Israeli forces launched deadly aerial attacks across the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, ending a temporary cease-fire with Hamas that began in January and raising the prospect of a return to all-out war.

More than 400 people, including children, were killed in the strikes, Gaza’s health ministry said. Those numbers did not distinguish between civilians and combatants — but the relentless Israeli bombardment produced one of the war’s deadliest single-day tolls.

The attacks came after weeks of fruitless negotiations aimed at extending the fragile cease-fire, which paused 15 months of devastating fighting in the territory. The truce’s first phase expired in early March, but it had largely held as diplomats worked to broker an extension to free the surviving Israeli hostages and end the war.

The office of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said he had ordered the military operation after Hamas’s “repeated refusal” to release the remaining captives seized in the Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel and the bodies of those hostages who have died. Of the 59 remaining in Gaza, fewer than half are believed to be alive.

In an address later on Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu suggested that more Israeli attacks in Gaza were coming and would be carried out in tandem with negotiations with Hamas.

“This is just the beginning,” he said. “We will keep fighting to achieve all of the war’s objectives.”

Hamas officials argued that Israel had brazenly overturned the truce, but did not immediately respond militarily to the strikes. It was unclear whether the Palestinian armed group — badly weakened after more than a year of war — would strike back or head to the negotiating table.

Suhail al-Hindi, a member of Hamas’s political office, said the group still hoped to restore the cease-fire but reserved the right to respond. “How to respond is left to those on the ground,” he said in a phone interview. “They know and understand how to respond to the occupation.”

Gideon Saar, Israel’s foreign minister, said the decision to strike had been made several days ago, after Hamas rejected two proposals offered by Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy.

“This is not a one-day operation,” Mr. Saar said in a speech on Tuesday in Jerusalem. “We will pursue military action in the days to come. We found ourselves in a dead end, with no hostages released and no military action. This situation cannot continue.”

In Israel, relatives of the hostages said the renewed Israeli attacks had heightened their fears that the remaining captives might never return alive. They accused Mr. Netanyahu and his government of abandoning the hostages, and some gathered in rallies demanding an immediate deal with Hamas to secure their freedom.

“Military action endangers hostages’ lives and directly harms them,” Alexander Troufanov, a hostage freed during the recent truce, told a crowd in Tel Aviv. “But this morning, I was horrified to find that decision makers choose not to listen.”

The hostages in Gaza “are going through hell because of the decision to return to fighting,” he added.

The Trump administration — which has been seeking to broker a deal between Israel and Hamas — appeared to back Israel’s decision to resume wide-scale attacks in Gaza. Karoline Leavitt, the White House’s press secretary, said Israel had consulted with the United States before launching its assault.

Brian Hughes, a spokesman for the National Security Council in Washington, blamed Hamas for Israel’s renewed attacks, saying in a statement on Tuesday that “Hamas could have released hostages to extend the cease-fire but instead chose refusal and war.”

The Israeli airstrikes in Gaza began slightly before 2:30 a.m. local time. Their ferocity recalled the war’s earliest days, when Israel launched heavy attacks in the enclave. Images from the territory showed people using flashlights to search through the rubble of flattened buildings, bodies lined up in bags and distraught families fleeing with their belongings packed on trucks.

Ramez Souri, a resident of Gaza City, in the north of the enclave, said he had awakened to the sound of explosions, followed by the rush of ambulances.

“All of Gaza shook,” Mr. Souri said.

More than 48,000 Gazans have been killed since the beginning of the war, according to the Gaza health ministry, and millions have been displaced.

Many Gazans had returned to their devastated neighborhoods during the cease-fire, said Mahmoud Basal, a spokesman for the Palestinian Civil Defense. They were sheltering together in the few homes that remained standing, he said.

“There are entire families that were buried under the rubble,” Mr. Basal said.

UNICEF said that among those killed were 130 children, the largest single-day child death toll in the past year in Gaza. The airstrikes hit shelters where they were sleeping with their families, UNICEF said.

Suzanne Abu Daqqa, who lives in Abasan, a southern suburb of Khan Younis, described a sudden wave of explosions in the middle of the night. She said she rushed to check the news, as did her family.

“Then we saw it wasn’t just in our neighborhood — it was all over Gaza,” Ms. Abu Daqqa said.

Some of the bombs hit Abasan, she said. On Tuesday morning, the Israeli military called on residents of the area to evacuate, calling it a “dangerous combat zone.”

Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said the bombing had targeted “Hamas military commanders, officials in Hamas’s leadership and terrorist infrastructure.”

Hamas said that two of the group’s senior officials killed had been members of its political bureau. Others held senior security roles, including one who was the director of Hamas’s feared internal security agency. Another militant group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, also said the spokesman for its military wing had been killed.

Before the airstrikes began, Israel and Hamas had been trying to reach an agreement on the second phase of the truce. During the first phase, Hamas released more than 30 hostages, and the remains of eight others, in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

During the second phase, Israeli forces were to fully withdraw from Gaza and Hamas was to release the surviving hostages seized during the 2023 attack in which militants killed about 1,200 people in Israel, abducted 251 people and ignited the fighting.

