A jet of steam rises with a hiss as a red hot poker plunges into a bowl of cider. A garlanded woman spears a piece of toast with a long fork and lodges the offering among the branches of a tree. Then, amid shouts from the watching crowd, the torch-lit ceremony ends with gunfire ringing out beneath the clear night winter sky.

For most of the year, Sheppy’s farm at Bradford-on-Tone in the west of England uses state of the art machinery to tend its 22,000 apple trees and produce more than half a million gallons of cider annually.

But for one evening in January, modern farming techniques are set aside for an ancient ritual called “wassailing,” where the coming year’s apple crop is blessed, evil spirits are chased away and cider is enthusiastically drunk by hundreds of spectators.

Dating from at least the 13th century, wassailing (the word derives from an Old English toast to good health, “waes hael”) seemed to have almost died out by the 1990s.

But recently, it has made a comeback at cider makers and community events, particularly in the west of England, spurred by growing interest in tradition and folklore, a renewed respect for the countryside and a desire among some Britons to liven up the grim winter months with a party.

“Wassailing fell by the wayside for a very long time and has had a huge revival,” said Louisa Sheppy, co-owner of Sheppy’s, a firm that has been making cider for more than two centuries, as she prepared the company’s farm for its seventh, consecutive year of hosting a wassail (one of dozens advertised around the region this winter).

Ms. Sheppy is not superstitious and does not really believe — as tradition holds — that the fate of the crop hinges on the annual wassail. But she values the event, which attracts more than 400 paying guests, promotes cider and features folk dancers known as Morris Men and a lively barn dance.

But before the dancing, visitors first joined in a song directed at two trees, imploring them to yield “hatfuls, capfuls, three-bushel bagfuls,” of fruit. Then the evening’s “wassail queen” (who symbolizes fertility and abundance) tasted heated cider, soaked a piece of toast in it and poured the rest around the tree roots.

Wearing a crown of ivy, mistletoe, hellebore and rosemary, the queen used a toasting fork to place the bread in the branches — a gesture designed to attract robins, which are seen as harbingers of spring — before shotguns were fired to drive away malevolent spirits.

Although her evening passed off smoothly, it was not stress free for Sheppy’s 2025 wassail queen, Em Sibley. Drinking the cider was fine (“Oh my god, it really is good, sweet and yummy,” she said) and so was pouring it around the tree.

Trickier, however, was soaking the toast in cider without rendering it soggy and then levering it off a long fork into the tree’s branches without sending the bread pieces tumbling.

“You don’t want to muck it up — just in case,” said Ms. Sibley, an employee at Sheppy’s, alluding to the possible celestial consequences of botching a ritual meant to guarantee the crop.

“When it all does go wrong, and the harvest is down, and we haven’t got as many apples for the year as normal,” said Ms. Sibley, “you don’t want to be the one who thinks ‘oh damn: It could have been the toast!’”

Once a Christmas or New Year tradition, wassailing now typically takes place around Jan. 18 or later.

The ceremonies have evolved over time, according to Ronald Hutton, a professor of history at the University of Bristol, who dates the first recorded wassails to the 13th century, when a large wooden bowl with alcohol was passed around by friends standing in a circle.

Someone would drink and call “waes hael” — be well — and the others would chorus back “drinc hael” or drink well, he said, adding that this could descend into a medieval drinking game.

“You’d carry on passing the wassail bowl from hand to hand and taking a slurp until either the host decided enough was enough — or people gradually keeled over and the winner was left standing,” said Professor Hutton, author of a book on English folklore.

By the 16th century, the link to agriculture was established, with farmers singing to and blessing bee hives, fruit trees, crops, sheep and cattle to encourage a bountiful harvest.

Interest in wassailing ebbed in the last century, said Professor Hutton, “with the growth of horticulture and fertilizers, a better knowledge of how trees and farms work, and a decline in the belief that singing to your trees or fields actually does any good.”

As he prepared to put on his multicolored costume, Mike Highfield, 64, a Morris dancer and master of ceremonies at Sheppy’s, where he gives visitor tours, welcomed the resurgence.

“We should celebrate our culture because cider really was the wine of England at one stage,” Mr. Highfield said, adding that the night brings people together over a beverage that, apart from its low alcohol version, typically ranges in strength from 4 percent to 7.5 percent alcohol.

“Once you let your hair down and scream at an apple tree — and you shout and you sing — you start to talk to people because you lose some of your inhibitions,” he said.

One spectator, Matthew Mudge, 62, a church musician from Cardiff, Wales, said he had wanted to attend a wassail for decades. “It’s a fantastic tradition. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get here,” Mr. Mudge said as he enjoyed a cider after the ceremony, adding, “All wassails involve drinking and perhaps that’s why they’ve lived for six centuries.”

In the village of Midsomer Norton, about 50 miles away, 100 people or so turned out for a community event to wassail three small apple trees in the local park. Instead of a queen, local children helped place pieces of toast in the branches. Trevor Hughes, 70, a Morris dancer, who conducted the ceremony, said the tradition had never disappeared here.

“We have always done wassails at this time of year. It may not have been advertised, there may have been just local village events, but it never really died,” he said. Lately, he added “there has been an explosion of wassails because it’s a simple means of having a laugh.”

While the fun of wassailing is irrefutable, does anyone really think it protects the crop?

“The rationalist in me says ‘of course not, how could it,’” said Professor Hutton, who spends a Sunday afternoon each January with friends in his garden, singing to his trees over a few drinks.

He noted, however, that his apple tree “never bore anything until I ‘wassailed’ it the first time.” adding: “It has borne bumper crops every year since.”

