Arab and Western countries, seeking to head off a major regional conflict in the Middle East, are urging Iran to show restraint after it vowed to attack Israel in retaliation for the killing of Hamas’s political leader in Tehran last week.

The diplomatic push by Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which have close ties to Washington, came as the United States, France and other countries have also been trying to lower tensions in the Middle East and renew stalled efforts to achieve a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip.

Anxiety across the region has been running high since an explosion in Tehran — widely attributed to Israel — killed Hamas’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, on July 31, just hours after an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon killed a top Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr.

Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon have vowed to retaliate for both killings. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has promised, in turn, to “exact a heavy price for any act of aggression against us, from whatever quarter.”

Hezbollah, the most powerful of Iran’s proxy forces, and Israel have been trading almost daily fire across the Israel-Lebanon border for months, and Israeli officials have suggested that an invasion of Lebanon could be coming, a prospect the White House and others have tried tamp down. A full-fledged war between Israel and Hezbollah, or one involving Iran directly, would be even more dangerous and destabilizing to the region.

As the region girds for the possibility of a wider war, Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman al-Safadi, has met twice over the last week with senior Iranian officials, including the newly elected Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, in a rare visit to Tehran.

“Jordan informed the Iranian brothers of its message in a clear manner,” Muhannad al-Mubaidin, Jordan’s minister of government communications, said in an interview. “We will not allow for our airspace or land to be used for any purpose. We are not willing to be a battlefield.”

Saudi Arabia on Wednesday convened an emergency meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a forum of Muslim countries, where the Saudi deputy foreign minister, Waleed El-Khereiji, called the assassination of Mr. Haniyeh a “blatant violation” of Iran’s sovereignty — the strongest official statement the kingdom has made on the killing.

“We have called for de-escalation by all parties involved and an immediate end to Israel’s war in Gaza,” he said. He added that the kingdom called on the international community to force Israel to “bear responsibility for its crimes,” including attacks on Palestinian civilians.

Saudi Arabia and Iran have recently taken steps to improve their antagonistic relationship, and they have been aligned — along with many other Muslim nations — in opposing Israel’s conduct in Gaza.

In April, Jordan helped the United States and other allies intercept missiles and drones fired by Iran at Israel, after senior Iranian military officers were killed in an airstrike on Iran’s embassy complex in Damascus, Syria. That strike was widely attributed to Israel, where some officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have acknowledged responsibility.

But Jordan also has millions of citizens of Palestinian origin, including many who fiercely oppose helping Israel.

“Jordan has to strike a very delicate balance,” said Saud al-Sharafat, a former brigadier general in Jordan’s intelligence service and director of the Shorufat Center for Globalization and Terrorism Studies, in Amman, Jordan. “It’s like walking on a tightrope.”

On Friday, the United States said it had ordered more combat aircraft and warships capable of shooting down missiles and drones to the Middle East in response to threats from Iran and its proxies.

President Emmanuel Macron of France spoke to the Iranian president, Mr. Pezeshkian, on Wednesday, and urged him to “do everything in his power to avoid a new military escalation, which would be in nobody’s interest, including Iran’s, and which would cause lasting damage to regional stability,” the French government said.

Qatar’s prime minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, told Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, that he had spoken on Monday to Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Bagheri Kani, about the need for restraint, according to an official familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.

The Qatari prime minister also told Mr. Blinken that Qatar had delivered a similar plea to Hezbollah, which says it is fighting Israel in support of Hamas. Israel invaded Gaza after Hamas led the deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7, and Hezbollah has said it would halt hostilities with Israel once that war ends.

On Tuesday, Egypt’s foreign minister, Badr Abdelatty, called Mr. Bagheri Kani, as part of his country’s effort to “contain the escalation in the region,” the Egyptian foreign ministry said in a statement.

Hamas’s selection of Yahya Sinwar, its hard-line leader in Gaza and a planner of the Oct. 7 attacks, to replace Mr. Haniyeh as the head of its political wing refocused attention on his decisive role in the negotiations to achieve a cease-fire in Gaza and free the hostages there.

