On a recent morning in eastern Ukraine, Karina Yatsina, a mine worker, was busy operating a conveyor belt in a dim, 1,200-foot-deep tunnel. Lights flickered at the end of the shaft, illuminating miners carving out the coal seams.

A year and a half ago, Ms. Yatsina, 21, was working as a nanny. Then friends told her that a mine in the eastern town of Pavlohrad was hiring women to replace men drafted into the military. The pay was good and the pension generous. It wasn’t long before Ms. Yatsina was walking through the mine’s maze of tunnels, a headlamp strapped to her red helmet.

“I would have never thought that I would be working in a mine,” Ms. Yatsina said, taking a short break in the sweltering heat of the tunnel. “I would have never imagined that.”

Ms. Yatsina is one of 130 women who have started working underground at the mine since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. They now operate conveyors that carry coal to the surface, work as safety inspectors or drive the trains that connect the different parts of the mine.

“Their help is enormous because many men went to fight and are no longer available,” said Serhiy Faraonov, the deputy head of the mine, which is run by DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company. Some 1,000 male workers at the mine have been drafted, he said, or about a fifth of the total work force. To help make up for the shortage, the mine has hired some 330 women.

They are part of a wider trend in Ukraine, where women are increasingly stepping into jobs long dominated by men as the widespread mobilization of soldiers depletes the male-dominated work force. They have become truck or bus drivers, welders in steel factories and warehouse workers. Thousands have also voluntarily joined the army.

In doing so, these women are reshaping Ukraine’s traditionally male-dominated work force, which experts say has long been marked by biases inherited from the Soviet Union. “There was this perception of women as second-class and less reliable workers,” said Hlib Vyshlinsky, the executive director of the Kyiv-based Center for Economic Strategy.

Mr. Vyshlinsky said that Ukrainian women had long been excluded from certain jobs, not only over the physical demands but also because such roles were considered too complicated for them. Women, he said, could drive trolley buses, but not trains. “It was full of stereotypes.”

The current influx of women into the Ukrainian job market has echoes of the munitionettes, the British women who worked in arms factories during World War I, and the women — memorialized in the iconic posters of Rosie the Riveter — who went to work in the United States during World War II.

But even with the influx of women into the work force, they will not be enough to replace all the male workers who have left, economists say. Three-quarters of Ukrainian employers have experienced labor shortages, a recent survey showed.

Before the war, 47 percent of Ukrainian women worked, according to the World Bank. Since then, some 1.5 million female workers, about 13 percent of the total, have left Ukraine, Mr. Vyshlinsky said.

“The share of women currently working in Ukraine is higher than before the war,” Mr. Vyshlinsky said. But too many have left Ukraine to allow the country to overcome its work force shortages, he said.

The phenomenon of women joining the work force has been particularly evident in the mining industry.

After Russia invaded in 2022, the Ukrainian government suspended a law that had barred women from working underground and in “harmful or dangerous” conditions. Now, they are a regular presence in the cramped lift shafts that take workers to the depths of the mines.

“I was surprised. It’s unusual to see a woman with a shovel doing a man’s work,” said Dmytro Tobalov, a 28-year-old miner, not long after a woman walked past him and other burly miners who were resting on benches in a tunnel, waiting to board the elevator back out of the mine.

Mr. Tobalov, who works at a mine in Pokrovsk, in the eastern Donetsk region, said 12 men had left his group of miners for the army, replaced by 10 men and two women. “They’re doing great,” he said of the women.

Several women said they had joined the Pokrovsk mine, owned by Metinvest, Ukraine’s largest steel maker, because it offered stable jobs in a war-ravaged economy. Valentyna Korotaeva, 30, a former shop assistant in Pokrovsk, said she lost her job after a Russian missile landed near the shop, causing the owners to pack up and leave. She now works as a crane operator at the mine, moving large metal machines under repair in a warehouse.

How long Ms. Korotaeva can keep her job will depend on the situation on the front line, just eight miles from the mine. Russian forces have been creeping closer to Pokrovsk in recent weeks. Russia frequently shells the area, and the mine’s management has prepared evacuation plans in case it becomes too dangerous to remain there.

“It’s scary,” Ms. Korotaeva, a mother of two, said. “But for now I’m staying because there are schools and kindergartens here. There’s nowhere else to go.”

Several women said working in a mine was a way to participate in the war effort, keeping the Ukrainian economy going while men fight on the front. Coal mines have been a lifeline for many towns and cities in eastern Ukraine, employing tens of thousands of people and contributing significantly to the government budget through taxes.