The two sides have not been able to agree on the second phase of the cease-fire. Israel is still vowing to destroy Hamas and is insisting on the demilitarization of Gaza. Hamas has largely refused to disband its armed battalions.

Critics of Mr. Netanyahu have argued that the prime minister has avoided a viable agreement with Hamas to end the war and free more hostages in order to preserve his political coalition, which includes far-right supporters of long-term Israeli rule in Gaza.

On Tuesday, Itamar Ben-Gvir announced that his far-right Jewish Power party would rejoin Mr. Netanyahu’s government to support the renewed offensive. In January, Mr. Ben-Gvir left in protest of the cease-fire with Hamas. Once approved, his party’s lawmakers would bolster Mr. Netanyahu’s thin majority in Parliament.

Daniel B. Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, said on Tuesday: “Hamas’s insistence on holding on to hostages as leverage, and Netanyahu’s politically driven refusal to proceed with Phase 2 of the cease-fire, which called for an end to the war and the release of all living hostages, led to this escalation.”

Israel has killed thousands of Hamas’s fighters and destroyed much of its tunnel network, which had been used, among other things, to store weapons. Hamas’s ability to fire rockets at Israel has also been undermined.

Mr. Saar, the Israeli foreign minister, suggested that Israel would return to the negotiating table if Hamas made major concessions over Gaza’s future.

“If we could achieve the same goals in a different way, fine,” he said. “But if it’s impossible to advance that way, you resume military operations.”

Hamas officials have vowed that would not happen.

“War and destruction will not bring the enemy what they failed to get through negotiations,” Izzat al-Rishq, a Hamas official, said.

Reporting was contributed by Adam Rasgon, Ephrat Livni, Eric Schmitt, Julian E. Barnes, Hiba Yazbek and Johnatan Reiss.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia agreed for the first time on Tuesday to a limited cease-fire that would stop strikes on energy infrastructure, as long as Ukraine does the same, the Kremlin said in a statement.

But in a two-and-a-half-hour phone call with President Trump, the Russian leader declined for now to agree to a broader 30-day halt in fighting that U.S. and Ukrainian officials had proposed, meaning that the attacks on Ukrainian civilians, cities and ports will continue as the two sides vie for territory and an upper hand in negotiations.

Still, if strikes on energy infrastructure by both sides indeed stop, it would mark the first mutually agreed suspension of attacks in the three-year war, which the White House characterized as a first step toward a broader peace. But privately, some administration officials acknowledged that Mr. Putin appeared to be stalling, agreeing to just enough to appear to be engaged in peace talks, while pressing his advantage on the battlefield.

A cease-fire for energy targets would not only benefit Ukraine, which has struggled for years with Russia’s repeated attacks on its energy grid. It would also come as a relief to the Kremlin: Ukraine has conducted extensive strikes on oil and gas facilities deep into the Russian heartland, jeopardizing Moscow’s most crucial stream of state revenue.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said he was awaiting a phone call from Mr. Trump to find out the details of his discussion with Mr. Putin, but noted he was open to a truce on strikes targeting energy infrastructure.

“Russia and Ukraine, through the mediation of the U.S., can agree not to attack energy infrastructure,” he told the Ukrainian public broadcaster, Suspilne, Tuesday night. “Our side will support this. But it cannot be the case that Russia attacks our energy sector and we remain silent. We will respond.”

In a later statement, he said Mr. Putin had “effectively rejected the proposal for a full cease-fire,” and accused Russia of continuing attacks, including a drone strike on a hospital in the northeastern city of Sumy. His claim could not be independently confirmed.

The American and Russian accounts of the call displayed the gulf that remains. Mr. Putin insisted that a long-lasting peace depended on a complete cessation of foreign military and intelligence assistance to Kyiv, the Kremlin said.

In essence, Mr. Putin was demanding an end to all of the military support for Ukraine that the United States and its allies have provided for three years. Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance have been highly critical of the billions of dollars that the United States has spent on the war, but the White House made no reference to that part of the discussion in its vaguely worded account of the conversation. Europe has committed to even more aid.

Nor did the White House describe any discussions over what territory Russia might retain after its seizure of about 20 percent of Ukraine’s land, beginning with the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.

The result of the call seemed to fall well short of what Mr. Trump had been hoping for in his outreach to Moscow, after several days of optimistic-sounding pronouncements from the White House that peace was within reach. Despite Mr. Trump’s public optimism, which included an exclamation-mark-filled social media post, there was no date set for a meeting between the two presidents. There was no statement of common principles to end the war.

But there were gestures of good will. Mr. Putin said Russia would release 23 seriously wounded Ukrainian soldiers and would carry out a prisoner exchange with Ukraine later this month, consisting of 175 prisoners from each side, the Kremlin said.

The negotiations came after a remarkable public breach between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky that played directly into Mr. Putin’s hands. The Trump administration temporarily suspended military and intelligence aid to Ukraine earlier this month after an explosive confrontation between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky in the Oval Office. Washington restored the flow of aid after U.S. and Ukrainian officials met in Saudi Arabia and agreed to a comprehensive 30-day cease-fire proposal. The Trump administration then brought the proposal to Moscow.

