When the secretary of the treasury, Scott Bessent, traveled to Kyiv this month, he wanted President Volodymyr Zelensky to sign an agreement ceding mineral rights to the United States, delivering a quick win for the Trump administration.

But Mr. Zelensky had an ask of his own: a meeting with President Trump, to finalize a deal he hoped would ensure continued American support. “I hope that in the near future,” he said, “the document will be ready, and we can sign it during a meeting with President Trump.”

Through the crucible of three years of wartime leadership, Mr. Zelensky has mostly played weak hands wisely, like when he popped out of a bunker while his capital was bombed early in the war to film selfie videos rallying his nation and the world to resist. His showmanship also paid off in talks that kept billions of dollars worth of weapons and ammunition coming to his military.

But his approach to the Trump administration has fallen flat with the White House, engendering not empathy but hostility from the American president. His request for a presidential meeting flopped, becoming the latest example of a dramatic personal style that was once integral to his nation’s struggle but now looks more like a monkey wrench in dealing with the Trump administration.

It is hotly debated in Ukraine whether Mr. Zelensky erred in his messaging by responding to insults from Mr. Trump with a few snipes of his own, rather than diplomatically navigating the U.S. president’s attacks. Though Mr. Trump’s claim that Ukraine started the war with Russia was clearly false, Mr. Zelensky infuriated him by publicly correcting the record and claiming the American president was trapped in a “web of disinformation” peddled by the Kremlin.

Was his response a necessary defense of national interests? Or a misstep in dealing with an empowered leader who broaches no criticism and essentially holds Ukraine’s fate in his hands?

“If you are a statesman, you should think first about your country and not your ego,” said Kostiantyn Yelisieiev, a former diplomat and an architect of the playbook used by the former Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, for relations with Mr. Trump.

That approach was characterized by offers of business deals to U.S. companies and responding to Mr. Trump’s criticism of Ukraine with dry, bureaucratic posts on a foreign ministry website.

“It is not a good idea to criticize the leader of any nation, and particularly the leader of a nation doing the utmost to help you,” Mr. Yelisieiev said.

Many Ukrainians have cheered Mr. Zelensky for standing up to Mr. Trump, even if the personal enmity has become an impediment. On Sunday, Mr. Zelensky said he would step down as president if doing so would bring peace to Ukraine, though it was unclear if he was seriously considering that option.

Mr. Zelensky has received advice from alarmed European leaders to avoid escalation, including in a phone call last week with Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda.

“I suggested to President Zelensky to remain committed to the course of calm and constructive cooperation with President Donald Trump,” Mr. Duda wrote on X after the call. Of the American leader he said: “I have no doubt that President Trump is guided by a deep sense of responsibility for global stability and peace.”

Mr. Zelensky’s style has rankled before. In visits to Western capitals to drum up more aid for Ukraine, he lectured leaders to the point of annoyance. The U.K. defense secretary, Ben Wallace, at one point responded that “like it or not, people want to see a bit of gratitude.” And the Ukrainian president has frustrated American military leaders by ignoring their advice on battlefield strategy.

Now, with the future of American military aid and backing in any potential peace talks on the line, it threatens to pose a far bigger problem.

Over the past two weeks, Mr. Zelensky has declined to sign the minerals deal and said he would not accept any outcome of Mr. Trump’s negotiations if Ukraine were not represented. He also has been pursuing diplomatic efforts to shore up European support.

But even backers in Ukraine of this diplomatic strategy say Mr. Zelensky’s showmanship is an issue.

Rather than once laying out Ukraine’s position, Mr. Zelensky reiterated at a security conference in Munich, a news conference in Turkey’s capital and two news conferences in Kyiv that he would reject Mr. Trump’s negotiations if they exclude Ukraine.

The constant public insistence on Ukrainian involvement has irritated Mr. Trump. “He’s been at a meetings for three years, and nothing got done,” Mr. Trump said on Fox News Radio on Friday. “So, I don’t think he’s very important to be at meetings, to be honest with you.”

But the American leader often uses threats and strong-arm tactics as a way of driving things forward — and Mr. Trump may ultimately be fine having Mr. Zelensky involved in the process.

On Sunday, rather than dial down his rhetoric as some European leaders had advised, Mr. Zelensky did not back away from his earlier comment that Mr. Trump is surrounded by Russian “disinformation” about the war.