Mr. Sinwar has made no public appearances since the start of the war and is believed to be hiding in tunnels underneath Gaza to evade the Israeli military, which has vowed to kill him. Despite that, he is thought to have been dictating Hamas’s position in the cease-fire talks.

“He isn’t going to make any more concessions,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a professor of political science who taught at Al-Azhar University in Gaza and is now living in Cairo. “He knows more than anyone else that the hostages are the only card he has.”

American officials have blamed Mr. Sinwar for holding up a cease-fire deal.

“As the chief decision maker, he needs to decide now to take this deal, to get a cease-fire in place, to get some of those hostages home, and to get us all an opportunity to get more humanitarian assistance in,” John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council, said on Wednesday.

But Mr. Netanyahu has also taken a hard line, saying last week that he wanted to put more military pressure on Hamas to extract more concessions from the group. He has shrugged off U.S. pressure to end the war, saying that Israel must destroy Hamas as a fighting and governing force. Some Israelis whose relatives were kidnapped on that day have protested Mr. Netanyahu’s stance, saying he should make a deal.

On Wednesday, the Israeli military ordered new evacuation orders for parts of northern Gaza that were among the first to be overrun by its invasion last fall. For several months, Israeli forces have been returning to places they had previously seized and devastated, as Hamas fighters regroup there.

Hamas’s decision to promote Mr. Sinwar only added to the anxiety of some Palestinians in Gaza. Some said he was not likely to agree to a cease-fire that would stop the Israeli offensive that has killed more than 39,000 people in the enclave, according to Gaza’s health officials.

Mr. Sinwar is “the most obstinate man I have ever seen,” and has been “willing to do anything for the sake of the movement’s survival,” said Husam al-Khateeb, a 45-year-old technician at a local radio station in Deir al Balah, in central Gaza.

He said that a solution to the conflict and an end to the war could only come from Iran, its proxies and the United States.

Nisreen Sabouh, a 37-year-old displaced mother of four, said she had hoped that the killing of Mr. Haniyeh would allow Israel to declare that it was closer to its stated goal of destroying Hamas.

“But now, with Sinwar taking over, I don’t believe this will bring the negotiations to a better place,” she said. Mr. Sinwar, she added, “is tough and everyone knows that.”

Others said Mr. Sinwar’s particular role was irrelevant, given the scale of the misery and destruction in Gaza.

“I don’t care who Hamas chooses to lead the movement inside or outside,” said Safaa Oda, 39, a cartoonist from the southern city of Rafah who was has been living in a tent in Khan Younis.

“What we need is a cease-fire,” she said. Mr. Sinwar’s appointment, she added, will make the suffering in Gaza “worse than ever before.”

Reporting was contributed by Bilal Shbair, Hiba Yazbek, Abu Bakr Bashir, Vivian Yee, Ephrat Livni, Aurelien Breeden, Vivian Nereim and Anushka Patil.

British officials on Thursday expressed relief and cautious optimism after far-right protests failed to materialize the previous night and antiracism demonstrators took to the streets instead.

The authorities had been braced for further violence after anti-immigrant protests in previous days had descended into riots, fueled by disinformation about the fatal stabbing of three young children at a dance class in Southport, northwestern England, on July 29.

But with around 6,000 officers on standby, Wednesday evening passed with little violence. Pockets of far-right protesters were easily outnumbered by antiracism counterdemonstrations in several cities, including Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool and London.

That raised hopes that the law enforcement authorities had begun to regain control after riots over the previous weekend. Hundreds of people were arrested and dozens of police officers were injured in those outbreaks of violence, which saw rioters set cars on fire and target mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers.

The British minister for policing, Diana Johnson, said on Thursday that the heavy police presence and the deterrent effect of swift prosecutions for some of those arrested after previous acts of violence had helped stave off disorder overnight.

“The fact that we were able to show that the police were out in communities in large numbers,” coupled with sentencings for rioters, she told the BBC, had been “a very stark reminder to people that if they engage in criminal acts on our streets they will be held to account.”