Mr. Putin, keen to avoid upsetting the Kremlin’s rapid rapprochement with the White House, said that the idea was “correct” and that Russia supported it in principle. But he proceeded to lay out conditions known to be unacceptable to Kyiv.

According to the Kremlin, the Russian leader reiterated those concerns during the call on Tuesday. Mr. Putin raised the issue of “ensuring effective control” to implement the cease-fire across a lengthy front, the Kremlin said. The Russian leader also said Ukraine would need to pause personnel mobilization and rearmament, a condition Ukraine has said it will not accept.

On Sunday night, Mr. Trump told reporters he expected much of the discussion would focus on territory that would be ceded to Russia, and on control of nuclear power plants. That seemed to suggest he wanted to discuss the fate of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, which is now occupied by Russian forces.

But neither the Kremlin nor the White House mentioned any discussions about the power plant or the territory Russia might retain.

While Washington and Moscow committed last month to normalizing their diplomatic missions, after years of tit-for-tat expulsions and closures, and midlevel U.S. and Russian officials held talks on the issue in late February. The White House and the Kremlin did not mention the matter, however, in their summaries of the call.

In a White House statement and a separate post by Mr. Trump on Truth Social, Washington said Mr. Putin had agreed to cease strikes on “energy and infrastructure.” But the Kremlin, in its statement, said “energy infrastructure.” It was not clear how the moratorium on energy strikes, if it goes into effect, would be enforced.

The Kremlin said the two leaders also expressed support for a broader normalization in relations between the United States and Russia, and discussed possible future economic cooperation, including in the energy sector. Mr. Trump agreed to Mr. Putin’s idea to hold hockey tournaments in their respective countries, in which American and Russian professional players would compete, the Kremlin added.

The Trump administration’s avoidance of discussing the details, including any discussion the two men may have had on land concessions they would press Mr. Zelensky to make in the name of ending the fighting, may be designed to keep the maximum flexibility in the negotiating room. But it may also reflect a desire to avoid another open confrontation with Mr. Zelensky.

In recent days senior Ukrainian officials have described three red lines going into negotiations: Kyiv will never formally accept Russian sovereignty over occupied Ukrainian territory, agree to neutral status or agree to reduce the size of its armed forces. Officials have also said they must obtain security guarantees as part of any settlement. France and Britain, among others, have offered to send troops to Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping or “trip wire” force, but the Kremlin has rejected the idea. And military officials question whether such a force is feasible if the United States does not agree to back up the European effort in a crisis.

Speaking to journalists on Saturday, Mr. Zelensky said Ukraine would not recognize occupied territory as Russian “under any circumstances,” adding that he understood “that this is precisely what the Russians need, and it will insist on terms it knows Ukraine cannot accept.” Last November, Mr. Zelensky conceded not all territory could be won back by force, and may have to remain under de facto Russian control after a settlement.

In its statement, the White House focused on issues beyond Ukraine, saying that Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin “spoke broadly about the Middle East as a region of potential cooperation” and “the need to stop proliferation of strategic weapons.” The sole remaining nuclear arms limitation treaty between the United States and Russia expires next February, and negotiations on a replacement have not begun. In his first term, Mr. Trump said he would not enter a new arms control treaty without China also signing on to limits, though Beijing has expressed no interest as it expands its arsenal.

For Mr. Trump, a Ukraine cease-fire is a first step to a much broader normalization of relations with Russia, which he is pursuing even while most of his NATO allies follow the strategy of the past three years: sanctions and containment of Russia, and continued aid for Ukraine.

Ukrainian officials have accused Mr. Putin of playing for time in order to maintain leverage in negotiations, and allow Russia time to continue bombarding Ukrainian cities and towns.

In its statement, the White House said that Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin had agreed to begin “technical negotiations” over a broader maritime cease-fire in the Black Sea, where Russian ships can barely operate now, and a “full cease-fire and permanent peace.” It said those talks would “begin immediately in the Middle East.”

Marc Santora and Constant Méheut contributed reporting from Kyiv.

The day her father and dozens of other men were convicted of raping her mother in a trial that had gripped France was an acute personal tragedy to Caroline Darian.

She escaped the Avignon courthouse and was enveloped in a giant crowd of women blocking traffic and chanting their love and gratitude for her and her mother, Gisèle Pelicot, who had become a feminist icon in France for insisting the trial against her husband and 50 other men be public and refusing to feel ashamed as a rape victim.

But Ms. Darian did not hear them. She was overwhelmed by despair.

The trial had ended and she hadn’t gotten the answers she’d hoped for from her father, Dominique Pelicot, who she believes drugged and raped her, too.

“Dominique was not tried for what he did to his daughter,” Ms. Darian, 46, said in a recent interview over lunch at a Parisian restaurant off the Champs-Élysées. “He wasn’t even confronted adequately for what he did to his daughter.”

The trial that led to the convictions of 51 men forensically inspected the horror Mr. Pelicot inflicted upon his wife over almost a decade, as he mixed sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication into her drink and food and then, when she was deeply passed out, dressed her up in lingerie and invited strangers to come over and join him in raping her while he took photos and filmed.

But the suspicions of his only daughter, Caroline, were little more than a sidelight of the trial. Instead of coming away with a degree of healing, Ms. Darian felt deeply wounded.