An asylum seeker from Afghanistan crashed a Mini Cooper into a union demonstration in Munich on Thursday, injuring more than two dozen people and adding to growing tensions around immigration ahead of Germany’s chancellor election next week.

The authorities believe the 10:30 a.m. crash was a deliberate attack by the 24-year-old, said Markus Söder, the governor of Bavaria, the state of which Munich is the capital. The police said the car passed a police cruiser that was accompanying the demonstration and plowed into the crowd. Officers fired one shot while arresting the man.

The crash site was less than a mile from the venue of the Munich Security Conference, which opens tomorrow and attracts high-profile participants and journalists from around the world. The police do not think the crash was connected to the conference. By the evening, as participants in the conference were arriving, the streets were calm.

Germany is reeling from a string of seemingly unrelated attacks carried out by immigrants from Afghanistan and the Middle East over the last year. Memories are still fresh of a car-ramming attack in December, when a man drove into a Christmas market in Magdeburg, in central Germany, injuring as many as 300 people and killing six.

Last month, an Afghan immigrant with an apparent mental illness and who had been scheduled for deportation killed a young child and an adult in a knife attack in a Bavarian park.

The leading parties in the chancellor election, set for Feb. 23, have all vowed to crack down on migrants to varying degrees — most notably the far-right Alternative for Germany party, known as the AfD, which sits second in the polls, and the conservative Christian Democrats, who are projected to finish first.

Some political insiders were speculating on Thursday that the attack could further lift the AfD, which has surpassed 20 percent in polls, by focusing voters even more on migration concerns.

There were similar expectations that the January attack in Bavaria would lure more voters to the AfD, a party that has long been shunned by all other parties in Parliament and parts of which are classified as extremist by German intelligence. But no such polling bounce materialized.

Allies of the Christian Democrats’ candidate for chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said on Thursday that they did not expect him to lose supporters to the AfD in the wake of the attack. They cited Mr. Merz’s decision last month, following the Bavarian knife attack, to push a set of newly restrictive migration members to a vote in Parliament.

The move was meant to show voters that Mr. Merz and his party are serious about acting to curtail migration and responding to concerns about public safety. But it sparked outrage in the Bundestag, the federal Parliament, and protests around the country, because Mr. Merz effectively broke a decades-long taboo in German politics against working with parties considered to be extreme. That’s because Mr. Merz pursued the measures knowing they could only pass with votes from the AfD.

Mr. Merz succeeded in passing a symbolic measure, but a second vote, on changes to migration law, failed, with several members of Mr. Merz’s party defecting.

Still, some of Mr. Merz’s allies suggested Thursday that the episode had effectively inoculated him and the Christian Democrats against claims of being unresponsive to voters on migration.

The political risks of the attack could be higher for the embattled incumbent chancellor, Olaf Scholz, whose Social Democrats are polling in third or fourth in surveys.

Mr. Scholz has taken a more measured approach to migration in the campaign. But on Thursday, he offered an aggressive response to the attack that underscored how sensitive the subject of migration — especially from Afghanistan and Syria — has become.

The driver “must be punished and he must leave the country,” said Mr. Scholz, who is struggling to connect with voters and is not expected to be re-elected chancellor, during a campaign stop in Fürth.

Mr. Scholz was set to take part on Thursday evening in a televised town hall with the three other leading chancellor candidates: Mr. Merz, Alice Weidel of the AfD and Robert Habeck of the Green Party. Migration was already expected to be a contentious topic, but the attack raised its salience further.

Photographs and videos of the crash site on Thursday showed a severely dented beige Mini Cooper, which police confirmed had been driven into the crowd.

A rescue helicopter and several ambulances were on site to bring victims — at least 30 were injured, two of them severely — to the hospital.

Sandra Demmelhuber, a journalist for Bayerischer Rundfunk, the Bavarian public broadcaster, was at the crash site and described a chaotic scene.

“There is a person lying on the street and a young man was led away by the police. People sitting, crying and shaking on the ground,” she wrote on X.

The demonstration had been organized by Verdi, one of Germany’s largest unions, which had called a one-day strike for city workers. About 1,500 people were at the rally when the crash took place, police said.

The man came to Germany in 2016 and failed his initial request for asylum, but was granted an official status that allowed him to stay in the country in 2021, according to Joachim Herrmann, Bavaria’s state interior minister. Mr. Herrmann also corrected earlier statements that police knew the man as a shoplifter — instead, he was working legally as an in-store detective for two private security firms.

Beyond those details, however, he was not publicly identified.

The attack came on the day the trial opened for an Afghan man who is accused of stabbing to death a police officer, and wounding several others, in Mannheim last spring.

After Thursday’s crash, Mr. Söder — whose Christian Social Union, a regional sister party of the Christian Democrats, has governed Bavaria for decades — wasted no time calling for action.

“It was not the first such act,” Mr. Söder said at the site of the crash. “Today I feel compassion for the people, but at the same time I am determined that something must change in Germany and quickly,” he added.

Hamas said on Thursday that it was ready to release Israeli hostages this weekend as laid out by the Gaza cease-fire agreement, after the fragile deal teetered this week, prompting more pessimism about its future.

Mahmoud Mardawi, a Hamas official, said in a text message that the hostage-for-prisoner exchange was set to go ahead on Saturday as long as Israel upheld its end of the agreement. He said mediators had told Hamas that Israel said it was committed to the deal.

Israel did not immediately comment on that and other statements by Hamas describing diplomatic progress. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was consulting with security chiefs in southern Israel on Thursday afternoon, his office said.

