there were initial disagreements regarding Gaza, I believe they will find a way forward.”

In any case, the two countries’ relationship does not hinge only on normalization, the defense pact or Palestinian statehood, especially under Mr. Trump. That was amply demonstrated in late January, when Prince Mohammed told Mr. Trump that Saudi Arabia intended to bolster its investment and trade with the United States by at least $600 billion over the next four years.

Anton Troianovski contributed reporting from Riyadh, and Kate Kelly from Florida.

Andrii Pobihai wore his army uniform to the funeral in Bucha, even though he’s retired. He was one of about 40 people to brave the freezing temperatures and air-raid sirens on Wednesday to say goodbye to his friend, who had died of a heart attack at the age of 48 after serving more than 10 years in the military.

Mr. Pobihai, who held a red carnation in his weathered hand, said he was disgusted by what President Trump had said only hours earlier: that this war with Russia was somehow Ukraine’s fault. He wondered what those comments portended, after a day of negotiations on ending the war that included high-level representatives from the United States and Russia, but none from the country the Russians invaded.

“I’m very, very angry,” said Mr. Pobihai, 66, who retired as a commander in the rifle company of the 11th Separate Motorized Infantry Battalion in 2019, three years before Russia launched its full-scale invasion. He had led 54 men near Mariupol, but since then, he said, the Russians have killed all those Ukrainian soldiers — the last just four days earlier.

“The best guys are dying,” Mr. Pobihai said. “How can you talk to these jackals?”

Bucha, a suburb of 37,000 about 20 miles northwest of the capital, Kyiv, has become a notorious symbol of Russian brutality. The Russians took it over within days of invading in February 2022, and in the month that followed, they killed more than 400 civilians, Ukrainian officials say, leading to global accusations of war crimes.

Images from that time ricocheted around the world: The priest left dead in a garage, his mouth open. The church choir singer and his family, their limbs cut off, their bodies burned. The woman shot dead pushing her bicycle home on Yablunska Street.

On Wednesday, many in Bucha seemed to be struggling to take in Mr. Trump’s comments. When the Biden administration was in power, the United States was Ukraine’s most powerful ally. Now they had many questions: Was Mr. Trump just speaking off the cuff? Was the United States really siding with Russia, a pariah on the world stage?

“Now he’s going to help the Russians?” asked Alla Kriuchkova, 40, waiting outside a military recruitment center in Bucha for her husband, who had just been called in. “They destroyed everything here, and now we’re supposed to give up? How does that work?”

Then she answered her own question: “If America leaves us, we are screwed.”

The ghosts of the massacre are still everywhere in Bucha. In the Bucha municipal cemetery on Memory Street, the body of Oleksiy Onyshchenko, Mr. Pobihai’s friend, rested maybe 50 yards from where scores of bodies in black plastic bags were once stacked.

On the corner of Yablunska and Vokzalna Streets — ground zero of the destruction in Bucha — Iryna Abramova lives in a boxy new house built to replace the home that was burned down almost three years ago. Whenever Ms. Abramova leaves for work, she has to walk past the spot where Russian soldiers shot her husband, Oleh, point-blank in front of her.

Then there’s the pink four-story building constructed during Soviet times, where Russian soldiers set up camp after invading. After Bucha was liberated in April 2022, trash as high as one’s knees was found in the building. A slick of blood had dried on the floor.

Now a man wearing thick-lensed glasses worked on a computer in the front window. Behind the building, eight young pine trees were tagged with the names of the men who were shot dead there in the early days of the war. “Anatolii,” read one. “Andriy,” read another. A few trees still had Christmas decorations, tinsel in the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag, balls of red and green.

Ms. Abramova, 50, who now works at a dry cleaner, said she had unsuccessfully tried therapy and medication. She said investigators told her recently that they had identified the Russians who had killed her husband.

“Now I am afraid that the court will do nothing, because of what’s happening politically,” Ms. Abramova said. “They will say that the Russians are fine. The thing I’m most afraid of is that they will say we are guilty ourselves. That we are guilty of killing ourselves.”

The Rev. Andriy Halavin, an Orthodox priest at the Church of St. Andrew, Bucha’s largest church, carries his city’s memories with him, flipping through photos on his phone.

There is one of a smiling Myron Zvarychuk, the priest who founded their church community in the 1990s, and then one of him dead. Other photos show the burned bodies of the singer and several men, bent over, their hands tied, found shot dead in the cellar of a children’s camp. Still another portrays the bodies of the eight men memorialized by the trees near the onetime Russian encampment. (A ninth escaped alive, because the Russians didn’t notice he was still breathing.)