He pointed to efforts by Mr. Trump to inflate the amount of aid Washington has given to Ukraine. And Mr. Zelensky lingered over Mr. Trump’s belittling assertion that the Ukrainian leader has only a 4 percent approval rating — debunking the claim in what critics say was an unwise war of words.

This is not Ukraine’s first run-in with Mr. Trump. During Mr. Trump’s first term, Ukraine offered deals to buy coal and locomotives from Pennsylvania, handing him a public-relations win in creating jobs in an important electoral swing state. Ukrainian authorities also quietly shut down an investigation of under-the-table payments in Ukraine to Paul Manafort, who had been chairman of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. Mr. Manafort was later convicted of financial crimes in the United States and was pardoned by Mr. Trump.

That approach through Mr. Trump’s first term saw Ukraine get permission to buy Javelin anti-tank missiles — the first lethal military assistance granted to the country — and the imposition of sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream natural gas pipelines.

In Ukraine today, many say they want a voice in talks that will shape their future — and that Mr. Zelensky’s demand is not just a sign of a stubborn character but a broadly endorsed position in the country. There is little appetite for allowing Mr. Trump’s negotiating team to trade on the army’s achievements in fighting Russia to a near standstill after three years of war — without engagement from Kyiv.

“Ukrainians want peace more than anyone else, but our struggle and the resistance of the Ukrainian military is the only reason why we still exist as a nation, and as a subject of international relations,” said Lt. Pavlo Velychko, who is fighting in northeastern Ukraine. “It was not Zelensky who decided what to want or not to want, but all Ukrainians who stood up to fight.”

Germany is getting a new chancellor. Its current leader is heading out of power, but his party probably will stick around in a diminished capacity. And the Trump administration’s efforts to influence the vote don’t seem to have done much.

Sunday’s election, which came months ahead of schedule after the country’s governing coalition crumbled late last year, produced a few surprises and a lot of suspense.

By early Monday morning, the results seemed clear enough to indicate that the center-right Christian Democrats would be able to lead Germany with only one coalition partner, returning the country to the more durable two-party form of government that has led it for most of this century.

Here are five takeaways from the returns.

Merz is the likely new chancellor.

The largest German turnout in decades gave the most votes to the Christian Democrats and their sister party, the Christian Social Union. That almost certainly means the next chancellor will be Friedrich Merz, a businessman who flies his own private plane and has long coveted the top job.

Mr. Merz lost a power struggle to lead the Christian Democrats early in the 2000s, to Angela Merkel, who went on to serve 16 years as chancellor. Voters soured on her legacy, though, including an ill-fated plan to rely more heavily on Russia for natural gas and the decision to keep Germany’s borders open in 2015 and begin welcoming what would be millions of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

After the Christian Democrats fell out of power in 2021, Mr. Merz assumed leadership of the party and drove it to the right on migration and other issues. He was most comfortable campaigning on the economy, promising to peel back regulations and reduce taxes in a bid to reignite economic growth.

Mr. Merz is tall and sometimes stern, with a dry wit. Polls suggest that only about a third of the country believes he will make a good chancellor. Even some of his own voters said on Sunday that they are not enamored of him. But if he can quickly forge a government, he has a chance to step into a leadership vacuum in Europe as it struggles with the strains on its relationship with the United States under President Trump.

Trump and NATO were on the ballot.

When Vice President JD Vance gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference last week chiding the European political establishment for excluding extreme parties, he jolted the once-sleepy election campaign awake. If Mr. Trump’s threats of a trade war and less military protection had already been worrying Germans, the speech and the president’s subsequent U-turn on Ukraine caused a near panic in Germany.

Among German voters, 65 percent are worried that Germany is helpless against President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, according to a poll released on Sunday afternoon.

On Sunday night in a post-election debate between leaders, Mr. Merz quickly brought up the threat that Germany and Europe face because of the new U.S. administration.

“It has become clear that the Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this government, is largely indifferent to the fate of Europe,” he said. “I am very curious to see how we approach the NATO summit at the end of June — whether we are still talking about NATO in its current state or whether we need to establish an independent European defense capability much more quickly.”

Musk did not seem to sway voters.

The hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, doubled its vote share from four years ago, largely by appealing to voters upset by immigration. In the former East Germany, it finished first, ahead of Mr. Merz’s party.

