In the waiting rooms of a Beirut hospital, exhausted families slumped on couches, waited anxiously for doctors’ updates and wept. Nearby rooms held their loved ones, injured when pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah suddenly exploded across Lebanon this week, blinding and maiming many of their owners.

“I have no hope,” said a woman whose son-in-law had lost an eye and fingers on both hands. He had been lying down when his pager beeped and he picked it up — only for it to blow up in his face.

She gave only her first name, Joumana, and would not say what her son-in-law did that required a pager. But she made a vow: “The only revenge that will get us justice is to get rid of Israel.”

Across Lebanon on Thursday, hospitals were packed and people were on edge after hand-held communications devices imported by Hezbollah, the militant group and political party, blew up in waves across the country on two successive days. Dozens of people were killed and thousands of others injured in attacks that spread a terror that simple objects carried in people’s bags and pockets could readily become bombs.

Lebanese, American and other government officials have said that Israel launched the attacks by remotely detonating devices that had been outfitted with explosives before they were sent to Hezbollah. Israeli officials have not confirmed or denied their country’s involvement.

For 11 months, Hezbollah has been attacking sites in northern Israel in support of its ally Hamas in Gaza. Israel has responded by bombing and assassinating Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon, and civilians have fled areas on both sides of the border.

Lebanon’s health ministry on Thursday raised the death toll from the attacks on Tuesday and Wednesday to 37, adding that nearly 3,000 people had been wounded.

Hezbollah did not release figures on how many of its members were killed or injured, but the devices were distributed solely to its people, and multiple interviews with officials and relatives suggested that most of the victims were connected to the group, although some were civilians or had noncombat roles in the organization.

Hezbollah publicly mourned many of the dead as its fighters, including one teenager, born in 2008, who was 15 or 16. At least two other children, a 9-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy, were among the dead, as was at least one woman.

The precise identities and affiliations of the wounded were less clear. Journalists were barred from entering some hospitals to interview victims, and the covert nature of Hezbollah’s military activities means that its members don’t readily share information with outsiders.

Hezbollah is a vast organization, which Israel, the United States, and other countries consider a terrorist group. It has a military force estimated to have tens of thousands of fighters, as well as offices that provide social services, administer schools and serve the group’s ministers and lawmakers in the Lebanese government.

The attacks appeared to cut through a broad swath of that apparatus, raising questions about whether such an assault violated the laws of war.

“It was an indiscriminate attack,” Firass Abiad, Lebanon’s health minister, told reporters on Thursday, after describing the burden the attacks had put on Lebanon’s health system. “It was a war crime.”

The laws of war prohibit booby traps in everyday items, said Lama Fakih, director for the Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch, including “something like a pager that a kid could easily pick up when it starts beeping.”

Combatants must also differentiate between fighters and civilians, something an attacking power cannot do with so many explosives moving freely around such a large area, Ms. Fakih said.

And detonating such explosives in urban communities risked harming nearby civilians and possibly exposing those with no ties to Hezbollah to future attacks. Ms. Fakih mentioned the case of a man who had lost an eye because he had been passing someone on the street whose pager exploded.

Appearing to be affiliated with Hezbollah meant “you could be targeted at any time,” she said.

After two days of explosions, many in Lebanon were anxious on Thursday about what might blow up next. Public institutions banned pagers, the Lebanese army collected and detonated suspicious devices, and the civil aviation authority forbade airline passengers from traveling with pagers and walkie-talkies.

At the American University of Beirut hospital, two floors held people who had been injured in the attacks.

One man wiped away tears, saying that his 30-year-old nephew had “almost lost his whole face.”

Dr. Mohammed Ghobris, a surgeon from southern Lebanon, said he had received dozens of patients wounded by the exploding pagers after the first blasts on Tuesday. Now, he was in Beirut, where his brother-in-law, Sajid Ghobris, awoke to find that he was missing an eye and that one of his hands had been amputated at the wrist.

“This is international terrorism,” Dr. Ghobris said. Three other relatives of his had also been injured.

In a televised speech on Thursday, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, acknowledged that the attacks had been “a severe and cruel blow” to the organization. He vowed that Hezbollah would continue to prevent Israelis who have been displaced from the border region from returning home.

“No military escalation, no killings, no assassinations and no all-out war can return residents to the border,” he said.

As he spoke, Israeli jet screamed though the sky over Beirut, setting off sonic booms, further terrifying residents.

Earlier in the day, crowds had gathered in Beirut’s southern suburbs, where Hezbollah holds sway, for a second day of funerals for those killed in the attacks.

A woman named Hanan said that it was the second funeral she had attended in two days and that four of her relatives were in the hospital as a result of the attacks. They included her sister-in-law, who she said had been injured when her husband’s pager blew up.

“There are fighters and nonfighters,” she said. “There are people who were civilian staff in hospitals.”