Father Halavin also showed a new satirical cartoon by a Ukrainian artist which depicts Mr. Trump pointing at the feet of Jesus on the cross. “I tried to find a very telling picture,” said Father Halavin, a wry smile on his face. “It’s Trump saying to Jesus, ‘This wouldn’t have happened if I were president.’”

A memorial outside the church identified those who were killed — from Timur Kozyrev, only 18 months old, to Iryna Rudenko, killed 18 days shy of her 99th birthday — mere feet away from where a mass grave once held 116 bodies.

Father Halavin pointed out a red home just beyond it where a mother and her two young sons once lived. They had fled Donbas, in the east, in 2014, shortly after the Russians seized Crimea and Russian-backed separatists occupied parts of eastern Ukraine.

“They moved here to escape, and then they were killed,” he said.

At the Bucha municipal cemetery, 52 graves were marked only with numbers, like 230 and 318. These bodies have not been identified.

In the military section of the cemetery, Ukrainian flags flew over every headstone. “Slaves are not allowed into heaven,” one grave marker proclaimed. Another bore a photo of a sergeant with the call sign Hedgehog; he was critically wounded in Bakhmut and died in a Kyiv hospital on June 12. “Infinite pain,” the epitaph said. “You’re not here, but you’re everywhere, forever with us.”

Other soldiers from Bucha had call signs like Viking, Lover and even Bucha, who died April 13 fighting in the east.

Mr. Onyshchenko, the soldier who was being buried on Wednesday, had collapsed Saturday at his post in Mykolaiv. A heart attack, his family and friends said. Mr. Pobihai said they had served together in the 11th Battalion in Mariupol and Popasna in 2014 and 2015. The Russians now control both areas.

“If not us, then who?” Mr. Onyshchenko had asked after enlisting, according to an obituary posted on Facebook by the mayor of Bucha.

After Mr. Onyshchenko’s coffin was placed into a freshly dug grave, Mr. Pobihai walked through the military cemetery, looking at the headstones. He figured there was a good chance that Mr. Trump would eventually change his mind.

“When Russia captures Ukraine and mobilizes the best Ukrainian fighters into the Russian Army, then goes against NATO and Europe, maybe then,” he said with a shrug.

Oleksandr Chubko contributed reporting.

Friedrich Merz, the man favored to be Germany’s next chancellor after elections on Sunday, is a conservative businessman who has never been a government minister and was forced out of party leadership years ago for challenging Angela Merkel.

As a Christian Democrat and committed trans-Atlanticist, he has been considered a potentially better match for President Trump than the current Social Democratic chancellor, Olaf Scholz. He is also expected to lead a foreign policy more aligned with Mr. Trump’s ideas about Europe’s taking responsibility for its own defense.

But recent comments by Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance have displayed just how difficult any partnership may be with a United States that is less reliable and possibly hostile, and sympathetic to Russia’s narrative on Ukraine and spheres of influence.

That challenge is especially profound for Germany, and after Sunday is likely to fall on Mr. Merz, 69, who is known to be assertive and direct, if a bit awkward.

He pushed back strongly against Mr. Trump’s latest comments siding with Russia, as well as what was seen as interference in Germany’s election by Mr. Vance when he criticized Europe for sidelining far-right parties at the Munich Security Conference last week.

Hamas handed over on Thursday what it said were the remains of four Israelis taken hostage during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, including two young children whose abduction was widely seen as emblematic of the viciousness of the Hamas assault.

But early on Friday morning, the Israeli military said that only three of the bodies belonged to the hostages slated to be handed over. They were Oded Lifshitz, 83, a retiree and a peace activist; Ariel Bibas, 4; and Kfir Bibas, 10 months old; according to Israeli officials.

The fourth body was supposed to be the children’s mother, Shiri Bibas. But Israeli forensic testing found it did not belong to her, the Israeli military said, describing it as a “violation of the utmost severity” of the ongoing cease-fire.

The shocking claim, sure to set off widespread anger and revulsion across Israel when the country wakes up to the news, threw the truce’s next steps into doubt after an already tense day that had ignited a torrent of emotion in the country.