Not everywhere was free of violence on Wednesday night, however, and a small number of arrests were made. In Belfast, Northern Ireland, objects were thrown at the police, fires were lit and officers in riot gear were deployed.

But in London, Mark Rowley, commissioner of the city’s Metropolitan Police, described Wednesday as a “very successful night.”

“The show of force from police — and frankly the show of unity from communities — together defeated the challenges we have seen,” he said.

Efforts to combat calls on social media for violence could also have played a role. Both the government and the police had expressed concern about the use of messaging apps like Telegram by far-right groups intent on stoking disorder.

On Wednesday, Telegram said that its moderators were removing channels and posts containing calls to violence. The company also said that it was using A.I. tools and user reports “to ensure content that breaches Telegram’s terms is removed.”

Despite the respite, Tiffany Lynch, acting national chair of the Police Federation, which represents rank and file officers, told the BBC that it was “absolutely not” possible to say that the run of violence was now at an end.

Faced with a shrinking population, China’s top leadership has tried everything to get women to have more babies. Everything, it turns out, except allowing unmarried women to freeze their eggs.

A Beijing court this week chose to uphold a longstanding rule that only married women may use the procedure. Rights activists say the rule is unfair because it excludes single women from a reproductive measure that gives them the option to put off childbirth.

The ruling centers on a lawsuit filed by Teresa Xu, against an obstetrics hospital after a doctor denied her access to egg freezing services and instead told her that she should get married and have children quickly.

On Wednesday, Ms. Xu said the Chaoyang Intermediate People’s Court in Beijing had rejected her lawsuit, exhausting her legal options in a six-year battle for reproductive rights. The court had argued that her rights were not violated.

In a livestream video, Ms. Xu, 36, a freelance writer in Guangzhou, said she wasn’t surprised by the court’s decision. “I was mentally prepared for it,” she said in the video that was later posted to her social media account. “This result wasn’t all that unexpected.”

In China, the ruling Communist Party continues to have a large say over who may have children, and how many. For years, it allowed families to have only one child. As births slowed significantly, threatening growth, officials loosened the one-child policy to allow for two children and then three.

Most hospitals in China require women to be married before freezing their eggs. Single women who are pregnant are regularly denied access to public health care as well as benefits like maternity leave. And children born to single parents struggle to get social benefits such as education and medical insurance.

Yet the reasons for Ms. Xu’s decision to freeze her eggs are ones shared by many young Chinese women: She wanted to have a baby at some point, but she wanted to work and save money first, for her future.

China’s ban on access to reproductive treatments for single women has forced many women who have the financial means and the determination to travel overseas and spend tens of thousands of dollars to get their eggs frozen in countries like Thailand and Malaysia.

On the surface, the desires of Ms. Xu and other young women would seem to fit with Beijing’s own goals. Urgently trying to address a declining population, Chinese officials have tried doling out cash and subsidies as incentives for families to have more children, making in vitro fertilization and other reproductive services more widely affordable.

Nevertheless, its birthrate remains historically low — and continues to fall. Many young Chinese women say they prefer to be alone. Even people who are in a relationship are forgoing marriage and children, some because of uncertainty about the country’s prospects as its growth slows. The number of marriages in the first half of this year dropped to the lowest level in a decade, according to official data released this week.

Ms. Xu, an advocate of women’s rights, has argued that the rules around egg freezing are sexist. Men can choose to freeze their sperm with no conditions. In addition to being married, women seeking to freeze their eggs must show that they have a license to give birth to a child. They must promise not to exceed the number of children they are allowed to have, and show proof they are either infertile or are undergoing treatment that could make it more difficult for them to conceive.

In its ruling, the Beijing court said that the decision by the hospital to deny Ms. Xu egg freezing services had complied with current rules and was “consistent with laws and regulations as well as common sense.” But the court also left room for future changes that could be made to China’s fertility policy and said that “when conditions are met, Ms. Xu may resolve the relevant disputes separately.”