Egypt and Qatar, alongside the United States, have been brokering the cease-fire meant to end over a year of devastating war. During the first six weeks of the truce, Hamas agreed to release at least 33 hostages in exchange for more than 1,500 Palestinians imprisoned by Israel. At least 21 hostages and 766 Palestinian prisoners have been freed since the deal went into effect in late January.

But this week, Hamas announced that it would indefinitely suspend the next hostage release to protest what it described as Israeli violations of the truce’s terms. Mr. Netanyahu then threatened that unless hostages were released by noon Saturday, Israel would resume its military campaign “until Hamas is conclusively defeated.”

President Trump added a further complication by demanding that all the remaining hostages be freed by Saturday or “all hell is going to break out.” That message appeared to contradict the cease-fire deal that Mr. Trump’s own envoy had helped to broker, which stipulates a gradual release of hostages for Palestinian prisoners.

Mediators between the two sides were following up “to remove obstacles and close gaps” after recent “positive” talks with senior officials from Egypt and Qatar, Hamas said in a statement released earlier Thursday. Hamas has said that Israeli forces have repeatedly opened fire on Palestinians during the truce and not allowed prefabricated homes and heavy machinery to enter Gaza, in violation of the terms of the deal.

Omer Dostri, Mr. Netanyahu’s spokesman, said in a statement on Thursday that Israel was not allowing in prefabricated housing or heavy construction equipment, without explaining the rationale. He did not say whether that might change.

At least 60,000 prefabricated housing units and 200,000 tents should be delivered to Gaza during the first phase of the deal, in addition to equipment for rubble clearance, according to a copy of the agreement’s text seen by The New York Times. Hamas has complained that only a small number of the minimum of 200,000 tents has arrived in Gaza.

Three Israeli officials and two mediators, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, said this week that Hamas’s claims about not receiving enough tents were accurate. But COGAT, the Israeli military unit that oversees aid deliveries, said in a written response that Hamas’s accusations were “completely false.”

Even if the current roadblocks are surmounted, however, the future of the truce and how long it would last are still far from certain. The first phase is set to expire in early March, and Israel and Hamas have yet to agree on terms to extend the agreement.

Israel and Hamas were supposed to begin indirect talks over the second phase of the deal last week, which would include an end to the war and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza. But on Thursday, Mr. Dostri said Israel was “not currently conducting negotiations over the second phase of the deal.”

The war in Gaza began on Oct. 7, 2023, after Palestinian militants launched an attack on Israel in which about 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage, mostly civilians. Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed over 48,000 people in the Palestinian enclave, according to local health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Underscoring the fragility of the ongoing truce, a rocket was launched from Gaza before falling back into the enclave, the Israeli military said on Thursday. Hamas did not comment, but its projectiles have sometimes accidentally landed in Gaza, causing casualties. Israeli forces later struck the rocket launcher, the military said.

Despite the standoff, the fragile cease-fire was still holding and some tents and other humanitarian aid have been entering Gaza. The United Nations’ relief agency said in a statement on Wednesday that 801 trucks entered Gaza that day to “seize every opportunity afforded by the cease-fire to scale up” assistance.

But the emergency coordinator in Gaza for the aid agency Doctors Without Borders warned that humanitarian deliveries were not happening quickly enough and that “people are still lacking basic items.”

“We are still not seeing the massive scale-up of humanitarian aid needed in northern Gaza,” the emergency coordinator, Caroline Seguin, wrote in a dispatch from the territory that was posted online on Wednesday.

Mr. Trump’s recent ideas for the future of the Middle East have reverberated around the region. Over the past week, he has repeatedly said that the United States should take over Gaza, turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” and not allow displaced Palestinians to return to the territory once it has been rebuilt.

Palestinians, other Arabs and many experts in the field have rejected Mr. Trump’s proposal as ethnic cleansing. Any such move to empty Gaza would most likely preclude any future chance of a Palestinian state there.

Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.

For President Vladimir V. Putin, one phone call marked a turning point as great as any battle in his three-year war.

In a lengthy call on Wednesday, President Trump delivered a message to Mr. Putin that encapsulated much of how the Russian leader sees today’s world: that Russia and the United States are two great nations that should negotiate Ukraine’s fate directly and move on to addressing even weightier global affairs.

It was the clearest sign yet that Mr. Putin, despite Russia’s disastrous failures at the outset of his Ukraine invasion in early 2022, could still emerge from the war with a redrawn map of Europe and an expansion of Russia’s influence in it.

The call came on the same day that Mr. Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, declared that the United States would not support Ukraine’s desire for NATO membership. It also came as the Senate confirmed Tulsi Gabbard, widely seen as sympathetic to Mr. Putin, as the next director of national intelligence.

Taken together, the developments marked a payoff for Mr. Putin’s monthslong campaign of lavishing praise on Mr. Trump — apparently in the belief that the American president has the power to deliver a Russian victory in Ukraine.

“Putin is playing a very clever game,” Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, said. “He’s investing 100 percent into the effort to seduce Trump.”

In Moscow, news of the long-awaited call ushered in a wave of barely contained glee. Commentators claimed that the American-led three-year effort to isolate Russia had emphatically ended. They celebrated Mr. Trump’s glowing social media post after the call about “the Great History of Our Nations” and noted that the American president had spoken to Mr. Putin before he had called President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.

One Russian lawmaker said that Mr. Putin’s call with Mr. Trump “broke the West’s blockade.” Another said that Europeans were surely reading Mr. Trump’s post about it “with horror and cannot believe their eyes.” A third said it was a “day of good news.”