Hamas said the four hostages were killed by Israeli airstrikes. The Israeli authorities said the two Bibas children were “brutally murdered by terrorists,” and that Mr. Lifshitz had been “murdered in the captivity of Palestinian Islamic Jihad” without providing further details. Neither claim could be immediately verified.

Crowds of Palestinians had gathered near the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis to watch the theatrical handoff staged by Hamas that morning: Four coffins placed on a stage in front of a cartoonish, vampiric picture of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. Triumphant music thumped in the background.

One casket bore a picture of Kfir Bibas, who was less than 9 months old when he was kidnapped. A few yards away, a poster threatened that if Israel went back to war against Hamas, even more hostages would return in coffins.

Miles away, Israelis watched the scene unfold in horror and anguish, a sharp contrast to the catharsis evoked by the recent releases of hostages who had survived. Israel’s leaders had vowed to topple Hamas and bring home the roughly 250 hostages the militant group and its allies abducted in October 2023.

But some of those taken captive are now coming home dead.

Critics in Israel say Mr. Netanyahu shares at least part of the blame, arguing that he pressed on with his campaign against Hamas rather than agreeing earlier to a cease-fire that would have saved some lives.

And despite more than a year of devastating war, Hamas’s show of force at the exchange demonstrated that the group was still very much in charge in Gaza. Scores of gunmen — most clad in green Hamas headbands — patrolled the area around the handoff.

On Thursday, the coffins containing remains were the latest props. Volker Türk, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, called the display “abhorrent and cruel,” adding that it “flies in the face of international law.”

Israel and Hamas are now in the final weeks of a 42-day cease-fire that began in mid-January. As part of the truce, Hamas agreed to turn over 25 living Israeli hostages and the bodies of eight others in exchange for more than 1,500 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

In exchange for the bodies, Israel was expected on Saturday to free women and minors from Gaza who were detained during the war, generally without formal charges. But the latest accusations from Israel over the failure to turn over Ms. Bibas’s body threw that into doubt.

The Hamas-led surprise attack in October 2023 killed about 1,200 people, including Ms. Bibas’s parents, according to Israel. Israel’s relentless campaign against Hamas in Gaza quickly followed, killing tens of thousands of Palestinians and leaving much of the enclave in ruins.

In Israel, right-wing politicians, including Mr. Netanyahu, reiterated furious calls for revenge against Hamas in the wake of the handover. Others saw the return of the bodies as another sign of how important it was to immediately bring home the remaining captives.

“Next to the sadness, it underlined to me that the most critical thing now is to bring them all back,” said Bar Goren, 24, whose parents were both killed in the Oct. 7 attacks. “Everyone deserves this closure.”

Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president, said “there are no words” for the agony of seeing the coffins. Many Israelis are now familiar with the names and faces of the hostages, whose images have been ubiquitous in the country since their abduction.

“Our hearts — the hearts of an entire nation — lie in tatters,” Mr. Herzog wrote on social media. “On behalf of the State of Israel, I bow my head and ask for forgiveness. Forgiveness for not protecting you on that terrible day. Forgiveness for not bringing you home safely.”

Ms. Bibas’s husband, Yarden Bibas, was also abducted. In footage from the scene that is now seared into Israel’s national memory, a terrified Ms. Bibas — covered with a blanket — could be seen clutching Ariel and Kfir to her chest as she is taken away by armed militants.

In November 2023, Hamas published a statement announcing the deaths of Ms. Bibas and the two children. The group also published a propaganda video featuring a sobbing Mr. Bibas, while still in captivity, responding to the news. Human rights groups have said such videos amount to war crimes.

Mr. Bibas was freed in early February as part of the ongoing cease-fire agreement.

Mr. Lifshitz, a retired journalist, was taken alongside his wife, Yocheved Lifshitz. Hamas later freed her for what it said were “humanitarian reasons” but refused to release her husband. Before the war, Mr. Lifshitz had volunteered to drive Gazans seeking medical treatment in Israel to hospitals.

Both Israelis and Palestinians have seen emotional homecomings in recent weeks. Israeli hostages, many of them thin and pale, reunited with their families after many months in Hamas’s warren of underground tunnels.

And Palestinian prisoners — some of whom also emerged from Israeli jails appearing gaunt — also embraced loved ones. Some had been serving life sentences for deadly attacks against Israelis, while many others had not been charged with any crime.

On Saturday, Hamas had been expected to free the last six living hostages covered in the first phase of the cease-fire in exchange for more Palestinian prisoners. The remains of four others will be released the following weekend.