Nearby, Ali Bazzi watched pallbearers carry the coffin of his nephew, Abbas Bazzi.

“This enemy has no mercy, no pity,” he said.

When asked how his nephew had died, he said, “From the pager.”

The revelation convulsed all of Canada.

Ground-penetrating radar had found possible signs of 215 unmarked graves at a former residential school in British Columbia run by the Catholic Church that the government had once used to assimilate Indigenous children forcibly taken from their families.

It was the first of some 80 former schools where indications of possible unmarked graves were discovered, and it produced a wave of sorrow and shock in a country that has long struggled with the legacy of its treatment of Indigenous people. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered flags to fly at half-staff, as many Canadians wore orange T-shirts with the slogan “Every Child Matters.”

Three years later, though, no remains have been exhumed and identified.

Many communities are struggling with a difficult choice: Should the sites be left undisturbed and transformed into memorial grounds, or should exhumations be done to identify any victims and return their remains to their communities?

While there is a broad consensus in Canada that children were taken from their families and died in these schools, as the discussions and searches have dragged on, a small universe of conservative Catholic and right-wing activists have become increasingly vocal in questioning the existence of unmarked graves. They are also skeptical of the entire national reconsideration of how Canada treated Indigenous people.

Three years after the announcement about the former Kamloops residential school site, they ask, why has no proof of any remains been uncovered anywhere in the country?

“There’s, so far, no evidence of any remains of children buried around residential schools,” Tom Flanagan, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary and an author of “Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools),” said in an interview.

“Nobody disputes,” he added, “that children died and that the conditions were sometimes chaotic. But that’s quite different from clandestine burials.”

The arguments by Mr. Flanagan and other skeptics have been roundly denounced by elected officials across the political spectrum who say evidence clearly suggests that there are many sites of unmarked burials.

Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation, who made the announcement about the Kamloops site, said, “The denialists, they’re hurtful. They are basically saying that didn’t happen.”

Security guards protecting the potential gravesites in her community have turned away people who have turned up late at night with shovels, she said.

Chief Casimir recalled holding the piece of paper in her hands about the potential gravesites that she read from to deliver the news and knew it would reverberate.

“I was thinking to myself, ‘This is horrible,’” she said.

Now her community is moving slowly and deliberately before deciding what to do next.

“We’ve had many conversations about whether to exhume or not to exhume,” Chief Casimir said. “It is very difficult and it is definitely very complex. We know that it’ll take time. And we also know that we have many steps yet to go.”

“We have to know for sure,” she added, “that we did everything that we can to determine: yes or no, anomaly or grave?”

The Canadian government and Pope Francis have apologized for the gruesome treatment of Indigenous people and the residential schools where children suffered so much abuse.

But the work to try to establish a precise number of potential graves will likely be difficult.

Murray Sinclair, a former judge who headed the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the residential schools system, estimates that at least 10,000 students never made it home from the schools, which were established by the government and operated from the 1880s to the 1990s.

During that period the Canadian government forcibly removed at least 150,000 Indigenous children from their communities and sent them to residential schools, most of which were run by the Roman Catholic Church. Indigenous languages and cultural practices were forbidden, sometimes using force.

And when the children died the government refused to pay to return their bodies to the communities where they came from.

In Ontario, a search of records by investigators working for the province’s chief coroner has so far identified 456 students who died while attending 12 residential schools. Some records show where remains may be buried, the coroner said, but there’s uncertainty about those findings.

At the Kamloops school site, where one of the largest number of potential gravesites was reported, Chief Casimir said her tribe was still analyzing the results of its ground and document searches before deciding whether to conduct exhumations.

Doing so, she added, would be “very intrusive.”

Kimberly Murray, a lawyer and a member of a Mohawk First Nation, was appointed by the federal government in 2021 to examine the issues surrounding potential Indigenous graves and make recommendations about protecting and commemorating the sites.

She says she reminds communities that the work they are doing is because “the government purposely disappeared” Indigenous children, “by not proper record keeping, by not telling the families, by refusing to send them home.”

Many communities, Ms. Murray said, have expanded their physical searches and have employed additional methods to find remains.

One involves placing probes into the ground to detect specific soil acidity that is created by buried human remains.

Another process involves using short pulses of laser light to scan the surfaces of areas where government and church records, as well as the memories of former students, suggest there were burials. The process, using a technology known as lidar, can reveal patterns consistent with burial sites.

Some Indigenous communities have also brought in dogs trained to find remains.

In some cases, Ms. Murray said there was evidence that schools resorted to burying students in mass graves because of disease sweeping through the institutions or to store bodies until the spring thaw made digging graves possible.

Still, Indigenous communities have faced obstacles finding graves, Ms. Murray said, as they struggle getting access to records about the children who died at the schools from the Canadian government and the Catholic Church, despite pledges of cooperation.