In her livestream on Wednesday night, Ms. Xu vowed to continue to fight for the reproductive rights of single women, saying the ruling this week was “not the end,” adding that she would “actively formulate the next strategy.”

As she signed off from her livestream, she added, “We have a long road ahead of us.”

No country competing in the track and field competition at the Paris Olympics has had its athletes subjected to more drug testing than Kenya in recent years. There is a reason for that.

Not only is the East African nation a running powerhouse, it has also been trying to emerge from a major cheating crisis first detected nearly a decade ago.

About 300 athletes from Kenya have been punished for using banned substances since 2015. The situation was so bad at one point that track and field officials had discussed the possibility of the unthinkable: a ban similar to those imposed on Russia, another sporting powerhouse whose doping past — among other issues — has rendered it conspicuous by its absence in Paris.

Kenya’s vast footprint, and dominance, of track and field since Naftali Temu brought home the country’s first gold medal at the 1968 Games meant losing the nation would have diminished the entire sport, said Barnabas Korir, an executive committee member of Kenya’s athletics federation.

Without Kenya, he said, “other countries will feel they will not get a proper competition because this country has some of the best athletes, deeper talent than any country”

“That is why,” he added, “the chance was given to Kenya to redeem itself from this problem.”

For Brett Clothier, the head of the independent unit responsible for drug testing in global athletics, the threat of a ban represented a “come-to-Jesus moment” for Kenya, a nation whose global standing, and sense of itself, is in many ways linked to its champion runners.

That much is clear on the roads out of Jomo Kenyatta airport in Nairobi, where the faces of top stars like Faith Kipyegon and Eliud Kipchoge appear on billboards, and where Kenyan runners come and go on their way to races around the world. Their success has been so consistent, the country’s gold-medal haul now so consistent, that winning well — breaking a record — is now the true measure of success.

“We say they are ambassadors for our country,” Mr. Korir said.

Risking all of that was not an option, Kenyan officials decided. So the Kenyan government bowed to demands (and threats) to invest a vast sum to create a new antidoping agency capable of tackling a problem that had spread through the entire Kenyan running pyramid.

In 2023, the government committed to spend $5 million annually to rebuild its broken antidoping program. The total is half the contribution of the British government to its local body and only a third of the United States’ contribution to testing there. But, according to Mr. Clothier, the head of track and field’s antidoping body, the Athletics Integrity Unit, it is an “incredible” sum considering the relative financial might of Kenya.

Testing of track and field athletes in Kenya is now “the best in the world,” Mr. Clothier said.

Unlike Russia, whose state-sponsored doping program offered advantages to elite athletes and corrupted dozens of international sporting events before it was revealed, doping in Kenya rises organically from the ground up and is complicated by a mix of economic uncertainty and intense competition.

Nearly all the best runners, Mr. Clothier and Kenyan athletics officials said, hail from three counties in the northern valleys, far from the capital Nairobi. In those counties, running is one of the few proven ways to escape grinding poverty.

“It’s like organized crime,” Mr. Clothier said of the effort to control and profit from a pool of talented middle- and long-distance runners that is deeper than anywhere else in the world. “Every wannabe criminal sees them as a moneymaking opportunity.”

Those conditions have attracted not just Kenyans but also foreign nationals who seek out talented athletes and offer them the chance to secure riches that can be not only life changing but also community changing.

“Runners are walking around with flashing dollar signs, and there are people telling them, ‘We can make you run faster,’” Mr. Clothier said.

The most lucrative and commercial sport is marathon running, and Kenyans happen to be the best in the world at it. Scores of major cities around the world host annual marathons, and each one represents an opportunity for a payday.

Winning a major marathon can be worth $100,000 or more, and even minor ones offer prizes of $5,000 to $10,000 for winning. In Kenya, even those smaller purses can represent the equivalent of a year’s wages. An endorsement contract with a shoe company can bring in yet more income.

That contrast between that money and poverty “creates a huge risk of doping,” Mr. Clothier said.