It is unclear now whether those exchanges will go forward as planned. But even if both sides manage to surmount the latest obstacle, the future of the truce after the first stage, set to expire in early March, is still shrouded in uncertainty.

Israel and Hamas have not agreed on terms to extend the agreement into a new phase that would conclusively end the war, free the remaining hostages and see a full withdrawal of Israeli forces.

President Trump has pressured both sides to clinch such a deal. But Israel has refused to countenance any Hamas control in Gaza, while Hamas has shown little appetite for disbanding its battalions of armed fighters or sending its Gaza leaders into exile.

Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Mideast envoy, said during a conference in Miami Beach on Thursday that reaching the next stage of the deal would be difficult, in part because of Israel’s red line on Hamas governance.

“It’s hard to square that circle,” Mr. Witkoff said. “But we’re making a lot of progress in the conversations and hopefully it will lead to some good things, good results.”

Kate Kelly contributed reporting from Miami Beach, Florida.

Luis Rubiales, the former head of Spain’s soccer federation, was convicted on Thursday of sexual assault for forcibly kissing a member of the women’s national team on the lips after the team won the 2023 Women’s World Cup.

Mr. Rubiales’s kiss of the player, Jennifer Hermoso, set off a national scandal, deepened debates about longstanding sexism in Spanish soccer and became a watershed moment in Spain’s #MeToo movement.

A Spanish court on Thursday cleared Mr. Rubiales of a separate charge of coercion. For the sexual assault conviction, it fined Mr. Rubiales 10,800 euros, about $11,270.

In delivering the ruling, Judge José Manuel Fernández-Prieto said that a kiss “is not the normal way of greeting people with whom one does not have an emotional relationship.” Mr. Rubiales was also ordered not to go within 200 meters, or about 650 feet, of Ms. Hermoso for one year. The court said he cannot contact Ms. Hermoso and must pay her 3,000 euros for “moral damage caused to her.”

Judge Fernández-Prieto said the sum was proportionate for the forcible kiss given the “time and place” — in full view of thousands of spectators in the stadium and many others watching the ceremony on television.

Mr. Rubiales’s forcible kiss, the judge said, was a “reprehensible act” that blighted “an unprecedented success in Spanish women’s football.”

There was no immediate response from Ms. Hermoso. She had said that the kiss was not consensual.

Ms. Hermoso said shortly after the episode that “at no time did I consent to the kiss that he gave me.”

“I couldn’t react — it was a thousandth of a second,” she later testified, adding that she had known immediately that the act was not normal.

“My boss was kissing me,” she said. “This should not happen.”

Mr. Rubiales plans to appeal the ruling, his lawyer, Olga Tubau, told the Spanish public broadcaster RTVE.

He has denied doing anything wrong during the encounter with Ms. Hermoso. Speaking in a courtroom near Madrid earlier this month, he said, “You don’t win a World Cup every day,” and he added that he had kissed other players in celebratory moments.

Prosecutors had also argued that Mr. Rubiales had pressured Ms. Hermoso to drop her claim and play down the incident.

Three other men, including Jorge Vilda, the team’s coach at the World Cup, were also charged with coercion alongside Mr. Rubiales. All were acquitted of that charge, with the court saying that prosecutors had not proven that Ms. Hermoso was subject to any acts of violence and intimidation that would warrant coercion.

The kiss and the ensuing fallout prompted a moment of reckoning in Spain, where progress in gender equality — women’s soccer in particular — has run up against a culture of machismo.

Spain’s minister of equality, Ana Redondo, welcomed the ruling on Thursday.

“When there is no consent, there is aggression, and that is what the judge certifies in this sentence,” Ms. Redondo said on social media.

However, the Federation of Progressive Women, a nonprofit that advocates gender equality in Spain, said it was “deeply disappointed” by the sentence: Prosecutors had sought a two-and-a-half-year prison term for Mr. Rubiales.

Thursday’s ruling “reinforces distrust in the judicial system and emboldens aggressors,” the nonprofit said on social media.

In the immediate aftermath of the incident, Mr. Rubiales offered a tepid apology. He resigned as head of the national soccer organization, the Royal Spanish Football Federation, after weeks of pressure and waning support.

Last spring, the Kremlin added a new rhetorical weapon to its regular barrages against President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.

“We are aware that the legitimacy of the current head of state has expired,” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said of the Ukrainian leader in May 2024, two months after orchestrating his own latest rubber-stamp re-election at home.