“My case, in that court, it was like it didn’t exist,” said Ms. Darian, who uses a pen name.

“It was terrible,” she said.

This month she filed her own police complaint against her father for rape and sexual assault. It coincided with the publication of Ms. Darian’s second book about her father’s crimes and the cataclysmic impact they’ve had on her life.

Her first book, a raw journal documenting the intimate horror she suffered in the year after her father’s arrest, is being released in the United States on Tuesday as “I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again.” She agreed to an interview with The New York Times in conjunction with its publication.

At the heart of her case are two intimate photos that her father had erased but that forensic investigators managed to retrieve from Mr. Pelicot’s electronics. Both capture Ms. Darian asleep in bed, with the lights on and the covers pulled back to reveal her beige underwear.

The underwear, Ms. Darian told the court, was not hers. She said that she had no recollection of the photos being taken and that she was a light sleeper. She believes that she, too, was drugged, and that her father used the same modus operandi on her as he had on her mother.

During the trial, Mr. Pelicot at first denied having taken the photos and said he did not believe they were of his daughter. Later, he said he had taken them because he was being blackmailed.

Investigators also found evidence of an erased folder with the title, “My naked daughter” and photo collages of Ms. Darian and Ms. Pelicot, both naked, that Mr. Pelicot had shared with strangers online. In one exchange on Skype, he referred to his “trapped daughter.”

But when it came to his daughter, he was convicted only on charges of having taken the intimate photos without her permission.

Ms. Darian is convinced they are evidence of much more serious crimes that investigators missed or ignored, overwhelmed by her mother’s case.

Her 30-page police complaint, seen by The New York Times, includes material found by investigators though not brought up in the trial.

They include transcripts of Skype interactions Mr. Pelicot had with another user in 2020 when he had shared photo montages. After the user admired his daughter, Mr. Pelicot wrote: “It’s been more than eight years I’ve been offering her up like this. Do you want to see her when she was 30?”

Mr. Pelicot’s lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, said she had not seen the complaint yet. She noted that the general prosecutor in last year’s trial had acknowledged Ms. Darian’s grievances but had said there were not enough “objective elements” to prosecute Mr. Pelicot for them.

During the trial, Mr. Pelicot repeatedly said that he had never drugged his daughter. He denied sexually touching her or any of his children and grandchildren, the eldest of whom has also filed a police complaint that he, too, was sexually abused by Mr. Pelicot.

Before their father’s arrest, neither she nor her brothers suspected he was a sexual predator, they told the court. They were a tight-knit family, often gathering for vacations down in Provence, where Mr. and Ms. Pelicot had retired. Their parents had been together for 50 years and seemed very happy.

His arrest, and his admission to crimes against their mother, caused a sudden profound shock. Ms. Darian began suffering panic attacks. She stopped sleeping and was briefly hospitalized in a psychiatric ward.

“Until I was 41, I thought my father was a good, kind person,” Ms. Darian said. “In 2020, all our foundations as children crumbled.”

In 2019, Ms. Darian was crippled with pain from an anal tear that doctors could not explain and that required three operations, according to her police complaint. She now believes it was probably caused by her father or men he may have invited to rape her.

In addition to the police complaint for sexual abuse filed by his eldest grandson, Mr. Pelicot has also been indicted in two cold cases, involving young female real estate agents in the 1990s. The first was raped and murdered; the second managed to escape an attempted rape and took refuge in a closet.

During the trial, while Ms. Pelicot remained calm and emotionally detached, Ms. Darian was a cyclone of emotion. Anger and suffering rose off her in waves. Part way through the trial, she announced on Instagram that she was checking herself into a clinic “to be able to sleep again.”

“You are lying — you don’t have the courage to tell the truth,” she hollered near the end of the trial, when her father once again denied having abused her. “You will die with your lies, alone with your lies.”

Remembering that day months later over lunch, Ms. Darian broke into tears. Her father’s refusal to acknowledge the evidence and explain it, she said, was “the ultimate betrayal.”

“He owed me the truth,” she said. “I am not just any victim. I was his daughter.”

Ms. Darian has lost not just her father, but her mother, too. The two are no longer speaking, she said. While she is sure her father abused her, her mother was more equivocal. When asked in court, she responded only that “it could not be ruled out.”

To Ms. Darian, it felt like abandonment.

“My relationship with my mother will never be the same again,” she said.

Gisèle Pelicot has refused all interview requests. One of her lawyers says said she won’t speak publicly before appeals of the convictions are heard, if ever.

Ms. Darian’s younger brother, Florian Pelicot, 38, said he believed their mother showed enormous strength in facing the horrors her husband, and dozens of other men, inflicted upon her. Opening her mind to his sister’s accusations, he thinks, “would have made her collapse.”

“You can’t save yourself and rebuild yourself and also help your children to rebuild themselves too,” he said.

Florian Pelicot emerged from the trial with his own deep wounds: His 18-year marriage ended, and he has started the process of getting a paternity test after his father raised doubts he was his son during one of his pretrial interviews with the investigating judge, he said.

Near the end of the trial, Ms. Darian said she darted across the courtroom to the glass box for the accused during a recess for a quick last private word with the man who had been her father.