But the same depth of talent among Kenyan runners means the very top ones are always in fear of being knocked off their perch by those just below.

To reduce the risk that elite runners will turn to doping to protect their status, and their incomes, the number of named athletes in Kenya’s drug-testing pool was increased to 300 from 30. The results have been encouraging for the testers: The number of international doping cases — runners caught cheating — involving Kenyans went from just one in 2017 to 38 in 2022.

“On Kenya, the jury’s out,” Mr. Clothier, a naturally cautious Australian lawyer, said when asked if that represented the end of Kenya’s doping problem. “We’ve got off to a good start.”

But that early success was why track officials, and their antidoping surrogates, have worked to persuade the Kenyan government to reaffirm its commitment to overhaul a system that had fallen prey to unchecked corruption.

Just before the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016, the head of Kenya’s track and field squad was caught in an undercover sting offering to tip off athletes about the timing of drug tests in return for thousands of dollars.

“Everyone knew there was a lot of cheating in Kenya,” Mr. Clothier said. “For our sport, Kenya is the No. 1 country in our sport, with the No. 1 doping problem. So we decided we are just doing it.”

The A.I.U. has had a semi-permanent presence in Kenya for years, sending some of its top staff to East Africa for several months at a time. It has increased its intelligence-gathering capability in the country and worked to make remote training camps targets for random testing. It also has recruited a new generation of local staff members with promises of higher pay, which, in some cases, was as much as five times higher than in the past.

The response was immediate. The local caseload increased, with sophisticated drugs detected and prosecuted, and the number of elite athletes caught by the A.I.U., which is responsible for pursuing the very best runners, started to fall just as the total caught by the new local antidoping agency crept higher. In 2023, the Kenyan antidoping agency opened cases against 60 athletes, and another 29 were investigated by global bodies.

The Kenyan antidoping agency’s additional resources have also helped catch some of the biggest stars and expose elaborate efforts to avoid testers, including faking car crashes and sometimes working with senior medical doctors to fake records.

Its most recent success story took two years to complete. Lawrence Cherono, a winner of the Boston and Chicago marathons, claimed he had inadvertently ingested heart medication that had been prescribed to his wife. Demands for official documents proving the medication was his wife’s were stymied for months, eventually requiring a court subpoena and the use of private investigators to track the athlete as he visited the clinic.

Eventually, Cherono’s story fell apart, and in July, the 37-year-old was banned for seven years.

All of those success stories, and the others that have taken out some of Kenya’s biggest stars, have hurt, said Mr. Korir, the Kenyan athletics commission chief executive. But he also said the “bad apples” must not overshadow decades of athletic success.

“I want to tell the world that most of the Kenyan athletes from the past have been running clean,” he said.

Fierce fighting raged inside Russia on Thursday after Ukrainian armored columns reportedly advanced as far as six miles into Russian territory and captured several small settlements.

The incursion, which was filmed on videos posted online and reported by Russian officials and military analysts, prompted the local governor to declare a state of emergency. On Wednesday President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia convened with top military and security officials to strategize about the attack.

The assault is a new and surprising turn in the war, the most concerted push by Ukraine into Russia since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. It appears to represent an effort by Ukraine to turn the tables on Moscow. In May, Russia caught Ukraine off guard when it sent troops across the border in the area north of Kharkiv, where it still has a narrow foothold.

Ukraine has remained mostly silent about the attack, which began on Tuesday. The Ukrainian military has not acknowledged its troops are in Russia.

The incursion is the third significant Ukrainian ground assault on Russian territory since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago. But it appears to be the largest, according to open-source intelligence analysts studying photographs and videos from the area of Russia under attack, a rolling expanse of farm fields, forests and small towns.

Some analysts estimate that Ukraine has sent hundreds of troops into Russia. That would be a major commitment at a time when Ukrainian forces are under heavy pressure along the front lines in the south and east of their country.

In a statement on Thursday, Russia’s Ministry of Defense said it was destroying Ukrainian formations and repelling the attack.