In a sign of the burst of optimism, Russia’s main stock market index jumped 5 percent on Thursday morning to its highest point since last summer, and its battered currency, the ruble, gained against the dollar to its strongest level since September.

Russian businesspeople hope that a peace deal with Mr. Trump could lead to sanctions against their country being dropped. The Kremlin said that, beyond Ukraine, Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin touched on “bilateral Russian-American relations in the economic sphere.”

Not all were happy. Some Russian cheerleaders of the war grumbled on social media that a deal with the United States could sell out the soldiers on the battlefield. A pro-war blog with more than a million followers, Two Majors, quoted a fighter who said that the discussion of Wednesday’s call “demoralizes and irritates me.”

Ms. Stanovaya and many other commentators noted that Mr. Putin’s chances of getting all he wants were far from assured. In particular, while Mr. Trump appears focused on ending the fighting in Ukraine, Mr. Putin wants a broader agreement with the United States that would push back NATO and allow Russia to reclaim a sphere of influence in Europe.

“Donald Trump spoke in favor of a speedy end to hostilities,” the Kremlin said in its summary of the call, hinting at that divergence. “Vladimir Putin, for his part, mentioned the need to eliminate the root causes of the conflict.”

On the diplomatic front, Mr. Putin still faces a Europe that is predominantly arrayed against him. Senior European defense officials gathering in Brussels on Thursday showed no sign of budging from their insistence that Ukraine be at the center of any peace talks and that Europe be at the table, too.

John Healey, Britain’s defense secretary, repeated the Biden administration’s mantra that there “can be no negotiations about Ukraine without Ukraine.”

It is unclear, however, how much leverage the Europeans would have over the U.S. on Ukraine diplomacy, despite their pushback.

The call sets up a complex negotiation whose contours — and participants — are still unclear. Mr. Zelensky will try to make the case for American support in a meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance in Munich on Friday.

Mr. Putin is likely to keep the military pressure on Ukraine while appealing to Mr. Trump’s ambitions as a peacemaker. Analysts say that what Mr. Putin cares about most is not how much territory he captures in Ukraine; rather, he wants a more comprehensive deal that keeps Ukraine out of NATO, limits the size of Ukraine’s military and reduces the Western alliance’s presence across Eastern and Central Europe.

Analysts doubt that Mr. Putin will agree to stop the fighting before he receives assurances that at least some of those wider demands will be met. He is signaling confidence that Russia has the personnel, equipment and economy to outlast Ukraine on the battlefield — and that Ukraine will collapse quickly if Mr. Trump should pull his support.

“They won’t last a month if the money stops,” Mr. Putin said last month, referring to Ukraine.

Still, Mr. Putin faces his own pressures, which some analysts believe could make him amenable to a deal in which he could come down from some of his demands. Russia’s military has been suffering roughly 1,000 casualties a day, according to Western officials, and the economy risks overheating, with the central bank’s benchmark interest rate up to a sky-high 21 percent.

Ilya Grashchenkov, an analyst of Russian politics based in Moscow, said that the call with Mr. Trump made Mr. Putin’s repeated doubling down on the Ukraine war “look like a successful bet in a casino.”

Russia absorbed huge losses in Ukraine, gambling that, eventually, “the global paradigm would change” and the West would tire of supporting the country, Mr. Grashchenkov said in a phone interview. “This change has happened, and now it is unclear how this bet will play out in the future.”

Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine was already facing a daunting week as foreign officials gathered in Europe for talks about his country’s future.

The Trump administration was demanding $500 billion in Ukrainian mineral rights, it canceled Ukraine’s exemption from U.S. tariffs on steel and a leading American skeptic of military assistance for Kyiv, Vice President JD Vance, was on his way to Europe for a meeting with the Ukrainian leader.

But on Wednesday, things went from bad to worse. President Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, delivered a harsh assessment of Ukraine’s prospects in its war with Russia. Then Mr. Trump announced that he had spoken with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a call Mr. Trump characterized as the opening of talks to end the war — with no clear role for Mr. Zelensky.

The phone call also spelled the end of American efforts to isolate Russia diplomatically after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago.

“He’s on his heels geopolitically,” Cliff Kupchan, chairman of Eurasia Group, a risk analysis firm based in Washington, said of Mr. Zelensky.

Mr. Trump’s actions in the last two days — which also included a prisoner swap with the Kremlin that freed an American teacher — signaled a thawing relationship between the United States and Russia that could favor Mr. Putin in a peace deal while leaving Ukraine on the sidelines.

Mr. Trump also called the Ukrainian leader on Wednesday, but in a social media post he did not mention how, or if, Mr. Zelensky would figure in peace talks.

Mr. Zelensky will meet with Mr. Vance and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, at the annual Munich Security Conference, which opens on Friday, Mr. Trump said.

Negotiations to end the deadliest war in Europe in generations will shape the future of Ukraine, and the recent developments mean some of its territory is likely to remain under Russian occupation.

And they will shape Mr. Zelensky’s political future. He has little choice but to go along with American-led talks despite his deep skepticism, shared by most Ukrainians, of Mr. Putin’s readiness to negotiate without imposing onerous conditions or bringing more military and economic pressure to bear.

By Thursday morning, it was a sentiment swirling widely in Kyiv, a city now hit nightly with Russian missiles and exploding drones.

Volodymyr Fesenko, a political analyst, wrote on Facebook that Mr. Putin was most likely playing the Trump administration for time. “He is not going to compromise on ending the war, as Trump’s team wants,” he wrote.