She told him that their relationship was over, she said, but that her pursuit of the truth was not.

“I’ll go all the way for my personal dignity,” she said in the interview. “Because I know I’m not wrong. I know that he must have done some very serious things. And I’ll get to the bottom of it.”

Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting from Paris.

The guards wore name tags that read “Hitler” and “Demon” and covered their faces with ski masks. The Americans in the Venezuelan prison were confined to cement cells, beaten, pepper-sprayed and subjected to what one prisoner called “psychological torture.”

Three months into their capture, the Americans were so filled with anger that they rebelled. They banged cell walls and kicked doors, they said, as other prisoners joined in, hundreds of them screaming for freedom until the concrete began to crack.

“Are you with me, my Venezuelans?” one of the prisoners, Gregory David Werber, yelled, a fellow inmate recalled.

“We are with you, gringo!” they yelled back.

Six American prisoners came home from Venezuela in late January, their freedom secured after an unusual and highly public visit by a Trump administration official to Caracas, the capital. Critics said the meeting between Richard Grenell, a special envoy, and Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s autocrat, gave legitimacy to a leader accused of widespread human rights abuses and stealing a recent election.

Others pointed out that it got the Americans home.

Now free and adjusting to their new lives, three of the former prisoners spoke at length with The New York Times about their detention, providing the most detailed look yet at their experiences.

Some described being hooded, handcuffed and kidnapped at legal border crossings after trying to enter as tourists. All offered a rare inside view of Mr. Maduro’s expanding strategy to push global leaders to do what he wants: He has amassed dozens of prisoners from around the world to use as leverage in negotiations.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia agreed on Tuesday during a phone call with President Trump to temporarily halt strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, according to the Kremlin.

That fell short of the unconditional 30-day cease-fire that Ukraine had already agreed to, at the urging of the Trump administration.

The Kremlin said on Tuesday that the two leaders spoke for more than two hours. It was their first known conversation since Ukraine agreed to support a U.S.-backed monthlong cease-fire, as long as Russia does the same. While Mr. Trump has stated his desire to broker a truce as quickly as possible, Mr. Putin has seemed to be seeking more concessions.

Tuesday evening, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said President Putin had “effectively rejected the proposal for a full cease-fire” backed by the U.S. and Ukraine.

Mr. Putin made “a number of significant points” about the 30-day cease-fire proposal in the call, according to Tass. That included reiterating to Mr. Trump that a complete cessation of military aid to Kyiv is the key condition for solving the conflict, Tass added.

The cease-fire proposal on the table

A week ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Michael Waltz, the U.S. national security adviser, sat down for talks in Saudi Arabia with a delegation led by Andriy Yermak, the Ukrainian president’s chief of staff, Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha and Defense Minister Rustem Umerov.

After more than eight hours of talks, the United States and Ukraine issued a joint statement saying that Kyiv would support the Trump administration’s proposal for a 30-day cease-fire with Russia, subject to Russia’s approval. The United States said it would immediately resume providing military aid and intelligence to Ukraine, which the Trump administration had suspended after an explosive U.S.-Ukraine meeting at the White House.

The United States and Ukraine also agreed to conclude “as soon as possible” a deal to develop Ukraine’s critical mineral resources.

Russia’s stance

Before his call with Mr. Trump, the Russian leader had said the idea for a cease-fire was “the right one and we definitely support it” — but laid out numerous conditions that could delay or derail any truce. That included demands that Ukraine cease mobilizing new soldiers, training troops or importing weapons for the duration of any pause in fighting.

Ukrainian officials have dismissed Mr. Putin’s stance as a cynical ploy to use a pause in fighting to strengthen Russian forces, while preventing Ukraine from doing the same.

While the Russian description of Tuesday’s two-hour conversation said that Mr. Putin reiterated to Mr. Trump that a complete cessation of military aid to Kyiv is the key condition for ending the conflict, the White House made no mention of that demand, or any discussions over what territory Russia might retain after its illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its seizure of about 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory.

Conversation topics

Mr. Trump had said on Sunday night that he expected to discuss territorial issues with Mr. Putin as well as the fate of Ukrainian power plants. He also noted that there had already been discussions about “dividing up certain assets.”

“We want to see if we can bring that war to an end,” Mr. Trump said. “Maybe we can. Maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance.”

Mr. Trump did not elaborate on what he meant by assets or power plants, but his comments came on the same day Mr. Witkoff mentioned a “nuclear reactor” in an interview with CBS News.

That appeared be a reference to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in southern Ukraine, which Russia seized early in the war and still controls. The six-reactor plant is Europe’s largest, and its proximity to frontline fighting has long raised concerns about the risk of a radiological disaster.

It was not immediately clear, though, whether discussion about the power plant would focus on Russia giving it up — or finding a way to keep it under any truce.

The power plant sits near the Dnipro River in Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia region, which Russia has declared it annexed, despite controlling only part of its territory. Surrendering the plant to Ukraine would mean ceding territory Russia considers its own. It would also give Kyiv’s troops a foothold in a Russian-controlled area that has been relatively protected from Ukrainian attacks thanks to the natural barrier of the large Dnipro River.