Those stilted words kicked off a concerted campaign by Moscow to tarnish Mr. Zelensky as an impostor incapable of signing a peace deal unless presidential elections were held in Ukraine.

Mr. Zelensky had remained in power when his term expired because Ukraine prohibits elections under martial law. No matter. By Wednesday, President Trump had picked up Mr. Putin’s message.

“A Dictator without Elections,” Mr. Trump said in a post on his Truth Social account, in a scathing attack on the Ukrainian leader. It came a day after Mr. Trump falsely accused Ukraine of starting the war.

Dmitri A. Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Russian security council and a former president of Russia, said he agreed with Mr. Trump about the Ukrainian leader “200 percent.” He suggested that Moscow could not believe its luck with Washington’s about-face, throwing into stark relief how completely Mr. Trump had adopted the Kremlin’s messaging.

“If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US president, I would have laughed out loud,” Mr. Medvedev wrote on X.

It was not the first time that Mr. Trump had picked up and repeated a questionable talking point of a strongman leader who had won his sympathies. During Mr. Trump’s first term, such interlocutors sometimes guided the president handily toward taking up their positions, even if those stances contradicted Mr. Trump’s own advisers and intelligence agencies.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, for example, regularly steered Mr. Trump toward his positions in calls and interactions, ultimately getting the U.S. president to move American forces out of the way while Turkey attacked the Kurds in northern Syria. The Kurds had been Washington’s main partners in the campaign against the Islamic State.

After the murder of the columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Mr. Trump publicly repeated Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s assertion that he had no knowledge of the crime, and said that the truth about what really happened might never be known. That was at odds with the C.I.A.’s conclusion at the time that Prince Mohammed, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, ordered the killing.

Mr. Trump also caused an uproar in 2019 when he said he took the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un “at his word” that he did not know about the harsh treatment of Otto Warmbier, an American in North Korean custody. Mr. Trump said North Korean prisons were “rough places.” Mr. Warmbier was released to the United States in a vegetative state and died soon afterward.

Perhaps none of Mr. Trump’s relationships with other world leaders have received more scrutiny than the one with Mr. Putin, whom the U.S. president has long praised and admired.

In 2018, the Justice Department named and charged 12 officers from Russia’s military intelligence agency with hacking emails from Democratic Party systems and releasing them online. The effort damaged the party’s 2016 presidential candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Days later, after a two-hour private meeting with Mr. Putin in Helsinki, Mr. Trump repeated the Russian leader’s assertion that Moscow had not interfered in Mr. Trump’s favor in the election.

“I have President Putin. He just said it is not Russia,” Mr. Trump said. “I will say this: I do not see any reason why it would be.”

Mr. Trump expressed “great confidence” in his intelligence agencies, which concluded that Russia had interfered, but said, “I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”

His decision to take Mr. Putin’s word over that of his own intelligence agencies outraged even Republicans, with Senator John McCain calling it a “disgraceful performance.”

A three-year study by a bipartisan U.S. Senate committee concluded that the Russian government “engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.”

Constraints during his first term, including a special counsel investigation into Russian interference, a coterie of Russia hawks within his administration and overwhelming bipartisan contempt for the Kremlin in Congress, largely prevented Mr. Trump from acting on his impulse to develop close ties with Mr. Putin.

In his second term, with those restrictions gone, Mr. Trump has set about pursuing a rapid rapprochement with Moscow, to the shock of both European allies and Ukraine. At the same time, he has taken actions cheered by the Kremlin, including the dismantlement of the American government foreign aid agency, U.S.A.I.D., while also repeating some of the Kremlin’s main anti-Ukrainian talking points.

Mr. Trump’s pattern of repeating what Mr. Putin says and being steered toward policy decisions by foreign strongmen has caused grave worry in both Europe and Ukraine about what the American president might agree to during impending talks with Mr. Putin, who has long sought to destroy NATO and unity between the United States and its European allies.

Mr. Trump adopted the Russian president’s line of attack against Mr. Zelensky a week after the two leaders held a phone call, during which Mr. Putin may have raised the matter.

Mr. Zelensky’s five-year presidential term would have expired in May of last year, but was extended under martial law rules in place since Russia’s invasion in 2022.

Mr. Putin told Russian state television in January that peace negotiations could be conducted with whomever, but that “due to his illegitimacy” Mr. Zelensky “has no right to sign anything.”