Mr. Trump wasn’t the only one to deliver sobering news to Ukraine. Mr. Hegseth told European allies on Wednesday that it was “unrealistic” for Ukraine to return to its borders as they were before Russia’s military invasion began in 2014.

And he added that the United States did not support Ukraine’s goal of joining NATO to secure any peace settlement, calling it “unrealistic.”

Mr. Zelensky has played weak hands well before. In the opening days of Russia’s invasion, he popped out of a bunker to film selfie videos that rallied his country, and much of the world, to Ukraine’s cause.

Now he is again facing a pivotal moment for his country in a diminished position, sinking in domestic polls and getting a cold shoulder from his most important ally.

Mr. Zelensky has twice said in recent days that he is willing to negotiate with Mr. Putin if Western allies offer security guarantees in a settlement. In his nightly address to the nation Wednesday, the Ukrainian leader was conciliatory, saying he had a “good and detailed discussion” with Mr. Trump.

“We discussed many aspects — diplomatic, military, economic — and President Trump informed me of what Putin had told him,” he added. “We believe that America’s strength is sufficient to pressure Russia and Putin into peace, together with us, together with all our partners.”

Mr. Putin, for his part, has signaled that Mr. Zelensky would need to face an election at home before Russia would accept his signature on a peace deal.

The demand suggests a Russian view of a potential three-step process for negotiating a settlement to the war, according to a person who has had recent conversations about settlement scenarios with senior Russian officials.

It envisions an initial truce and preliminary deal, followed by elections in Ukraine and only then a binding peace settlement, said the person, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Ukraine has had some bright spots. Soon after his inauguration, Mr. Trump harshly criticized Mr. Putin, saying he was “destroying” Russia with the war.

And while Mr. Trump’s claim on Ukraine’s minerals comes at a big cost for Kyiv, it has also been viewed by Ukrainian officials as a hopeful sign.

The talks on mineral rights, which began on Wednesday with a visit to Kyiv by the American Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, open a path for Mr. Trump to continue military aid while claiming to have secured a benefit for the United States.

“They’ve essentially agreed to do that, so at least we don’t feel stupid,” Mr. Trump said of Ukraine’s willingness to yield its natural resources, in an interview with Fox News that aired on Monday. “Otherwise, we’re stupid. I said to them, ‘We have to get something. We cannot continue to pay this money.’ ”

That was before Russia and the United States showed a new willingness to work together. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump’s friend and envoy, Steve Witkoff, flew a private jet into Moscow to retrieve an imprisoned American teacher, Marc Fogel, a notable gesture of conciliation by Moscow. In return, the Kremlin said, the United States would deliver a Russian cybercriminal, Alexander Vinnik, back to Russia.

Mr. Zelensky has rejected Mr. Putin’s repeated claims that he is an illegitimate leader, and that Ukraine needs to lift martial law and hold elections. (Ukrainian elections were delayed under martial law after Russia invaded in 2022. Mr. Zelensky’s five-year term, which would have expired last May, was extended under the law.)

Ukrainian officials say they view the Russian demand for democratic elections as part of a ploy to destabilize the government and compel Ukraine to let its guard down for a vote. They have urged the Trump administration not to endorse the idea.

“It is the Russians who are raising the topic of elections because they need their man in Ukraine,” Mr. Zelensky said in an interview with the British broadcaster ITV News that aired last weekend. “If we suspend martial law, we may lose the army. And the Russians will be happy because the qualities of spirit and combat capability will be lost.”

Inside Ukraine, however, his domestic opponents are quietly preparing for a possible campaign.

Despite his diminished status going into talks, it is too early to write off Mr. Zelensky, a former actor and an adept leader in a crisis, Mr. Kupchan, the Eurasia analyst, said.

“He’s proven to be quite a skilled counterpuncher,” he said. “I don’t feel we’re in the final act of any play yet.”

Mr. Zelensky is preparing for talks as the momentum on the main front of the war, in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, has favored Russia for more than a year. It is unclear for how long Russia can sustain extraordinarily high casualties, which have been estimated by military analysts as at least in the hundreds daily.

And Ukraine is entering talks with one bit of leverage: its control over a few hundred square miles of Russian territory in the Kursk region captured last summer, an incursion that was deeply embarrassing to the Kremlin. Mr. Zelensky said he wanted to trade territory in Kursk for Russian-held Ukrainian land, something Mr. Putin would almost certainly resist.

If the momentum of a few dozen or hundreds of yards of advances per day continued through negotiations, it would give an advantage to Moscow. Then, any delay by Ukraine in accepting cease-fire terms would cost Kyiv territory.

Russia’s progress has slowed since November in month-on-month measures of captured territory, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a U.S.-based analytical group.

In January, for example, Russia captured about 40 fewer square miles than in December, the institute reported. Military analysts have cautioned that determining the significance of that decline is not possible.

Anton Troianovski contributed reporting.

Not so long ago, Taiwan basked in seemingly boundless, bipartisan support in Washington, where the island has long been regarded as a valiant democratic partner against China.

Now, a few weeks into President Donald J. Trump’s second term, Taiwan is adjusting to a shift in its relationship with the United States, its primary backer — one that does not focus on shared democratic ideals, and that is more uncertain and transactional. Mr. Trump has accused Taiwan of spending far too little on its own security and of gaining an unfair dominance in making semiconductors.

Taiwanese officials and businesspeople have been trying to assure the new administration of their commitment to cooperation. They have traveled to Washington for meetings, bearing charts detailing their military outlays, and attended inauguration events filled with the MAGA faithful. They have floated new deals that Taiwanese companies could broker with American businesses in gas and other fields, and tried to explain the value of Taiwan’s semiconductor manufacturing to American interests.