At the same time, energy experts say, the nuclear plant is in poor condition after three years of war and restoring full operations would require a lot of time and investment from Russia. That could mean Russia might see an incentive to try trading it in negotiations for something else, such as the easing of Western sanctions on the Russian economy, experts say.

State of the war

Mr. Zelensky has accused Mr. Putin of stalling so that Russia’s army can advance on the battlefield and strengthen his hand in cease-fire talks.

Moscow’s push to drive out Ukrainian troops from most of the Kursk region of Russia in recent days has deprived Kyiv of an important bargaining chip in any potential negotiations.

The moves in Kursk give Russia an opportunity to show Mr. Trump that it holds the momentum on the battlefield. And battlefield maps compiled by both Russian and Western groups analyzing combat footage and satellite images show that Russian forces have already crossed into Ukraine’s Sumy region from Kursk, in what analysts say may be an effort to flank and encircle the remaining Ukrainian troops in Kursk or open a new front in the war.

Mr. Zelensky has accused Russia to preparing to mount a larger offensive into the Sumy region, which is home to hundreds of thousands of people.

Despite the setbacks in Kursk, Kyiv’s forces have stalled a Russian offensive in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine and started to win back small patches of land, according to military analysts and Ukrainian soldiers. Military analysts, however, have been debating whether, after more than 15 months on the offensive, Russian brigades are exhausted or are regrouping for a renewed push.

Recent U.S.-Ukraine tensions

Since taking office, Mr. Trump has realigned American foreign policy seemingly in Russia’s favor — including by echoing a Kremlin talking point that blamed Kyiv for starting the war.

That raised alarm in Ukraine about whether Mr. Trump would taper the flow of U.S. military assistance. Strain in the relationship burst into public view on Feb. 28, when Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated Mr. Zelensky in the Oval Office, saying he was not grateful enough for U.S. support.

Since then, Ukraine has sought to smooth over relations with the Trump administration, and Mr. Zelensky has repeatedly expressed gratitude for American assistance.

Concessions and guarantees

Mr. Rubio has said that Ukraine would have to make concessions over land that Russia had taken since 2014 as part of any agreement to end the war. But he also said that it would be imperative in talks with Moscow to determine what Russia was willing to concede.

Before agreeing to the U.S.-backed proposal for an unconditional cease-fire, Ukraine had insisted that any cease-fire include security guarantees, but there has been no indication since that any such guarantees would be provided before any interim cease-fire would take effect.

European allies have pledged further support to Kyiv. Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain has said he would continue pressing Mr. Trump for American security guarantees — a lobbying effort that he shares with President Emmanuel Macron of France. Britain and France have already pledged to contribute troops to a peacekeeping force and are trying to enlist other countries across Europe to do the same.

Help may at last be on the way for the Nepali Sherpas who carry heavy loads for foreign climbers through treacherous sections of the world’s tallest peak.

When the main climbing season begins next month on Mount Everest, expedition companies will test drones that can ferry loads as heavy as 35 pounds in the high altitudes, bring back ladders used to set the climbing routes, and remove waste that is typically left behind.

Goods that would normally take seven hours to be transported by foot from Everest’s base camp to Camp I can be airlifted within 15 minutes. By lightening the Sherpas’ burdens, drone operators hope that the chances of fatal accidents — which have risen as climate change has accelerated snowmelt — can now be reduced.

“Sherpas bear enormous risks. The drone makes their task safer, faster and more efficient,” said Tshering Sherpa, whose organization, the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, is responsible for fixing the route through the deadly Khumbu Icefall, southwest of Everest’s summit.

For about a year, operators have been experimenting with two drones donated by their Chinese maker. The pilot test during this year’s Everest climbing season is seen as an important opportunity to persuade expedition agencies to invest in more of the devices, which could be used to carry climbing gear and essential items like oxygen cylinders.

While the upfront cost of the drones may be high, their proponents say they will eventually reduce agencies’ costs.

Among those who could benefit most are the experienced Sherpas known as “icefall doctors.” Before every climbing season, they assemble at the Everest base camp for the daunting mission of establishing a route through the shifting ice.

They carry heavy loads of ladders, fix them over crevasses and lay rope to climb up the ice wall. Once the ladders and ropes are set along the Khumbu Icefall to Camp II, other Sherpas ferry oxygen bottles, medicine and various essentials to high camps. Sherpas make this dangerous climb at least 40 times a season, according to expedition organizers.

When the icefall doctors made their way to the base camp early this month, they were eagerly awaiting the arrival of the drone pilots, who were still in Kathmandu, the Nepali capital, finishing flight clearance documentation.

“They are calling us to team up early,” said Milan Pandey, a drone pilot affiliated with AirLift, a startup drone company in Nepal.

The catalyst for the use of drones was the latest of the many deadly tragedies involving Sherpas on Everest. In 2023, three of the mountain guides were buried under an avalanche as they fixed rope for foreign climbers.

Their bodies could not be retrieved. Doing so could have damaged the ice block and endangered those trying to get the remains, said Mingma G. Sherpa, the managing director of Imagine Nepal, which led the expedition in which the Sherpas died.