The AfD’s vote share appeared to fall short of its high-water mark of support in polls from a year ago, however. Many analysts had been expecting a stronger showing, after a sequence of events that elevated the party and its signature issue.

The AfD received public support from Mr. Vance and an endorsement by the billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk. It sought to make political gains out of a series of deadly attacks by migrants in recent months, including in the final days of the campaign.

But that boon never materialized.

The surprise of the night

Reaction to the recent attacks and the support from Trump officials may have even mobilized a late burst of support to Die Linke, the party of Germany’s far left, which campaigned on a pro-immigration platform, some voters suggested in interviews on Sunday.

Two months ago Die Linke was dying. Sahra Wagenknecht, its most popular member, started a new party last year that was more friendly to Russia and tougher on migration. Many followed her, thinking that she was the future. Die Linke languished at 3 percent.

But Die Linke managed to turn things around in just months, thanks to a new pair of charismatic and social-media savvy leaders and the alienation that many young voters feel with mainstream parties. It surged to what appeared to be nearly 9 percent of the vote and more than 60 seats in Parliament.

Its campaign events started attracting so many young people that they became must-see affairs, as much dance party as political rally.

The party leaders became social media stars. Heidi Reichinnek, who is credited for much of the turnaround, told a crowd on Sunday night that they owed their success to the many volunteers who went from door to door talking to people about pocketbook issues. Ms. Reichinnek told supporters they “did everything right.”

Scholz is out, but his party marches on.

Despite polling predicting his third-place finish, Chancellor Olaf Scholz had insisted until the very end that he would somehow retain his job. He was wrong. His Social Democratic Party won a record-low 16 percent, coming in third place. Though Mr. Scholz will continue as a caretaker chancellor until Mr. Merz is sworn in, he is widely expected to step down from active politics.

His party will live on, though. It will very likely slip into the familiar role of junior partner in a government led by the conservatives. The so-called “grand coalition” supported Ms. Merkel through three of her four terms, and it could be Mr. Merz’s best shot for a stable government in a tumultuous time for Germany.

China’s leader said his country and Russia were “true friends who have been through thick and thin together” after a video call with President Vladimir V. Putin on Monday, according to Chinese state media.

The warm words attributed to Xi Jinping were clearly intended to dampen speculation that the Trump administration might succeed in driving a wedge between Beijing and Moscow.

The call came on the anniversary of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, after three years in which China has served as Russia’s most important foreign partner amid Moscow’s isolation in the West.

“History and reality show us that China and Russia are good neighbors who won’t move away, and true friends who have been through thick and thin together, support each other and develop together,” Mr. Xi was quoted as saying by Chinese state media.

Mr. Xi said relations between China and Russia were not “affected by any third party,” in what appeared to be an oblique reference to the United States. And he said the two countries’ foreign policies were for the “long term.”

The Kremlin issued a similarly cordial statement after the call, describing Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin’s conversation as “warm and friendly.” In a rebuff of the idea that President Trump could divide the two countries, the Kremlin added: “The leaders emphasized that the Russian-Chinese foreign policy link is the most important stabilizing factor in world affairs,” and said the relationship was “not subject to external influence.”

The call was the second between Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin in just over a month, coming less than two weeks after Mr. Trump upended U.S. strategy toward Russia by holding a phone call with Mr. Putin and appearing to side with him over the war in Ukraine. Mr. Trump blamed Ukraine for instigating Russia’s invasion, called President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine a “dictator” and excluded Kyiv from peace negotiations.

Mr. Trump’s decision to side so favorably with Mr. Putin on the war has fueled speculation that Washington was aiming to split Russia and China, a country that some senior Trump officials consider a far more serious threat to U.S. interests.

Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, told a panel earlier this month in Munich that the Trump administration was hoping to “force” Mr. Putin to fray his ties with North Korea, Iran and China.

Analysts, however, have expressed skepticism that China and Russia can be driven apart in what is being called a “reverse Nixon,” a reference to President Nixon’s rapprochement with Beijing in 1972 that was aimed at exploiting the worsening relations between China and the Soviet Union.

Unlike 53 years ago, ties between China and Russia today are at a high. Shortly before the invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin heralded a “no limits” partnership. Since then, China has sustained Russia’s war machine with oil purchases and exports of dual use technologies.

Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin also share an ideological opposition to the West. They blame the United States for holding back their global ambitions, and promote a reshaping of the global order to weaken Washington’s dominance.