Underlying their efforts is an anxiety over what Mr. Trump may do, for instance, to press Taiwanese companies to move advanced semiconductor production to the United States. Mr. Trump has said he might soon impose tariffs on semiconductors. Taiwanese officials have been preparing to help Taiwanese businesses soften the blow of any such move.

“I think Taiwan just convinced itself that they had good relations with the U.S. and they had lots of friends in Congress, and they would be able to weather the storm,” said Bonnie S. Glaser, the managing director of German Marshall Fund’s Indo-Pacific program, who often speaks with Taiwanese politicians. “When Trump made those comments, I think it was a wake up call for people in Taiwan that they really didn’t know what was coming next.”

Governments around the world are trying to adjust to Mr. Trump’s combative approach. But the stakes for Taipei are especially high. The island depends on the United States for nearly all its major weapons. It sends nearly a quarter of its exports directly to the United States, and Washington is crucial in giving Taiwan political support against Beijing, which claims that Taiwan is its territory and must accept unification — by force, if deemed necessary.

Taiwanese officials and policy advisers said the island would quickly roll out measures to help its businesses hurt by any new U.S. tariffs. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive and provisional nature of the plans, and declined to give details. Some officials have publicly hinted at the preparations. “We’re preparing for a range of scenarios,” the minister of economic affairs, Kuo Jyh-Huei, told reporters when asked about Mr. Trump’s threatened tariffs. “If we showed our hand now, that would not work to the benefit of everyone.”

Even if Mr. Trump holds off on the tariffs, Taiwan faces more pressure from his administration on other issues. They include the island’s big trade surplus with the United States, which climbed to a record $74 billion last year according to U.S. data, and its military spending and preparations, which many in Washington see as lacking, even though billions of dollars worth of orders of American military equipment are stuck in a backlog. The United States is committed by law to help Taiwan defend itself, and leaves open the possibility of intervening militarily if China tried to conquer the island.

“There’s a basic mismatch. We’ve been thinking that America and Taiwan are in a strong partnership, but America under Trump thinks Taiwan doesn’t do enough,” said Jason Hsu, a former Taiwanese lawmaker and technology investor who is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “Sooner or later, the Taiwan government will need to show up in town with a package ready to offer Trump.”

Publicly, the Taiwanese government is projecting calm confidence about relations with Washington. But Taiwanese officials’ efforts to build bridges into Mr. Trump’s inner circle during trips to Washington last month and in December, have yielded little so far, said three American officials familiar with their attempts, who described the interactions as limited.

Taiwan sent two economic officials to Washington this week to “better explain ourselves to Mr. Trump’s circle,” Mr. Kuo, the economic affairs minister, told reporters before their departure. Taiwan also hopes to buy more liquefied natural gas from Alaska, he has said.

“Taiwan is preparing some presents for Trump,” said Jeremy Chih-Cheng Chang, the chief executive officer of the Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology in Taipei. “They have already indicated some, as you have seen in news reports — like buying liquefied natural gas — but there are sure to be others.”

In January, executives from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company — TSMC, the world’s most advanced chip maker — held talks with Mr. Trump’s nominee for commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, said several people familiar with the talks who spoke on condition of anonymity.

In December, Taiwanese officials visiting Washington showed officials and Republican politicians a presentation designed to demonstrate that Taiwan has been rapidly increasing military preparations, according to people familiar with those discussions. They met with Michael Waltz, then a Florida congressman known for being hawkish on matters of national security, according to one of the people.

Taiwanese officials remain hopeful that they will find robust supporters in two men who were deeply critical of China in Congress: Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, and Mr. Waltz, now Mr. Trump’s national security adviser. But some former officials who strongly supported Taiwan in Mr. Trump’s first term have not been brought into his new administration, including Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state.

“It’s very telling that some hard-line hawks on Taiwan have been left out,” said Christopher K. Johnson, the president of China Strategies Group, a consulting firm, and a former U.S. government intelligence officer. “It looks like Taiwan bet on some of the wrong horses.”

Half a dozen or so officials poised to take senior positions in the Pentagon have rejected the G.O.P.’s tradition of backing an expansive foreign reach, in favor of limiting U.S. military commitments abroad. They represent an ascendant foreign policy doctrine in a party that in recent years has chafed at committing more military support to Ukraine, and pushed NATO allies to spend more on their militaries.

In an opinion essay published last May, Mr. Trump’s nominee to serve as the Pentagon’s under secretary of defense for policy, Elbridge Colby, warned that Taiwan should not assume that it was indispensable to the United States. “America has a strong interest in defending Taiwan, but Americans could survive without it,” he wrote. He and other Pentagon officials have suggested that Taiwan should increase its military spending to at least 5 percent of its economic output, or about twice what it currently is spending.

The Taiwanese government has said it is committed to expanded military spending, though many Taiwanese experts and officials, privately, question the 5 percent target. President Lai Ching-te of Taiwan also faces a legislature controlled by opposition lawmakers who have accused his government of wasteful spending and reined in parts of this year’s defense budget.

At the same time, Taiwan has its own frustrations with the United States, including the big backlog of undelivered orders of arms and military equipment to the island.

“I do sense a soreness of being told to spend more when they haven’t received what they’ve already paid for,” said Steve Yates, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, referring to Taiwan. “The U.S. has to fix its defense manufacturing supply chain before it can reasonably put pressure on others to do and buy more.”

Ana Swanson in Washington, Amy Chang Chien in Taipei and Tripp Mickle in San Francisco and Whistler, British Columbia contributed reporting.