Even if exhumations uncover remains, identifying individual bodies or determining a cause of death will likely be impossible, said Dr. Rebekah Jacques, a forensic pathologist who has been working with Indigenous communities that have potential gravesites.

Dr. Jacques has met members of Indigenous communities while serving as a member of a national committee on potential graves at school sites, and she said the question of exhumations hangs heavy over many groups.

“I don’t always have consensus myself about what to do,” she said. “So for me to expect for our communities to have consensus — well, I can really relate to that.”

She also believes that nothing Indigenous communities do, including exhumations, will satisfy skeptics.

For Mr. Flanagan and others who share his viewpoint, their disbelief that there are many gravesites is part of a broader argument against the key conclusion of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission: that the residential schools were a system of brutality that led to “cultural genocide.’’

“The narrative that’s been constructed pulls out all the bad stories and retails those and minimizes the benefit of residential schools,” Mr. Flanagan said, adding that converting Indigenous people in nations colonized by Europeans to Christianity and eradicating their cultures was once common worldwide.

“The churches believed that it was their religious duty, and the politicians thought that it helped to civilize the Indians,” He said. “Would we do that today? No. But our understanding wasn’t available to these people of 150 years ago.”

Government officials and experts say such views are driven by bias and a lack of understanding and sensitivity over what Indigenous children endured for over a century, until 1996.

“There is simply no question about the horrific impact that the residential schools policy had on Indigenous peoples,” said David Lametti, who was Canada’s justice minister and attorney general when Chief Casimir announced the findings at the Kamloops school site.

Government officials, he added, have little doubt that many of the radar anomalies found on school grounds will prove to be gravesites.

“Will every one of those anomalies turn out to be an unmarked grave? Obviously not,” Mr. Lametti, a former law professor now practicing law in Montreal, said. “But there’s enough preponderant evidence already that is compelling.”

Many Indigenous people who favor exhumations want their communities to move more quickly to find remains.

On his ranch in the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation, Garry Gottfriedson, a poet, retired academic and rodeo rider, said that as a former residential school student he wants more openness and progress from leaders.

“It can drag on and on and on and in the meantime, it dies out,” Mr. Gottfriedson said of the discussion about what to do about the gravesites.

“I’m saying: something needs to happen, let it happen,” he added. “But right now, it seems like nothing’s happening.”

Vjosa Isai contributed research.

Facing an aggressive Russia, a long war in Ukraine and an uncertain American commitment to Europe, Ursula von der Leyen, as president of the European Commission, has created a new post of defense commissioner.

The task before any new commissioner is formidable. The war in Ukraine has pointed up huge shortcomings in Europe’s capacity to defend itself. Its armies are small and sometimes poorly equipped. It has been slow to increase military spending and prioritize the production of artillery shells, ammunition and air defense. It remains deeply dependent on the United States for key military equipment and funds.

But even before the commissioner, a former prime minister of Lithuania, Andrius Kubilius, can begin, analysts and others have raised alarms that the portfolio is ill-defined and vastly underfunded. The appointment, they say, appears more of a semaphore than a substantive position, calling into question whether Europe is fundamentally serious about taking responsibility for its own defense.

Europe has no army. Defense is legally in the competence of the 27 member states, 23 of which are also members of the NATO alliance. In reality, Mr. Kubilius will be a commissioner for the European arms industry, not defense itself.

His difficult job will be trying to push the arms industries of various European nations toward more standardized production and cooperative purchasing power and coordination.

Before he resigned suddenly on Monday, Thierry Breton, who was responsible for industry as commissioner for internal markets and security, estimated that 100 billion euros a year — about $111 billion — would be needed for European defense.

But even €20 billion or €30 billion, the size of the military budgets of larger European countries, “could make the European Union a sizable investor on the continent and start shaping business decisions,” said Camille Grand, a former NATO assistant secretary general for defense investment now at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

For now, the European Union is not even close. It can spend just €1.5 billion for 2025 to 2027 under its budgeted strategy, far less than required, said Christian Mölling, a defense expert and director for Europe for the Bertelsmann Foundation.

“So to change the E.U. structure you’re really looking more for a wizard than a commissioner,” Mr. Mölling said. “It’s a king without a kingdom.”

A senior European diplomat also expressed skepticism, saying that the commission had no extra money for the job, so Mr. Kubilius wouldn’t be able to get much done. In any case, the diplomat said, individual countries would do better at coordinating military capabilities than Brussels could.

A defense commissioner “could prove the catalyst for further reform and better coordination, but good intentions in this area have all too often failed to deliver the desired outcomes,” argued Ester Sabatino of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a centrist research institute that focuses on defense and security.

Then there is the question of overlapping responsibilities within the commission, the European Union’s 27-member executive arm. Ms. von der Leyen will have to “carve out something from already existing portfolios, so how is that going to work?” asked Mr. Grand.