Yulia Koba, a former child psychologist who joined the Pokrovsk mine in June as a conveyor belt operator, described it as a multipronged effort, with women in the rear supporting men on the front. “They’re there and we’re here,” she said.

Ms. Koba said male colleagues had been skeptical when she took on her new position, with some believing that women had no place in the mine’s dark and dusty tunnels. “What are you doing? Why are you here and not somewhere above ground?” she said she was asked.

But over time, Ms. Koba added, the men gradually overcame gender stereotypes and understood that women could do the job just as well as men. If women “go to serve in the armed forces, why can’t they take on traditionally male positions in the mine?” she said.

Companies have also tried to bring more women into the labor market through training programs.

The Pokrovsk mine started a program earlier this year that has so far enabled 32 women to work underground. Reskilling Ukraine, a Swedish nonprofit organization, has offered accelerated training courses for women wishing to become truck drivers. More than 1,000 women applied this year, but the organization has the funds to train only 350, said Oleksandra Panasiuk, the program coordinator.

“A lot of women wanted to be drivers, but, for a long time, society didn’t really allow them to do that,” Ms. Panasiuk said. “That’s changing.”

At the Pavlohrad mine, several women hired during the war are now hoping to make a career for themselves and move up the ladder. Ms. Yatsina, the former nanny who is now a conveyor belt operator, said she would like to become an electromechanical technician. “I’ve thought about it,” she said, a faint smile creeping onto her youthful face. “I like it here.”

Evelina Riabenko and Daria Mitiuk contributed reporting.

President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that Ukraine’s surprise offensive into western Russia, which entered its third week on Tuesday, shows the West that its fears about attacks on Russian territory are unfounded and should be abandoned.

As his forces attempted to push deeper into Russian territory, Mr. Zelensky seized the moment to challenge a limitation from Kyiv’s allies that has long frustrated Ukraine: the use of Western-supplied long-range weapons against Russia, which Ukraine argues is key to disrupting Moscow’s military operations.

“The whole naïve, illusory concept of so-called red lines regarding Russia, which dominated the assessment of the war by some partners, has crumbled these days somewhere near Sudzha,” Mr. Zelensky told Ukrainian ambassadors to other countries in a speech published on Monday evening. He was referring to the western Russian town of Sudzha, which Ukrainian forces captured last week.

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In Australia, he went plant hunting by helicopter and waded in crocodile-infested waters to watch a water lily bloom. In Mauritius, he grabbed a plant specimen off the ledge of a cliff. Last month, while looking for lilies in a tributary of Colombia’s piranha-packed Orinoco River, he jumped from plank to plank in the pitch dark at 4 a.m. to get to a floating pontoon.

“It’s not that I am that daring,” said Carlos Magdalena, a research horticulturalist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London. “These situations just arise, and they are not like Superman extreme. Sometimes it’s more Peter Sellers than Indiana Jones.”

Mr. Magdalena’s main responsibility at Kew Gardens is tending tropical plants. But he is also known as “the plant messiah,” as anointed by a Spanish newspaper in 2010, for his work rescuing several plant species from the brink of extinction. That work has earned him enormous respect in the field of botany and made him somewhat of a celebrity in the horticulture world.

His renown only grew when David Attenborough, the British doyen of nature documentaries, repeated the “plant messiah” tagline at the 2012 premiere of one of his films, which featured a scene of Mr. Magdalena propagating the pygmy lily.

The attention, especially from a figure as venerated as Mr. Attenborough, initially dismayed Mr. Magdalena. “Imagine what happens when the God calls you the messiah,” he said, standing outside one of the graceful greenhouses at Kew Gardens.

It is appropriate that Mr. Magdalena’s star moment in the documentary showed him working with lilies, the plant closest to his heart and the first one he grew as an 8-year-old on his parent’s finca, a plot of land in the Asturias region of northern Spain.

The pygmy lily was what helped bring Mr. Magdalena, 51, to broader attention.

The smallest water lily in the world, Nymphaea thermarum, its flower about the size of a fingernail, had become one of Kew Gardens’s prized possessions. In 2014, it was stolen from the gardens. The thief was never caught, but Mr. Magdalena, who had cared for the tiny plant, made the media rounds, explaining the rarity of the flower, native to Rwanda.

Since then, he has embraced the role of serving as a megaphone for the silent plant kingdom, a showman as exuberant and colorful as some of the tropical flowers he cultivates.

“Plants don’t speak. Plants don’t cry. Plants don’t bleed,” he said. “So I’ve decided to speak for them.”