Women are being turned away at clinics that provided maternity and reproductive care and cancer and H.I.V. treatment. Doctors and nurses have been placed on leave and told to go home. Across the globe, aid agencies say, decades of female-focused health care work has been “decimated overnight.”

Three weeks into President Trump’s suspension of all foreign aid, and already the impact on millions of women and girls is catastrophic and health care systems are “crumbling,” according to the United Nations and other women-focused global aid agencies.

“You can’t get treatment and you can’t get care because America has decided on a whim that you are not worthy, that is unfathomable,” said Elisha Dunn-Georgiou, president and chief executive of the Global Health Council. “We are in the fight for everybody’s lives.”

For example, as of Wednesday, about 2.5 million women and girls have been denied contraceptive care, said Dr. Elizabeth Sully, the principal research scientist at the Guttmacher Institute. That number will balloon to 11.7 million by the end of the Trump administration’s 90-day review process for foreign aid.

The Trump administration has frozen nearly all foreign aid pending a review “to identify programs that work and continue them and to identify programs that are not aligned with our national interest,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio last week during a visit to the Dominican Republic. The United States Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D., through which much of the aid for the women’s groups was distributed, has been essentially gutted and what remains will now be run out of the State Department.

At a panel organized by the United Nations Foundation, an organization that promotes the work of the U.N., representatives from the United Nations Population Fund, the Global Health Council, MSI Reproductive Choices, the Guttmacher Institute, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and the Universal Access Project at the U.N. Foundation said they had come together to sound the alarm.

They described a chaotic breakdown of operations along the health care supply chain, with decades of trust-building in communities having been decimated overnight.

The State Department did not respond to a request for a comment.

The United States has for the past five decades been a top leader in donations and investments in global health, providing some 40 percent of all donations for global family planning, mostly through U.S.A.I.D., said Dr. Sully.

Mr. Rubio has said that the United States will issue emergency waivers for humanitarian work and that lifesaving aid such as food and medicine are not included in the freeze. But global aid agencies contest that claim, saying that the waivers are nonexistent in the places where programs operate. Staff members who would process them are on leave, and pleas to U.S. officials have not been answered.

“If you are hearing from the U.S. government there is a waiver, that is a lie,” said Ms. Dunn-Georgiou from the Global Health Council. She added that for global health agencies, a top concern is that programs related to family planning and contraceptives could disappear permanently. The State Department did not respond to requests for comment on the waivers.

In the first week of his presidency, Mr. Trump reinstated a longstanding Republican anti-abortion policy that bars federal funding from going to any overseas nongovernmental organization that performs or promotes abortions.

“Already the Trump administration has attacked services and systems that keep millions of people safe and healthy in our country and around the world,” said Caitlin Horrigan, senior director of Global Advocacy for Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Dr. Carole Sekimpi, senior director of MSI Africa, a family planning agency that provides contraception and abortions to women, said fear and anxiety were prevalent with all the programs across Africa that receive aid from the United States closed and their staff members sent home.

She said in her country, Uganda, hundreds of physicians providing H.I.V. care have been told to go home. “Most of these organizations will collapse because they are one hundred percent reliant on aid from U.S.A.,” Dr. Sekimpi said.

The U.N.’s agency focused on women’s reproductive and health rights, UNFPA, said its programs across the world are affected because the United States provides 30 percent of the agency’s administrative costs and 50 percent of its humanitarian aid funding. For the past four years that amounted to $725 million helping provide mental health care to women in Ukraine, women displaced in Chad and maternal care for Afghan women.

Rachel Moynihan, deputy director of UNFPA’s North America office, said the suspension of services and breakdown of trust has jeopardized U.S. investments at the U.N. agency. It also put in peril local government’s investments in their own health care systems, which the U.N had encouraged them to do.

Last week, Stephan Protschka, a member of Parliament for the far-right party Alternative for Germany, took to Facebook and Telegram to share a sensationalist article. The country’s Green Party, it claimed, was conspiring with the Ukrainian government to recruit migrants to stage terrorist attacks — and blame his party.

As intended, the post enraged Mr. Protschka’s followers. “People wake up,” one of them replied on Facebook. “This is criminal.”

The article was, in fact, part of a torrent of Russian disinformation that has flooded Europe’s biggest economic and diplomatic power ahead of its federal election on Feb. 23.

As the vote approaches, Russian influence campaigns have propagated wild claims about sexual, financial and criminal scandals involving German politicians, playing on social and political tensions that have divided the country, according to researchers who track disinformation and foreign influence operations.

The claims have appeared in fake news outlets and in videos that have been altered by artificial intelligence. They have been spread by an army of bot accounts on social media platforms like X, Facebook, Telegram and, in a new development, Bluesky.

The goal, according to the researchers and Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, is to undermine trust in mainstream parties and media and to bolster Germany’s far right, led by the Alternative for Germany, known as AfD.

Aiming at the same target is the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. His public support of the Alternative for Germany on X, the social media network he owns, has aligned with Russia’s strategic objective to destabilize Western democracies and support for Ukraine.

“We’re now dealing with a dual front,” said Sasha Havlicek, chief executive of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit research organization that on Thursday released a report about the Russian disinformation campaign on X.

“Between Musk’s overt and the Kremlin’s covert operations,” she said, “it is clear from the content that there’s mutual reinforcement there.”

Targeting Germany

Germany’s election has become the latest battleground in Russia’s influence campaigns. The Kremlin hopes the outcome of the contest, called ahead of schedule after Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left coalition collapsed late last year, could erode support in Europe for Ukraine, where Russian invaders are grinding down the country’s defenses after three years of war.