The European Union already has a vice president in charge of European foreign affairs and security policy, soon to be Kaja Kallas of Estonia.

Ms. von der Leyen, who is starting her second term, has named a former French foreign minister, Stéphane Séjourné, to succeed Mr. Breton and he will keep much the same responsibilities for industrial strategy, but with a higher rank, as a vice president. There is also another vice president, Henna Virkkunen of Finland, responsible for tech sovereignty, security and democracy.

So what is the job of defense commissioner and is it really needed? asked Mr. Mölling.

In a recent comprehensive report on how to revive European growth and competitiveness, Mario Draghi, the former Italian prime minister and governor of the European Central Bank, supported the new commissioner’s job.

Europe buys more than 60 percent of its equipment from the United States, plus another 15 percent from other non-E.U. countries. So making European weapons more competitive would be good for European companies and taxpayers, Mr. Draghi argued, echoing many others.

“Europe is wasting its common resources,” he wrote. “We have large collective spending power, but we dilute it across multiple different national and E.U. instruments.” He added: “We are still not joining forces in the defense industry to help our countries to integrate and reach scale.”

He proposed creating E.U. bonds for military-related projects and other key investments. But that idea was quickly shot down by key member states, like Germany and the Netherlands, that have rejected collective European debt except for dealing with the “one-time” crisis of the coronavirus.

But without added money behind the E.U. ambition, the new commissioner is unlikely to be able to achieve what is needed. That includes helping the bloc make its support for Ukraine more timely, efficient and coordinated, while also replenishing the stocks of military equipment and ammunition depleted in European countries that have sent them to Ukraine.

Europe also needs to provide seed money, Mr. Grand emphasized. That is the only way to advance research and development of next-generation weapons and so-called strategic enablers, like integrated air and missile defense, sophisticated drones and intelligence satellites, among other things, that are now almost exclusively provided and sold by the United States.

Making the European Union itself a player in procurement could slim down extensive overlap. To satisfy competing domestic industries, Europe produces 12 battle tanks and 17 infantry fighting vehicles, and it provided Ukraine 10 kinds of howitzers, not all of which use the same shells.

To improve consolidation and make spending efficient, European rules on competition would have to be softened for defense, Mr. Grand said.

Still, he said, “I’m not sure having a single product line is a good idea,” and Brussels should not get into the business of trying to define military requirements for each country. “NATO knows much better, and the commission should not try to do that.”

But given the war in Ukraine and a U.S. concentration on the threat of a rising China, the question of European military dependency on Washington is no longer just a theoretical question, said Ian Lesser, director of the Brussels office of the German Marshall Fund.

It’s a natural inclination for Europeans to buy off-the-shelf from larger American arms producers, he said. “But Europe is in the process of shifting from seeing its own defense companies as national champions to thinking of them also as essential building blocks for stronger European defense,” Mr. Lesser said.

He, too, emphasized the issue of money, with major European economies like Germany, France and Italy already scouring their budgets for cuts.

As some E.U. countries are becoming skeptical of further large support for Ukraine, the motivation to come up with the money may only wane, said Ed Arnold, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank centered on security.

He said he was skeptical that the defense commissioner would have the scope to make an impact on Europe’s military strategy. As ever, he said, a lot will depend on political will, and not just the funding.

“There’s a disconnect between the stated ambition you get initially and the hard reality of when you actually have to get member states’ approval,” he said.

A week ago, he was the keynote speaker at a glitzy Chicago dinner for the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank with a history of denying climate science, where the top tables went for $50,000.

On Friday, it was back to the day job for Nigel Farage, the veteran political disrupter, ally of Donald J. Trump and hard right, anti-immigrant lawmaker whose ascent has alarmed both of Britain’s main political parties.

In a cavernous exhibition center in Birmingham, in England’s West Midlands, Mr. Farage addressed supporters of his upstart party, Reform U.K., at its first annual conference since its success in Britain’s July general election.

Declaring that this was the moment the party “comes of age,” he called on his enthusiastic audience to campaign and build networks of support across the country, telling them that the “sky is the limit.”

There had, he added, never been a time of “greater disenchantment” with Labour, which won the election, or with the Conservatives, who lost it and whose brand was “broken.” Later, Mr. Farage told reporters that Labour-controlled regions were now his main target.

His ambitions for the party were clear. But the jet-setting lifestyle of Mr. Farage, 60, whose visit to Chicago was his third recent trip to the United States, underscores the question hanging over Reform U.K.: Does its leader have the ability and appetite to build the fledgling party into a credible political force?

Mr. Farage, a polarizing, pugnacious figure, is one of Britain’s most effective communicators and had an outsized impact on its politics for two decades before finally being elected to Britain’s Parliament in July. A ferocious critic of the European Union, he championed Brexit and helped pressure Prime Minister David Cameron to hold the 2016 referendum.

“A fairly strong case can be made that Nigel Farage has been the most important political figure in all the elections of the last decade,” said Robert Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester.