But a prominent Russian military blogger who writes under the name of Rybar said on Thursday that Ukrainian forces had Sudzha, the main town in the area, “practically under full control.”

The Russian claims could not be independently confirmed.

Videos from Sudzha, verified by The New York Times, show cars trying to leave Sudzha amid sounds of gunshots and roads littered with burned vehicles and what appeared to be mines.

President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration offered its first commentary on the incursion on Thursday in a statement by a senior adviser that did not acknowledge any Ukrainian role but portrayed the Russian populace as collectively backing Mr. Putin’s invasion.

The adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, said the attacks “provide an opportunity to see how ordinary Russians relate to the current authorities in Russia.” Russians, he said, were not going to “come out with flowers to greet the anti-Putin tanks” — noting that a million had volunteered to serve in the country’s military.

In response to the developments in the Kursk region, Peter Stano, a European Union spokesman, told the Ukrainian news outlet Suspilne that Ukraine “has the legal right to defend itself, including by striking at the aggressor on its territory.”

Analysts and Russian military bloggers have said the Ukrainian push involves regular Army units. That would be a change from the previous incursions, which were carried out by armed groups of Russian exiles backed by Kyiv’s army.

The fighting was intensive enough for the acting governor of the Kursk region in Russia, Aleksei Smirnov, to declare a state of emergency late Wednesday in order to “liquidate the results of an incursion into the region’s territory by enemy forces.”

“Difficult conditions for operations persist” in the border region, Mr. Smirnov said in a statement posted on the Telegram messaging app, without specifying where or how intensively the fighting continued.

Since the incursion began, Russian officials have wavered between assurances the attack had been rebuffed, or soon would be, and acknowledging the scale of the breakthrough along the border.

That likely reflects a balancing act between condemning Ukraine for what Mr. Putin called a “provocation,” and risking anger from the population over the breakdown in security, the Institute for the Study of War wrote in a research note on Wednesday.

Photographs and videos posted online and verified by independent military analysts suggest that Ukrainian forces pushed past the border defenses in the region and were maneuvering on the roads inside Russia.

A video filmed by a Russian drone and posted by a Russian military blogger who writes under the handle Dva Mayora, or Two Majors, showed a damaged, U.S.-made armored vehicle at a road intersection six miles inside of Russia. The video, which could not be independently verified, was posted as a way of showing a successful Russian strike on Ukrainian armored columns.

It was unclear whether Ukrainian forces intended to dig in and try to hold Russian territory or pull back, having reportedly captured prisoners and destroyed a Russian border post.

The attack left some military analysts pondering why Ukraine would throw scarce men and resources into a risky assault that opens a new front at a time when it is fighting pitched battles to hold onto positions on its own territory.

The earlier incursions across the border by militant Russian exile groups achieved little militarily — the Ukrainian-backed fighters were quickly routed and driven back. They were seen as efforts to force Moscow to divert troops from inside Ukraine to defend the border, to embarrass the Kremlin over security lapses and to boost morale at home.

Russia’s assault across the border in May toward Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, prompted both armies to divert troops from the front lines in eastern Ukraine to the new area of fighting.

Ivan Nechepurenko, Constant Méheut and Sanjana Varghese contributed reporting.

Yevhen Litvinov was brushing his teeth on Thursday morning when his phone started buzzing — a friend had sent him a YouTube video showing the victory of the Ukrainian boxer Oleksandr Khyzhniak at the Paris Olympics overnight.

He hit play and watched Mr. Khyzhniak delivering punch after punch to his opponent, Nurbek Oralbay of Kazakhstan. As the final bell rang and Mr. Khyzhniak’s hand was raised, Mr. Litvinov said he was lifted by a surge of pride.

“Pride for the nation, for our athletes,” said Mr. Litvinov, a 48-year-old resident of Kyiv. “It’s not our first gold medal at the Olympics, but it’s definitely inspiring.”