Mr. Musk, for his part, appears to have done little to curtail Russian bots promoting the AfD on his platform. Instead, he has told his 217 million-strong audience on X that the party is the country’s last hope.

In January, Mr. Musk interviewed the party’s leading candidate, Alice Weidel, for 75 minutes on X, the same platform he gave Donald J. Trump during his run for office last August. Addressing the party’s conference by video link last month, he said it had the support of the Trump administration.

Russia’s propagandists have welcomed the convergence and sought to exploit it. Mr. Musk’s posts on X have been spread by bot accounts operated by a Russian influence operation known as Doppelgänger, according to CeMAS, an organization that tracks German online extremism. X did not respond to a question about the Russian activity.

A fake news maven

In Germany, Russia is employing tactics it has honed in France, Moldova, Georgia, the United States and other countries that have recently held elections, according to disinformation researchers including from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, CeMAS and Recorded Future, a threat intelligence company based in Massachusetts.

One key player is a former sheriff’s deputy from Florida, John Mark Dougan, who received political asylum and eventually citizenship in Moscow. Having previously built a network of more than 160 fake news websites that pushed Kremlin propaganda in the United States, Britain and France, he has now turned his attention to Germany.

Nine days after the snap election was announced on Nov. 12, Mr. Dougan began registering dozens of fake German news sites, according to a report by NewsGuard, a company that tracks online disinformation, and Correctiv, a nonprofit news organization in Germany.

By February the number had grown to 102 — some masquerading as national news outlets, others as local media in Berlin, Hamburg and other cities.

On Jan. 30, one of the sites uploaded a video claiming that Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck conspired with Ukraine to steal 50 paintings from a Berlin art gallery. Another claimed Friedrich Merz, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union and the front-runner to become the next chancellor, was a “person of interest” in a 20-year-old murder case.

“The network is showing its agility,” said Clément Briens, an analyst with Recorded Future, which also published a report detailing Russian disinformation in Germany on Thursday.

Mr. Dougan, reached in Moscow, declined to answer questions about his role, but criticized the current German government as a puppet of the United States. “All their leaders need to be replaced,” he said.

‘Deepfakes of regular people’

Not all fake videos feature prominent politicians. Another tactic that has been gaining momentum is altering videos that feature regular people.

In January, Natalie Finch, a mental health nurse, made a promotional video on Instagram for the college in Britain where she works, the University of Bradford. Two weeks later the video reappeared on Bluesky, except this time she was not speaking about nursing but the mental health of candidates for Germany’s Christian Democratic Union.

The new version was a fake, using an artificial intelligence tool to recreate her voice reading a different script over the same video, emblazoned with the university’s logo. “The video started with me introducing myself, introducing the university and then, very seamlessly I have to say, became a video about the German government,” she said in an interview.

The fake was one of several identified by Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub. Others included manipulated audio of the presidents of several U.S. universities, and a fabricated video of a British policeman claiming to have passed on warnings of terrorist attacks in Germany.

“These are some of the clearest examples of deepfakes being used for disinformation that I’ve seen,” said Darren L. Linvill, a director of the hub who notified Ms. Finch about the manipulated video. “And what’s compelling about them is that some of them are just deepfakes of regular people.”

What impact Russia’s campaign will have on the outcome of the election remains uncertain. The researchers say the efforts have not so far meaningfully altered voter preferences, but the huge volume of disinformation has certainly seeped into the public discourse, carefully tailored to compound existing social grievances.

“The Russians very intricately study the newspapers, print media, television in their target countries,” Brian Liston, an analyst at Recorded Future, said. “They probably know more about a country’s politics than the country knows its own politics in many instances.”

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency said the quantity and sophistication of the disinformation have exceeded anything it has previously seen.

“The danger of disinformation campaigns is that they influence voters in their voting decision,” the Office for the Protection of the Constitution said in a statement to The Times. “There is also a risk that the election itself will be delegitimized and thereby cast into doubt by the public.”

There are signs that the campaign is intensifying. The 48 accounts traced to Russia on X over the past month have collectively received 2.5 million views, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s study found. Over the course of January, the number of engagements — likes or shares — tripled.

The Russian efforts benefit significantly when prominent politicians or influencers online, like Mr. Protschka of the Alternative for Germany, share the false claims, which researchers call “disinformation laundering.”

Mr. Musk, who is currently playing an outsize role in the Trump administration, may be the biggest influence. He has called the chancellor a “fool” and Germany’s president “an undemocratic tyrant.” Germany, he wrote in an opinion piece for a major newspaper in December, is “teetering on the brink of economic and cultural collapse.”

Mr. Musk has also amplified supporters of Alternative for Germany by sharing their posts on X. Some of these influencers were marginalized or even banned on the platform before Mr. Musk took over and reinstated them. Many, like Naomi Seibt, a 24-year-old vaccine and climate change skeptic, now post content in English to attract his attention.

Mr. Musk has also amplified Russian propaganda. In October 2023 he shared a meme created as part of an influence campaign run by Social Design Agency, an internet company in Moscow that has been sanctioned by the United States. Internal company documents from the Social Design Agency seen by CeMAS show that the Russians consider it a victory when their material is shared by public figures.

“This is the first German election where both the Kremlin and a powerful figure from the new U.S. administration are trying to influence the process and supporting the same far-right party,” said Julia Smirnova, an analyst at CeMAS.

“When figures like Musk share Russian propaganda narratives,” Ms. Smirnova said, “they ultimately normalize them, boost their reach and cause more damage than a network of inauthentic accounts.”