Having divided the Conservatives in the 2010s with his campaigning on Brexit, Mr. Farage dealt a huge blow to the party in July by splitting the vote on the right, allowing Labour to win. “Nigel Farage is the reason that the Conservatives had their worst-ever election result in July. Not even a reason. The reason,” Professor Ford said.

But taking the party a step further could be a challenge, he added, because it “presumes a level of strategic thinking that generally isn’t Farage’s strong point: He likes big, bold plans, lots of excitement, lots of razzmatazz.”

In an interview with The New York Times in June, Mr. Farage said his party could challenge both mainstream parties in the next general election, which must take place by mid-2029. “Five years will give us a lot of time to build us a mass movement,” he said, adding, “Very quickly into a Labour government, the desire for real change will get bigger.”

When it was put to him that Reform had few of the organizational structures of a modern political party, he replied: “Absolutely.”

Reform was founded in 2018 as a private company — initially called The Brexit Party — with Mr. Farage owning a majority stake. In a video released on Thursday, he pledged to give up his shares, saying: “I am giving up control, I am giving it to the members.” One of the tasks on the conference agenda in Birmingham is to adopt a formal constitution.

Having largely relied on volunteers until now, rewarding loyalty over expertise, Reform has begun recruiting for a number of jobs, including a regional director for England, a management accountant, a membership manager, a graphic designer and a video editor.

The party has five lawmakers in Parliament, including Mr. Farage and the blunt-spoken Lee Anderson, a former coal miner whose inflammatory, Islamophobic language saw him suspended by the Conservative Party early this year. He then defected to Reform.

Much of the work in professionalizing Reform will likely fall to its chairman, Zia Yusuf, 37. Born in Scotland to parents who emigrated from Sri Lanka, he studied at the London School of Economics and worked for Goldman Sachs before making a fortune by founding and selling a luxury concierge service.

On Friday Mr. Farage called on his party to copy the strategy of the centrist Liberal Democrats, who won a smaller share of the vote than Mr. Farage’s party in July but secured 72 seats in Parliament. That was achieved by ruthlessly targeting areas where they had a realistic chance of winning.

Reform came second in 98 constituencies in July. Of those, 89 were won by Labour, often in the deindustrialized north and middle of England. The party will try to campaign aggressively in those areas, hoping to win over disenchanted voters amid rising disillusionment with the mainstream political parties.

Mr. Farage also sees an opportunity in elections to the Welsh Parliament, the Senedd, and the Scottish Parliament, both scheduled for 2026. Those contests take place under different voting systems, which award seats in proportion to the number of votes cast.

But the party’s many challenges include vetting candidates to exclude extremists and cranks. Mr. Cameron, the former prime minister, once described members of one of Mr. Farage’s earlier parties, the U.K. Independence Party, as “fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists, mostly.”

During this year’s election campaign, embarrassing revelations emerged about one Reform candidate who said that Britain should have “taken Hitler up on his offer of neutrality” in the Second World War, and another who used antisemitic tropes.

On Friday Mr. Farage said that amateurism had let down Reform in the past, adding: “We don’t want extremists, we don’t want bigots.” It was left to other speakers to rail against an array of targets, including illegal immigrants, climate protesters, trans activists, the BBC, the World Economic Forum and the United Nations.

But perhaps the biggest question surrounds Mr. Farage himself. He wavered before deciding to run for Parliament this year, confessing doubts as to whether he wanted to spend time in Clacton, the seaside area he now represents. He appears regularly as a presenter on GB News, a right-leaning TV channel, and recently declared earnings of almost £98,000 a month (about $131,000) from those appearances.

Gawain Towler, a spokesman for Reform U.K., said Mr. Farage’s recent trips to the United States were arranged months ago, when the general election was expected to be held later in the year. He said Mr. Farage was now committed to building up his party and campaigning against immigration and against government plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050.

Yet while he is the party’s undisputed star, Mr. Farage is a divisive politician. In one pre-election interview, he said the expansion of the European Union and NATO had provoked the war in Ukraine, prompting widespread criticism. During riots in August that were fueled by far-right conspiracies about the murder of three young girls, he was accused of stoking the violence by questioning whether “the truth” had been withheld by the authorities.

“Having him as your frontman ensures that you get media attention whenever you want it,” Professor Ford said. But, he added: “There are an awful lot of people — including quite a lot of Tory voters — who just don’t like the guy at all.”

The European Union’s top official said on a trip to Kyiv on Friday that Europe would offer Ukraine a loan of 35 billion euros, about $39 billion, backed by frozen Russian assets. European leaders said the loan would move forward initially without contributions from the United States, after talks between American and European officials stalled in recent days.

The official, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to reiterate Europe’s continued support for his country. Her trip came days before Mr. Zelensky was expected to travel to New York for the United Nations General Assembly.