His search for ways to improve safety drew him to Chinese expedition companies that were using drones on Muztagh Ata, a 24,757-foot peak in China near Pakistan’s border. The Chinese were using the vehicles to ferry climbing gear, food and other crucial items to Camp II and bring them down.

“The Chinese cooked food at base camp and sent it to Camp II of Muztagh Ata, where climbers could eat hot food,” Mr. Sherpa said. “I thought, why not use drones on Everest’s south side, especially the Khumbu Icefall section?”

At his invitation, a team from the Chinese drone maker DJI went to Nepal in the spring of 2024 to test two FlyCart 30 delivery drones.

The DJI team donated the drones to AirLift, the Nepalese startup. Since then, AirLift has been testing the drones’ limits in the most dangerous sections of Everest.

The drones’ proponents hope that they can do more than carry items. Since the shape of icefall keeps changing, icefall doctors struggle to locate the previous climbing route, which complicates setting the new route each season. Drone operators believe they will be able to pinpoint old routes using geolocation.

The devices could also help make up for the declining numbers of Sherpas. More are leaving because of the safety risks and better employment opportunities abroad.

But even with all the drones can offer, their price tag has given some expedition companies pause.

Once customs duties, batteries, a winch system and other parts are factored in, a DJI drone can cost more than $70,000 — a huge sum in a poor country like Nepal. Startups like AirLift are exploring options to assemble the drones inside Nepal, which they say could reduce their cost by more than half.

The miracle of a warm meal may ride on that cost-cutting effort.

During a trial run last year on Mount Ama Dablam, a Himalayan peak where drones were used to remove 1,300 pounds of waste, Dawa Jangbu Sherpa, a drone pilot, saw the potential of the vehicle firsthand. Food sent from base camp was still hot when it reached Camp I.

“It takes six hours if you follow the normal route to reach Camp I,” Mr. Sherpa said. “But the drone served food in six minutes.”

Canada has made a 6 billion Canadian dollar ($4.2 billion) deal with Australia to develop a cutting-edge radar for the Arctic that can detect hypersonic missiles and other threats over the curvature of the earth, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced on Tuesday.

Mr. Carney also announced hundreds of millions of dollars in new spending to carry out year-round military exercises in the Arctic and to build up vital infrastructure for the Indigenous communities that make up most of the population there.

The new Canadian funding and operational plans come amid a crisis in the U.S.-Canada relationship as a result of President Trump’s continued threats to crush the Canadian economy through tariffs and to annex it to the United States.

Mr. Trump has also expressed an interest in annexing Greenland, part of a broader play for dominance in the Arctic, where Russia and China are also flexing their muscle as the region emerges as a new frontier for global competition.

Mr. Carney’s announcement Tuesday signaled Canada’s renewed interest in asserting its sovereignty over its immense Arctic territory, amid intensifying and shifting geopolitical pressures that raise doubts about his country’s core defense alliance with the United States.

“Canada is, and forever will be, an Arctic nation,” Mr. Carney said during a four-hour stop in Iqaluit, near the Arctic Circle, the capital of the northern Canadian territory of Nunavut, on his way back to Ottawa from a quick visit to Europe.

“We are strong, united and sovereign.”

The new radar, which Australia has developed, is known as over-the-horizon-radar technology, and is expected to be delivered by 2029, said a senior Canadian official who was not authorized to speak to reporters on the record.

It will be deployed under NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the agreement between Canada and the United States to jointly manage and defend the skies over the two countries. The command was established in the early 1980s, when the prospect of Soviet missiles and bombers crossing the Arctic was considered the gravest threat to North America.

The decision to opt for Australia as a provider for the advanced radar technology was supported by the U.S. military, the senior Canadian official said, highlighting that, despite the now-rocky relationship between Canada and the United States, military cooperation has continued.

Developing military technology and maintaining personnel in the Arctic is a major challenge because of the extreme weather conditions. Conventional equipment does not work properly in Arctic conditions, and maintaining bases that can be staffed the entire year is a challenge because access to the area is limited.

Advancing Arctic defense has been a longstanding demand of Canada by the United States. Canada, which is also a member of NATO, has committed to spending more toward its overall defense budget to reach the threshold of 2 percent of its economic output — the NATO target for all member nations.

But as Canada tries to boost its military spending, it faces new challenges over the procurement of equipment.

Mr. Trump said last week that he would not allow Canada to use icebreakers that the United States has ordered unless it became the 51st U.S. state.

“If you’re a state, you can be part of the deal, but if you’re separate country, you’ve got to get your own icebreakers,” Mr. Trump said. That led to calls in Canada to cancel an order for F-35 aircraft from the United States.

Mr. Carney also announced on Tuesday that Canada had set aside 420 million Canadian dollars to carry out three to four new military exercises in different places in the Arctic, in order to enable it to maintain personnel there throughout the year.

He also said that the federal government would spend 253 million Canadian dollars to improve infrastructure for the local people, who are mostly Inuit. Nunavut, with a land area nearly the size of Mexico, has a population of about 37,000.

The German Parliament narrowly approved a plan on Tuesday to loosen government borrowing limits, allowing it to spend heavily on defense and infrastructure to offset America’s pivot away from Europe and try to end years of economic stagnation.