Mr. Zelensky hit back at Mr. Putin’s line of attack in June of last year, saying the Ukrainian people were the only ones who would determine the legitimacy of their president.

“Our people are free. To be honest, we’re fighting precisely for this,” Mr. Zelensky said. “The legitimacy of comrade Putin is recognized only by comrade Putin himself. Only Putin elects Putin. Russians are the scenery, with only one performer on stage.”

During an appearance on Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Florida estate, the president not only supported Mr. Putin’s argument about Mr. Zelensky’s legitimacy. He co-opted it.

Mr. Trump said it was the United States, not Russia, pushing for elections in Ukraine, though Mr. Putin for months has been saying that Mr. Zelensky cannot sign a peace deal unless presidential elections take place.

“That’s not a Russia thing,” Mr. Trump said of elections in Ukraine. “That’s something coming from me and coming from many other countries also.”

It was unclear what countries, apart from Russia, Mr. Trump had in mind.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It is unclear exactly what the Kremlin intends to gain from its rhetoric, but questions about Mr. Zelensky’s legitimacy and the timing of future elections could weaken Ukraine’s negotiating position in potential peace talks or form a pretext for sidelining Mr. Zelensky — especially if Mr. Trump amplifies the message.

Stefan Meister, a Russia expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations, said the Kremlin is trying to delegitimize Mr. Zelensky with the hope of destabilizing Ukraine and ultimately setting in motion a process to install a new, more Moscow-friendly leader in Kyiv.

He called the false narrative about Mr. Zelensky an important tool in Russia’s “toolbox for how they want to destroy Ukraine as a state.”

“This is ongoing and evergreen in the Russian disinformation campaign — that there were no elections in Ukraine and Zelensky is an illegitimate president,” Mr. Meister said. “As we understand, Trump is taking over the elements of Russian disinformation.”

Beyond Ukraine’s clear prohibition on elections during martial law, active warfare in the country would also make holding a fair election incredibly difficult, with thousands of men stationed at the front, fears about going to polls during fighting and worries about a distracting political sweepstakes at a moment of existential crisis for the Ukrainian state.

Republican members of Congress who back Ukraine have hit out at the idea that elections should be held before or during any peace process and have highlighted the irony of such a demand by Mr. Putin, who years ago ended fair elections in Russia and changed the rules to stay in power past his term limits.

Rep. Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, wrote on X that while Russia was demanding elections in Ukraine, “we should remind ourselves that Putin has murdered or exiled all his political rivals.” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, Republican of Pennsylvania, told Mr. Putin, also in a post on X, that he should try holding a free and fair election in his own country first.

It was the site of Britain’s Royal Mint, where coins were struck from 1810 to 1975. It sits atop the ruins of a Cistercian abbey dating to the 14th century, as well as a burial ground from the Black Death. And from the 16th century to the early 18th century, it was a supply yard for the Royal Navy.

Now the storied compound known as Royal Mint Court is on the brink of a new chapter as the home of the Chinese Embassy in London. If Britain’s Labour government approves the project, as seems likely, China will move its embassy from its current quarters in Marylebone to an imposing, 5.5-acre complex across town, which would be the largest diplomatic outpost in Europe.

Handing Beijing such a prime piece of real estate, next to the Tower of London and in the shadow of the skyscrapers of London’s City, has set off a storm of opposition from neighborhood residents, China hawks in the British Parliament and Hong Kong democracy advocates who have resettled in Britain.

Some say China could use the embassy, with its proximity to strategic fiber-optic cables that snake under the financial district, to spy on dissidents and ordinary Britons. Others claim its location, on a busy road just off the Tower Bridge, would make it hard for crowds to gather to protest issues like Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong or its persecution of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.

“This is not just a building; this is an extension of the Chinese Communist Party’s power in the U.K.,” said Chloe Cheung, a representative of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, a pro-democracy group, as she spoke to more than 1,000 protesters who rallied at the site this month.

Ms. Cheung, who left Hong Kong in 2020, warned that the supersized embassy would be “about control, fear and silencing voices.” She noted that the Hong Kong authorities had offered a reward for her arrest.

The protesters, many of whom, like Ms. Cheung, are immigrants from Hong Kong, brandished banners and placards that read, “CCP is Watching You. Stop the Mega Embassy!” But afterward, as they politely tidied up the site, several acknowledged there had been a shift in the political winds.