There, he will present President Biden with a proposal, which has not yet been made public, to bring about the end of Russia’s war in Ukraine. He will also meet with the two candidates seeking to replace Mr. Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump.

The loan announced on Friday, which would provide Ukraine with a needed infusion of funds without increasing direct aid from the budgets of European countries, is smaller than the $50 billion that the United States and other large Group of 7 economies agreed to provide in June. Washington had intended to contribute $20 billion to $25 billion to the loan, but only under conditions that would have barred an E.U. review of sanctions against Russia for three years.

Still, the loan announcement will be a relief to Kyiv, which is running out of money for acquiring weapons and for rebuilding damaged energy infrastructure as it heads into another winter at war.

At a news conference with Mr. Zelensky, Ms. von der Leyen said, “We should make Russia pay for the destruction it has caused.” The trip to Kyiv was her eighth visit to the Ukrainian capital since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

The plan is to repay the $39 billion loan using interest from $300 billion of Russian central bank assets that were frozen in 2022, though there is a risk that falling rates could decrease the value of the returns on those assets.

E.U. member states and the European Parliament will need to vote on the loan announced on Friday; should the proposal gain the required votes, Brussels intends to release the funds before the end of the year.

Jacob Kirkegaard, a Brussels-based senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the announcement that the European Union would move forward with the loan signaled that it was rising to the task of possibly becoming the dominant supporter of Ukraine. But by doing so, the bloc was also taking on the risks associated with the loan.

“Those assets aren’t 100 percent certain, so this is a common risk taken by the E.U. without unanimity,” he said. “That’s a huge deal.”

The proposal for a $39 billion loan leaves open the question of to what extent individual European countries might reduce their contributions to Ukraine from their budgets, potentially decreasing the financial impact of the loan.

European and American officials struggled to secure an agreement because of legal questions. One sticking point has been the requirement by the European Union, where two-thirds of Russia’s central bank assets are held, to review the sanctions that have frozen the assets every six months. Because any change in the sanctions could unlock the frozen Russian money serving as the basis of the loan, the United States has said that it will only move forward with its contribution if Brussels agrees to extend the sanctions review period to 36 months.

Any change to the review period requires the approval of all 27 E.U. member states, however, and Hungary, which has cultivated close ties with Russia, objected.

To resolve the impasse, E.U. officials decided to move forward with the smaller loan, which does not include participation from Washington, though Ms. von der Leyen said that she was “absolutely confident” that the United States and others would eventually contribute.

Ukraine faces enormous energy challenges as it heads into the third winter of the war. Russian attacks on power plants have intensified in recent months, and in late August, after Ukraine invaded the Kursk region of Russia, Moscow fired more than 200 missiles and drones on Ukraine that targeted its energy infrastructure.

Even before those attacks, Ukraine’s power generation was about a third of its prewar capacity. “This winter will be, by far, its sternest test yet,” Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, said on Thursday.

In a report published on Thursday, the energy agency urged Ukraine and the international community to focus on increasing the security of critical infrastructure and on Ukraine’s capacity to import electricity and gas from the European Union. The agency also called on Ukraine to decentralize its power supply, since large energy assets were more vulnerable to attack.

Ms. von der Leyen’s visit to Kyiv comes as Ukrainian troops on the ground are in a precarious position. On the eastern front, they have been gradually retreating for months in the face of persistent Russian advances, and they are now grappling with Russian counterattacks in the small portion of the Kursk region that they captured last month.

Also on Friday, Ukraine announced that it would ban the use of the messaging app Telegram on the official devices of members of its government, military and security apparatus. The app was founded by Pavel Durov, a Russian citizen who was arrested in France last month as part of an investigation into criminal activities on the platform.

Citing threats to national security, the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine warned on Friday that Russia may have access to messages and personal data on Telegram. The app has become a major platform of communication for people in both Ukraine and Russia during the war.

The ban was not expected to significantly affect communications within Ukraine’s military, which uses other platforms, such as Signal.

Alan Rappeport contributed reporting from Washington.

The Dutch government returned centuries-old stone Buddhist statues, a bejeweled serpentine armband and other looted artifacts to its former colony Indonesia on Friday, a rare example of cultural objects taken during colonialism making their way back home.

The Netherlands returned 288 items in a ceremony at the World Museum in Amsterdam, where the artifacts had been held. The repatriation is only the second by the Dutch since a 2020 report by a government advisory committee recommended returning art and other objects taken during four centuries of the country’s colonial era.

The report was part of the Netherlands reckoning with that legacy and involvement in slavery. The country was returning “objects that should never have been in the Netherlands,” Eppo Bruins, the minister of education, culture and science, said in a statement.

The exchange shows an evolving restitution process, after several former colonial powers in Europe pledged to return prized historical objects to countries in Africa, Asia and South America. Countries like France and Belgium, which have thousands of such treasures in public collections, have moved slowly, however, hindered by the arduous work of identifying, tracing and returning the often delicate objects.