In a special session of Parliament on Tuesday, 513 lawmakers voted for the plan, two dozen more than the two-thirds majority required to amend the Constitution.

It was not the final vote on the plan, which also faces legal challenges. But it was a crucial hurdle and its passage was celebrated by the centrist lawmakers who hope it will allow Germany to shoulder a more powerful leadership role at a critical moment for Europe.

The centerpiece of the plan, pushed by Friedrich Merz, the likely next chancellor, relaxes what is colloquially known as the “debt brake,” a limit on government borrowing that Germany enshrined in its Constitution.

That brake has reduced German debt, but it has also kept the government from investing in roads, software, bridges, tanks and other areas. Lawmakers say that spending is now urgently needed to address declining German competitiveness and shrinking American security guarantees.

Here is a quick guide to the debt brake, how Mr. Merz and his allies want to change it, and what comes next.

What is the debt brake?

Like most wealthy nations, Germany borrows money to help balance its annual federal budget. But unlike some peers, most notably the United States, Germany has a Constitution that limits its yearly borrowing to just 0.35 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. There are exceptions for economic downturns and natural disasters.

German lawmakers have voted in recent years to circumvent the limits with some special pots of money, including emergency pandemic spending starting in 2020 and a recent bump in military spending. But by and large, the debt brake has constrained borrowing.

In 2009, when the debt brake was introduced, Germany, the United States and Britain had roughly similar levels of debt as a share of their economies. Since then, that share has soared in Britain and America, but fallen in Germany.

Why does Germany have it?

The debt brake was added to Germany’s Constitution after the country’s budget deficit grew during the 2008 financial crisis. It became a signature economic policy and a point of national pride.

But the country’s aversion to large deficits and debt predates the crisis. Its leaders borrowed heavily to help smooth reunification between West and East Germany in the early 1990s, with mixed economic effects. More notoriously, high government debt helped drive hyperinflation in the Weimar government of the 1920s, aiding the rise of Hitler.

That historical trauma has remained a neuralgic pain that has defined the public and political debate around government debt in Germany for generations.

Why change it now?

The debt brake didn’t just depress borrowing. Its critics say it also handcuffed German’s ability to spur its economy, invest in its future and lead in European security affairs.

German spending has lagged well behind its needs to upgrade its transportation networks, digitize its public services and make a host of other investments essential to its global competitiveness.

The country’s net public investment has been negative for the last 25 years, holding back economic growth, said Marcel Fratzscher, the president of the German Institute for Economic Research.

The brake was also a major reason German lawmakers spent relatively little on their military for decades, under the belief that the United States would continue to protect their country as it has since the end of World War II.

Now, releasing the debt brake has become urgent as the German economy continues to shrink and President Trump threatens to scale back or remove America’s security role in Europe.

“It’s now or never for a big spending increase,” Mr. Fratzscher said.

Even officials at Germany’s staid central bank, the Bundesbank, have called for changes to the debt brake to free up money for government investment to drive growth.

“Rarely in Germany’s postwar history has government investment been as necessary as it is today — and rarely since reunification have the potential returns been so promising,” economists at the Deutsche Bank Research Institute wrote last week.

“Germany has successfully used the good years of the past decade to create fiscal flexibility for more challenging times,” it added. “And times will likely remain challenging for the rest of the decade.”

The change was propelled as much as anything by strategic concerns.

“The reform of the debt brake is of central importance in view of the epochal change that the U.S.A. is no longer Germany’s reliable ally,” Anton Hofreiter, a member of Parliament for the Green Party, said in a text message this week.

With it, he said, “It is now possible to finance satellites, intelligence services, cyberdefense and support for Ukraine alongside the urgently needed upgrading of the Bundeswehr” — the German military.

What changes are lawmakers contemplating?

The agreement Mr. Merz struck with the Greens and the center-left Social Democrats creates an exemption from the debt brake for all spending on defense above 1 percent of gross domestic product.

It also defines “defense” broadly, to include domestic intelligence, aid to allies and other measures alongside weapons purchases. Effectively, Germany lawmakers could borrow whatever sums the government bond market would allow to fund those items.

Mr. Merz also agreed to create a new infrastructure fund of 500 billion euros — almost $550 billion — spread over 12 years, outside of the debt brake’s limits. Of that, €100 billion would be earmarked for projects to fight climate change.

What are the chances they succeed?

Good, but hurdles remain.

Having decided to change the Constitution to allow extra borrowing, Mr. Merz has taken the unusual step of passing the measure in the final days of a lame-duck Parliament, before he can even become chancellor.

After the success of the vote on Tuesday, the change still needs to be approved by the Federal Council of the States on Friday before it can go into effect. That, too, could turn out to be very close.

And even then, the plan faces legal challenges, including from the far-right party Alternative for Germany. Courts have refused to stop the vote thus far.

Lawmakers from the three big centrist parties supporting the package say they are confident they will prevail.

Hours before Parliament approved the measure, Lars Klingbeil, one of the leaders of the Social Democrats, told fellow lawmakers, “It was time for us to pursue a financial policy without dogmas, without ideologies, but to focus on growth, prosperity and security.”