The youngest of five children, Mr. Magdalena was an indifferent student, but devoured his parent’s gardening encyclopedia, reading it 12 times by the time he was 8. “I preferred living with the ants,” he said of his childhood.

His mother grew flowers. His father farmed as a hobby. And nature became central to their son’s worldview. His grandfather took him around on a donkey, pointing out the names of plants and animals, and it’s a habit he inherited.

“I’ve never outgrown the stage when children point at nature,” he said.

Just as his mother would sometimes force her husband to stop the car in the middle of the road if a plant caught her eye, Mr. Magdalena can’t help but do the same, sometimes to the impatience of his Kew Gardens colleagues.

“It’s quite a sight to watch him jump into a ravine or creek looking for plants, water up to his neck, happy as can be for hours,” said Christian Ziegler, a photojournalist who has worked with Mr. Magdalena on some of his global quests to find endangered flora to nurture.

With few work opportunities in Asturias, where he managed a bar, Mr. Magdalena moved to London in 2001. If Britain was different in many ways from home, the two places shared something in common: damp, green landscapes.

At first, he took hospitality jobs. Then, one day in 2002, he visited Kew Gardens, and the trip turned into an origins story as uncommon as some of his cherished plants.

As he peered through the condensation clouding the windows of a tropical nursery, he dreamed that “all those plants could be at my disposal.”

He sent an inquiry email to Kew’s School of Horticulture, and the principal invited him for a visit. The two hit it off, and Mr. Magdalena, despite his lack of professional or academic qualifications, landed an unpaid internship.

Four months later, he earned a temporary job as assistant propagator inside the nursery of his dreams. “Time to show off,” Mr. Magdalena said.

The first plant Mr. Magdalena saved from extinction was the café marron, or Ramosmania rodriguesi, a tree that grows to about the height of a man and has distinctive white, star-shaped flowers. Endemic to the Mauritian island of Rodrigues, no living specimen had been seen since 1877 — until a schoolboy found another some 45 years ago.

A cutting was sent to Kew Gardens, and although the clone flowered, the plant did not produce seeds. Until Mr. Magdalena arrived.

In what has become part of botany lore, he spent five months intensely studying the plant. After much experimentation and 200 attempts at pollination, he succeeded in coaxing forth seeds, around 20 of which were sent to Mauritius, where the pretty flower is now seen once again.

“Carlos delivers,” said Dr. Alex Monro, a lead scientist at Kew Gardens.

While Mr. Magdalena eventually earned a diploma from the Kew horticultural school — to him, “the Oxford of gardening” — he is known for relying less on traditional techniques than for more unconventional approaches.

To help save the pygmy lily, he borrowed seeds from a botanical garden in Germany. While these seeds germinated, they quickly died. “An extinction awaiting to happen,” he said.

Mr. Magdalena tried everything, growing the seeds in acid and alkaline water, and experimenting with light and temperature. Nothing worked.

One night as he watched the water for his tortellini bubbling, he wondered if the difficulty germinating the tiny lily had to do with the amount of carbon dioxide the plants were being exposed to.

“Plants need light, water, nutrients — and they need carbon dioxide, too,” he explained.

As he prepared his dinner, he remembered that the water lilies in their native habitat in Rwanda grew in a shallow stream, and that there is much more CO2 above water than below, so he changed the depth of the water he was using in his experiment in a bid to get them more of the gas. It worked.

While his initial renown may be thanks to mini lilies, what might be his biggest accomplishment falls on the other end of the size spectrum.

Giant water lilies, of the genus Victoria, are a major part of Kew Gardens’s summer displays, displayed in a dedicated green house.

In 2007, Mr. Magdalena’s low-paid job included caring for the only two known species — Victoria amazonica and Victoria cruziana.

The plants were named after a newly crowned Queen Victoria, to secure her patronage for Kew Gardens.

As he tended to the enormous plants, Mr. Magdalena became increasingly obsessed and would spend nights researching them online, which is where he stumbled upon a photo of the strangest Victoria leaf he had ever seen and, suspecting it was an unknown species, had to learn more.

He contacted the photo’s owner, who had found this anomalously enormous lily in the Amazonian ponds of the Beni region of northern Bolivia and had transplanted cuttings from it to a man-made pond in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

A few years later, Mr. Magdalena found himself in Bolivia, teaching a local community how to grow Brazil nuts more effectively. He took a couple days off, ventured to the man’s pond to see the mysterious, humongous lilies for himself and persuaded the owner, with an assist from the Santa Cruz Botanical Garden, to donate a few seeds to Kew Gardens.