The Dutch government was following an expanded definition of which objects are eligible for return that was adopted after the 2020 report. The objects are not just those looted in conflict, but also seized by missionaries, for example, or smuggled by mercenaries and other colonial-era runners.

“In the colonial period, cultural objects were often looted, or they changed hands involuntarily in some other way,” Mr. Bruins said.

Last year, Indonesia filed a claim to the Dutch Commission of Colonial Collections for the statues, which were taken from an unfinished temple complex built in the 13th century in East Java, according to the commission. The Indonesian Repatriation Commission also filed a claim for traditional weapons, jewelry and other treasures that were looted in the early 20th century.

To return them, Dutch researchers had to prove the objects’ provenance. While researchers were able to trace the objects’ historical paths from kingdoms in Indonesia to museums in the Netherlands, it is often difficult to produce the archival evidence needed to prove where looted objects come from, said Jos van Beurden, an independent researcher who specializes in restitution. The recommendations of the 2020 report eased some of these requirements.

The objects will now be sent to the National Museum in Jakarta, where they will likely be housed among other restored objects, said Mr. van Beurden, who has visited the museum.

Critics of the repatriation process have questioned how poorer countries will store the returned objects. But that should be of no concern to former colonial powers, said Marieke van Bommel, director general of the National Museum of World Cultures in the Netherlands, a network that includes the Amsterdam museum.

“The thief cannot tell the rightful owners what to do with their property,” Ms. van Bommel said.

The Dutch museum has been in talks with its Indonesian counterparts for more than a decade, long before it became government policy to return the artifacts, she said. Other efforts to return objects have usually been driven by collaboration between museums, rather than the pledges by government leaders.

“One of the bad things of colonialism was the creation of so much distrust,” Mr. van Beurden said. “But, trust is growing between the two parties so that they can discuss it.”

Unlike some other former colonies, Indonesia had the resources and cultural muscle to reclaim its looted objects, he added.

The Netherlands holds thousands of artifacts from around the world, mostly in museums, but some may also still be part of private collections, making it harder to trace them.

Nigeria and India have also filed repatriation claims. At least four Dutch museums are known to house objects that British soldiers looted from the Benin kingdom on Africa’s West coast, while the copper manuscripts of India’s 17th century Chola Empire are listed as donated to the Leiden University by a Dutch family.

China said on Friday that it would gradually resume imports of seafood from Japan, a year after banning them in response to Japan’s release of treated radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the ocean.

The announcement came after the countries reached an agreement to expand monitoring of the treated water, which Japan began discharging in August of last year. The Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power Company, which operated the Fukushima plant and is overseeing its cleanup, have assured the public that the water is safe for human consumption.

China was the most outspoken of several Asia-Pacific countries that objected to the release of the water, citing fears that it could contaminate seafood, though most scientists have dismissed such concerns. The water had been used to cool the nuclear fuel rods destroyed in 2011 when the Fukushima plant, on Japan’s east coast, melted down after a devastating earthquake and tsunami.

Tepco, as the power company is known, has said that it runs the water through a treatment plant to remove most of the radioactive material from it, and that what remains does not exceed international safety standards.

But Beijing has continued to refer to it as “nuclear-contaminated water,” doing so again in its statement on Friday. It has spread disinformation about the safety of the discharge, stoking fear, anger and anti-Japanese sentiment.

On Friday, the two countries announced that they had agreed to expanded monitoring of the treated wastewater under guidelines set by the International Atomic Energy Agency, with the participation of experts from countries including China.

Beijing said it planned to “gradually” restart imports of Japanese seafood that met its safety standards. But it continued to criticize what it called Japan’s “irresponsible practice.”

Mao Ning, a spokeswoman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said that Beijing was still opposed to Japan’s “unauthorized discharge into the sea,” but that the agreement would ensure that Japan would “earnestly fulfill its obligation under international law.”

In a statement, Fumio Kishida, Japan’s prime minister, said that Japan welcomed the additional monitoring.

China was the biggest importer of Japanese seafood in 2022, accounting for about 23 percent of all exports, worth roughly $600 million, according to Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.

China’s announcement that it would lift the ban comes at a time of heightened tension between the two countries, further strained this week when a 10-year-old Japanese boy was fatally stabbed on his way to school in Shenzhen, a city in southern China.

Chinese officials have called the killing, which happened outside a school for Japanese children, an isolated incident perpetrated by a 44-year-old “thug,” according to a Chinese Communist Party newspaper. But it came two months after a man stabbed a Japanese woman and her son in eastern China, then killed a Chinese woman who tried to stop him.

On Thursday, Mr. Kishida called the attack on the boy in Shenzhen “an extremely despicable crime” and urged China to do more to protect Japanese people in the country.