In 2022, the borough council of Tower Hamlets denied permission for the project. But China resubmitted the proposal after the Labour Party swept into power last July. China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, raised the matter in a call with Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and Mr. Starmer later told him the government had “called in” the planning application, giving it the ultimate say on whether it gets a greenlight.

A public inquiry on the proposal ended on Wednesday, and a decision by Housing Secretary Angela Rayner is expected by the summer.

Two of her fellow ministers — David Lammy, the foreign secretary, and Yvette Cooper, the home secretary — gave the plan provisional support last month. In a letter to the council, Mr. Lammy and Ms. Cooper noted that the Metropolitan Police had dropped an earlier objection that the site could not accommodate demonstrations without disrupting nearby roads.

“Given the importance of countries having functioning diplomatic premises in each other’s capitals,” they wrote, “it is right that China is able to carry out its diplomatic work in the United Kingdom, as the United Kingdom does in China.”

The Chinese Embassy in London did not respond to a request for comment. But last month, a spokeswoman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mao Ning, said, “It is the international obligation of host countries to provide support and facilitation for the building of diplomatic premises.”

Britain’s government has plenty of reasons to break the deadlock. The Chinese authorities have blocked Britain’s plans to rebuild its embassy in Beijing while they await approval for theirs. Britain is looking to China as a source of foreign investment at a time when its economy is stagnating and its relationship with the United States is uncertain. The chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, recently visited Beijing, drumming up 600 million pounds ($756 million) of commitments.

“There’s no question that British policy was very pro-China under David Cameron, then switched to being hostile toward China under subsequent governments, and now has switched back to being more accommodating,” said Tony Travers, professor of politics at the London School of Economics.

Mr. Cameron, a Conservative who was prime minister from 2010 to 2016, famously declared a “golden era” of economic ties between Britain and China. He took Mr. Xi out for a celebratory pint at a 16th-century pub.

By 2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, also a Conservative, had banned technology from the Chinese communications giant Huawei from Britain’s high-speed wireless network on national security grounds. He extended an offer to many Hong Kong residents to live and work in Britain; more than 150,000 have done so.

Professor Travers noted that it was a quirk of the London planning process that big building projects face three layers of scrutiny: local councils, the mayor’s office and the national government. “It touches micro planning issues at one end and ends up as a matter of high diplomacy on the other,” he said.

Chinese officials lobbied members of the council, sending them French wine, tea and, in one case, a Chinese-English children’s book, according to government records. (Some of the gifts were returned.) Critics in Parliament noted that China also orchestrated a letter-writing campaign that included submissions from brand-name companies like Bank of China and Air China.

The Tower Hamlets council is unusual in that it is not controlled by an established political party, but by an independent party, Aspire. Having voted to reject the embassy in 2022, some councilors complained that the government was brushing aside their concerns, including fears that the Chinese could tap into sensitive communications lines that run into the City of London.

“We’ve been pushed into a corner,” said Peter Golds, a Conservative council member who took part in the protest. “We said we don’t want it, repeatedly. And suddenly the government are overruling us.”

Critics said they were puzzled that the police dropped their concerns about protests outside the embassy. They also asked why the British government was taking such a solicitous approach toward Beijing after an incident in 2022 when a pro-democracy demonstrator was dragged on to the grounds of the Chinese Consulate in Manchester and beaten by staff members.

“It is simply the wrong place for this embassy to be,” said Tom Tugendhat, a Conservative who served as security minister and is one of China’s most vocal critics in Parliament. “But it is also the wrong thing to have,” he said, adding, “We already have too much state repression, too much influence, too much aggression.”

Government officials pointed out that Mr. Lammy and Ms. Cooper did not offer the project unqualified support. In their letter, they said approval should be contingent on making a design change to the front of the embassy, where the Chinese want to construct a viewing area for the Cistercian ruins.

Opening part of the complex to the public, they said, would raise safety concerns and they urged China to surround it with a “hard perimeter.” A lawyer for the Chinese government told the public inquiry that China had no intention of altering the design — by a prominent British architect, David Chipperfield — to accommodate the ministers’ concerns.

At the inquiry and demonstration, there was a palpable sense that the embassy’s opponents had probably lost their battle. Some said their biggest hope now was a change in government in Britain. But Mr. Starmer’s Labour Party does not have to face the voters for more than four years.

“An American government wouldn’t permit it,” Mr. Golds said. “Can you imagine building a Chinese embassy right by Wall Street?”

Claire Moses contributed reporting from London, and Keith Bradsher from Beijing.