“There’s strategic and geopolitical alignment for this relationship,” said Sergey Radchenko, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who specializes in Chinese-Russian relations. “They don’t see eye to eye on everything, but I think they both realize they need each other.”

Mr. Radchenko said Beijing was probably feeling uncomfortable with Mr. Trump’s bid to court Mr. Putin, but that it was unlikely that Mr. Putin would see his interests better served by aligning more closely with the United States over China.

“The idea that Putin can be manipulated as some kind of weapon against China, I think that’s naïve on the part of the Trump administration,” he said.

Mr. Xi is set to visit Moscow in May to attend the commemorations of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, according to Russian state media.

The Kremlin said in a statement that Mr. Putin had informed Mr. Xi during their call about “recent Russian-American contacts.” It also said China had “expressed support for the dialogue between Russia and the United States that has begun, as well as readiness to contribute to the search for a peaceful settlement of the Ukrainian conflict.”

In the comments published by Chinese state media, Mr. Xi said he was “pleased” that Russia had started negotiations with “other parties” to end the “Ukrainian crisis.”

China has yet to describe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “war.”

Amy Chang Chien contributed research.

When Israel and Hamas agreed to a six-week cease-fire in January, there were hopes that it would evolve into a longer and more stable truce.

Now, those hopes are dwindling.

Both sides have accused each other of breaking the terms of the existing deal, which have allowed for the exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners. Over the weekend, Israel delayed the release of several hundred prisoners, protesting the humiliating manner in which Hamas had paraded hostages before handing them over.

With just days before the current truce elapses on Sunday, the sides have yet to begin negotiations for an extension.

Steve Witkoff, the Mideast envoy for the Trump administration, said he would return to the region on Wednesday to push for a new truce.

While a brief extension is possible, the likelihood of a long-term arrangement — preventing the revival of fighting — seems remote.

Both sides have preconditions that make it hard to reach a permanent resolution. Israel’s leaders say they will only end the war once Hamas no longer exerts military and political power in Gaza. Hamas has indicated it could give up some civil responsibilities but its leaders have largely dismissed the idea of disarmament, at least in public.

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Pope Francis was resting on Monday at the Rome hospital where he has spent the past 10 days with pneumonia, a complex infection and now kidney problems that have all left him in critical condition, the Vatican said.

The Vatican said in a statement on Monday morning that “the night went well, the Pope slept and is now resting,” but it did not provide additional information about the health of the 88-year-old pontiff.

Officials were expected to give an update on his condition on Monday evening, a day after the Vatican said he was also suffering from “initial, mild kidney failure.”

At the moment, the kidney issues are “under control,” the Vatican said. There had been no repeat of the “asthmatic respiratory crisis” that the pope experienced on Saturday, it said.

The pope was “alert and well oriented,” and tests showed that his anemia had improved thanks to blood transfusions, the Vatican said, adding that he was still receiving high flows of supplemental oxygen.

Francis, who as a young man had part of a lung removed, has suffered a series of health conditions in recent years, but this is his longest hospitalization for a lung infection.

Sergio Alfieri, a surgeon who is on the pope’s medical team, said on Friday that the pope had told him that he was aware of his own fragility and that “both doors are open.”

An older person hospitalized for pneumonia is in a risky situation from the start. The American Thoracic Society reports that pneumonia confers a greater risk of death in older patients than any other reason for hospitalization.

And kidney failure is a common and particularly ominous sign in older people hospitalized with pneumonia, said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, San Francisco.

He added that an older patient hospitalized with pneumonia could develop kidney failure because of the pneumonia infection, which causes inflammation as the body tries to fight the disease, or low blood pressure or low levels of oxygen in his blood. Some antibiotics can also affect kidney function.

But whatever the cause, the prognosis is poor. A recent study found that more than a third of hospitalized geriatric patients with pneumonia developed kidney failure, and that more than half of them died, as compared to similar patients whose kidneys did not fail.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, in his homily on Sunday at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, said that Francis was “in very, very fragile health and probably close to death,” as he urged the faithful to pray for the ailing pope.

Many around the world have gathered to pray for Francis, who is the spiritual leader of almost 1.4 billion Roman Catholics. From near the Policlinico Agostino Gemelli hospital in Rome, where the pope is being treated in a dedicated apartment for popes, to South Korea, to his native Argentina, the faithful have held vigils and prayers for the pontiff.