Back in London, as the Bolivian seeds started growing with leafs and flowers that looked different from what he was used to, he began to strongly suspect he was looking at a third, unnamed species of Victoria.

He proceeded carefully in his investigation, keenly aware it was unusual in the field of botanical science that “a gardener like me,” as he said, might help identify a new species. But his observations ultimately convinced him, and the scientific community agreed.

On July 4, 2022, Kew Gardens announced the discovery of a third Victoria lily, naming it Victoria boliviana Magdalena & L. T. Sm., the second name recognizing the contribution of Lucy T. Smith, a botanist and illustrator at the gardens who had shared his conviction this was a new species.

The media attention was intense.

“I am still doing interviews. Yesterday, it was German television,” said Mr. Magdalena, who believes more giant water lily species may be awaiting discovery.

“My beloved nenúfar,” he said, using the Spanish for water lily.

Although the “plant messiah” moniker had originally bothered him as pretentious, he has since embraced it — “It’s just such a good handle” — using it as the title of a book.

“In Spain, the messiah is like being Jesus, which I am not,” he said. “For Anglos, it’s more like someone with a mission, someone who has things to say in the fight for a cause.”

His celebrity and outspokenness have not always sat well within the genteel world of gardening. But Mr. Magdalena said he doesn’t care about rubbing people the wrong way and has no plans of lowering his voice in championing the plant world, which he wants to imbue with the same charisma enjoyed by the animal kingdom.

“We need to stop thinking that plants are just greenery in the background,” he said, pointing at a blooming Titan arum. It is also known as the corpse flower, renowned as the smelliest of all plants, its rotting stench an evolutionary strategy to attract pollinators. “How cool is that?” Mr. Magdalena said.

His voice then shifted into a more serious tone, talking about the race to save as many plants as possible before they disappear forever.

“There are still more than 100,000 threatened species that are sitting at the bar having their last beer,” the former bartender said. “I have nothing else to do. Just this.”

The test was spectacular, but not in the way those involved had hoped.

A rocket engine firing at a planned spaceport on a remote Scottish island ended in a tower of fire on Monday, with an explosion that engulfed the launch platform in flames.

The site, a former radar station on Unst, in the north of the Shetland Islands, is intended to become a base for launching small satellites. That ambition reflects a wider push in Western Europe to develop more independent space capabilities after relations with Russia broke down over the war in Ukraine, freezing European access to Russian Soyuz rockets.

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Switzerland’s lakes reflect its craggy mountains and lap against its cities. Their blue surfaces are peaceful. And the waters are, seemingly, pristine.

But the placid exterior covers an explosive problem: Unspent military munitions lie deep below the waters, a fact that could eventually damage the lakes’ fragile ecosystems. So Switzerland is trying to crowdsource ideas for how to eventually extract the weapons if they begin contaminating the water.

The country has kicked off a competition with a cash prize of 50,000 Swiss francs, or about $58,000, to be shared by the three best proposals for removing ammunition that was dumped in the lakes over decades. But it must be done in an environmentally friendly and safe way.

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A man who the Kenyan authorities said had confessed to killing 42 women over the past two years escaped from custody at a police station, a spokeswoman for the national police service said on Tuesday.

The man, Collins Jumaisi Khalusha, and 12 other people, all of them Eritreans, escaped from the Gigiri Police Station, Resila Atieno Onyango, a police spokeswoman, said in a WhatsApp message. The police station is in a neighborhood that also includes the United States Embassy, a United Nations office and other diplomatic missions in the capital, Nairobi.

Mr. Khalusha’s arrest in July came after the discovery of dismembered bodies at an abandoned quarry in Nairobi, and the revelations rattled Kenya, an East African economic powerhouse, during a period of political turmoil.

The discovery intensified the horror and added to the urgency of tense national debates about violence against Kenyan women. A wave of killings, including at least 31 in January, prompted nationwide protests.

Mr. Khalusha confessed to having “lured, killed and disposed” of women, according to a statement in July by Mohamed I. Amin, who heads the Directorate of Criminal Investigations. John Maina Ndegwa, Mr. Khalusha’s lawyer, accused the police of torturing and strangling his client into giving a confession.

One of Mr. Khalusha’s victims was his wife, the police said: He strangled her, then dismembered her body and disposed of it at the quarry, which was used as a dumping site — and was near a police station.

The police did a forensic analysis of a cellphone belonging to one of the victims to identify Mr. Khalusha. They recovered a machete, nylon sacks, industrial rubber gloves, multiple identification cards, women’s underwear and rope from his house, which was about 100 yards from the dump site, the statement read.

This is a developing story.