Ms. Mao, the Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman, said the timing of the announcement about the seafood ban was unrelated to the boy’s killing. China said it had engaged in more than 10 rounds of negotiations with Japan and various organizations to reach the agreement.

Tepco says it has released more than 60,000 tons of treated wastewater from the Fukushima plant, in a series of eight discharges. That is less than 5 percent of the 1.3 million tons of treated water sitting in tanks at the decommissioned facility. It may take 30 to 40 years to release all the wastewater, Japanese news outlets have estimated.

Before the discharges started last year, the I.A.E.A. sent a team to Fukushima with experts from 11 countries, including China and the United States. They published a report in July last year that said Japan’s plan met international safety standards.

Since then, the agency has set up an office at the site to independently analyze the treated water before release and to test seawater near the plant. Two months ago, the I.A.E.A. said the wastewater discharge continued to comply with safety standards.

Lawyers representing dozens of women who have detailed harrowing allegations of sexual assault by Mohamed al-Fayed, the former owner of Harrods, said on Friday that they would launch a civil case against the luxury British department store for allegedly enabling his abuse.

At a news conference on Friday, a day after a bombshell BBC documentary and podcast laid out a pattern of sexual violence and rape of female employees during the time that Mr. al-Fayed owned the store, lawyers for at least 37 women said Harrods had “acquiesced to” an unsafe environment that had failed the alleged victims. About 20 of those women looked on from the audience.

Mr. al-Fayed, who died last year at 94, was a billionaire tycoon who owned the iconic store from 1985 to 2010.

“We will say it plainly, Mohamed al-Fayed was a monster,” said Dean Armstrong, one of the lawyers, adding, “But he was a monster enabled by a system, a system that pervaded Harrods.”

Mr. al-Fayed was “enabled by unsafe systems of work which Harrods established, maintained, certainly acquiesced to, and, we say, facilitated during his chairmanship,” Mr. Armstrong said.

Harrods, which is now owned by the state of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, issued a statement shortly after the documentary was released on Thursday saying it was “utterly appalled by the allegations of abuse perpetrated by Mohamed al-Fayed.”

The company acknowledged that during his ownership, “we failed our employees who were his victims and for this we sincerely apologize.” It said its priority had been to “settle claims in the quickest way possible, avoiding lengthy legal proceedings for the women involved.”

New accusations have emerged since the documentary, called “Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods,” aired on Thursday, lawyers said. The investigation featured the accounts of more than 20 female ex-employees whose allegations span years and continents, with accusations of assault in London, Paris, St. Tropez and Abu Dhabi. Five of the women say they were raped by Mr. al-Fayed.

On Friday, three British lawyers sat alongside one victim who shared a detailed account of abuse. They were accompanied by Gloria Allred, the American attorney known for representing women in high-profile abuse cases.

Mr. Armstrong said the allegations against Mr. al-Fayed combined “some of the most horrific elements of the cases involving Jimmy Savile, Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein.”

The lawyers said they would deal with each claim individually rather than through a class-action lawsuit, though civil claims had not yet been filed as they continued to investigate each case.

“Every survivor suffered different harm here and different long-term effects,” Mr. Armstrong said.

While the lawyers are focusing their initial efforts on holding Harrods accountable for what they describe as systemic failures and a culture that enabled the abuse, they said it was likely that civil suits could extend to other businesses Mr. al-Fayed owned, potentially in other countries.

“We are aware of allegations that have been made at other places of work,” said Maria Mulla, one of the lawyers representing the women. “But our investigations are obviously ongoing into all these entities that he had an involvement in.”

The lawyers said they were representing at least one employee of the Ritz Paris, which Mr. al-Fayed bought in 1979 and owned until his death. That hotel, in an emailed statement from a spokesperson, said it “strongly condemns any form of behavior that does not align with the values of the establishment,” adding that “the safety and well-being of our employees and guests are our absolute priority.”

Any case against the department store, and others who the lawyers say enabled Mr. al-Fayed’s behavior, could have international reach as the alleged sexual assaults took place in locations around the world. At least six of the accusers are from the United States, while others from Malaysia, Australia, Italy and Romania have also come forward.

Former employees said Mr. al-Fayed would scour the department-store floor and handpick women to work in his office. Many of those women were given intrusive gynecological medical checks and tested for sexually transmitted diseases, the results of which were sent directly to Mr. al-Fayed.

Around 20 women who said Mr. al-Fayed abused them filed into the room quietly at the start of the news conference on Friday. Many requested anonymity to protect their privacy.

Natacha, who spoke to reporters on the condition that only her first name be used, described how her one-time boss had manipulated and harassed her before ultimately sexually assaulting her. The abuse impacted her for years, and she said when she saw his obituary last year, it had overwhelmed her emotionally.

“I couldn’t believe that this monster had gotten away with his crimes. Thankfully today, this is a different story, and I’m really grateful for that,” she said.