For many Ukrainians, the medals won by their compatriots at this year’s Olympic Games have been rare good news in an otherwise somber period. Since the beginning of the year, Russian troops have steadily gained ground in Ukraine, dampening the public mood.

As a result, each of Ukraine’s eight medals so far has been hailed in the war-torn country as a symbol of resilience and defiance, with citizens and government officials alike celebrating each victory with effusive social media posts. Aware that people back home are counting on them, Ukrainian athletes in Paris have also seized the moment to highlight their country’s cause to the world.

“I wanted the whole world to hear our national anthem, to stand up for it, to see our flag,” Olga Kharlan, a fencer, told the Ukrainian news agency Ukrinform after she and her Ukrainian teammates won the gold medal in women’s team saber fencing on Saturday.

It was Ukraine’s first gold medal at this year’s Olympics, and the victory resonated across the country, with President Volodymyr Zelensky publicly congratulating the team for showing the world that Ukraine could win.

“It shows that we are capable of achieving something, and this is important for Ukrainians,” Mariia Murina, a 19-year-old student, said this week as she was having breakfast on a terrace in central Kyiv. “We come and show that we can win, despite the war,” she said.

To many in Ukraine, Ms. Kharlan, 33, has been the face of the country’s defiant spirit.

The fencer was disqualified from the World Fencing Championships last summer for refusing to shake hands with her Russian opponent. The gesture was highly popular in Ukraine, where top sport authorities have encouraged athletes not to shake hands with Russian and Belarusian competitors, but it threatened to derail her participation in the 2024 Olympic Games.

Ms. Kharlan was eventually allowed to participate. She won the bronze medal in the women’s individual saber competition and then led her team to victory on Saturday by scoring five consecutive points in a stirring comeback in the final against South Korea.

Images of her bronze medal spread on Ukrainian social media. In one video, Ms. Kharlan, having just won the final bout, walked over to a camera filming the competition, her sword still in hand and barely holding back tears. Pointing to her blue and yellow helmet, she said: “Ukraine, this is for you, dear homeland. This is for you.”

Ms. Murina said watching the video gave her a “feeling of euphoria.”

Still, she and other Ukrainians admitted that the medals had brought them only a fleeting sense of happiness, quickly overshadowed by the stark realities of war. As Mr. Khyzhniak punched his way to victory overnight, air-raid alerts were active in six Ukrainian regions.

“I’m more saddened by the constant advances toward Pokrovsk,” said Oleksandr Haidai, 45, a business owner who was drinking an espresso at a cafe in Kyiv on Monday as he played chess on his phone. He was referring to an eastern Ukrainian city and military stronghold that Russian forces have recently been closing in on. “The news from the Olympics takes place against this backdrop. It just helps to distract us a bit.”

But even watching Ukraine at the Olympics can bring a reminder of the war’s toll. Ukraine sent only 140 athletes to Paris, its smallest delegation ever, because hundreds of athletes and trainers have been killed during the conflict and others have joined the army or are no longer able to train because of wartime conditions.

“Many athletes are not participating because of the full-scale invasion,” David Hasparian, 24, said this week over coffee at a cafe in Kyiv. “If it weren’t for this situation, it could have been much better.”

With four days remaining in the Olympics, Ukraine still has opportunities to add to its medal count, including in the final in Greco-Roman wrestling on Thursday. The country is currently three medals shy of its lowest tally of Olympic medals: 11, in the 2016 Olympics.

Last weekend, Ukraine won four medals in fencing, high jump and hammer throw, an impressive run that raised hopes of more victories. But Olga Gaidachuk, 37, who works for a logistics company, said she was still finding it hard to celebrate.

“For me, good weekends are when there is no shelling or the situation on the battlefield is more or less stable,” she said in Kyiv this week. “My entire worldview revolves around the front, around the war.”

Like many other Ukrainians, Ms. Gaidachuk said she had been more excited by the announcement on Sunday that a first batch of long-awaited F-16 fighter jets had finally arrived in the country. “That’s what’s important,” she said.

Daria Mitiuk contributed reporting from Kyiv.