Vice President JD Vance urged European leaders on Friday to end the isolation of far-right parties across the continent, an extraordinary embrace of a once-fringe political movement with which the Trump administration shares a common approach on migration, identity and internet speech.

The address stunned and silenced hundreds of attendees at the Munich Security Conference, a forum where top-level politicians, diplomats and analysts had gathered expecting to hear President Trump’s plans for ending the war in Ukraine and Europe’s defense against a rising Russian threat.

The vice president singled out his German hosts, telling them to drop their objections to working with a party that has often reveled in banned Nazi slogans and has been shunned from government as a result. He did not mention the party, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, by name, but directly referred to the longstanding agreement by mainstream German politicians to freeze out the group, parts of which have been formally classified as extremist by German intelligence.

“There is no room for firewalls,” Mr. Vance said, bringing some gasps in the hall.

He punctuated the message by meeting on Friday with Alice Weidel, the AfD’s candidate for chancellor in this month’s election, as well as other German leaders. Altogether, it was an unusual intervention in the domestic politics of a democratic American ally.

The vice president offered what may be a preview under Mr. Trump of a redefinition of a trans-Atlantic relationship built on postwar bonds of stability between allied governments. Mr. Vance aggressively challenged the diplomats in the hall in Munich, telling them that their biggest security threat was not from China or Russia, but “the enemy within” — what he called their suppression of abortion protests and other forms of free speech.

He made the claim at a moment when Russia was waging the largest ground war in Europe since 1945 over Ukraine. It signaled the Trump administration’s priorities — expanding the MAGA movement abroad rather than countering President Vladimir V. Putin’s aggression.

Mr. Vance’s remarks echoed those of hard-right leaders across Europe and the anti-establishment messages that Russia has pumped onto social media in an effort to destabilize democratic politics in America and Europe.

Mr. Trump, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Friday, called it “a very brilliant speech.”

“I heard his speech, and he talked about freedom of speech,” Mr. Trump said. “And I think it’s true in Europe; it’s losing. They’re losing their wonderful right of freedom of speech. I see it. I mean, I thought he made a very good speech, actually, a very brilliant speech.”

Mr. Vance is the second figure in the Trump administration to try to chip away at the efforts to isolate the far right ahead of the German elections next Sunday by attempting to destigmatize the AfD.

The billionaire Elon Musk, a top adviser to Mr. Trump, endorsed the AfD late last year in a post on social media. He has publicly interviewed Ms. Weidel. And in an address to party members this month, Mr. Musk said Germany has “too much focus on past guilt.” That was a clear reference to Hitler’s long shadow, which continues to dominate mainstream German politics, including in tight legal restrictions against Nazi language.

Mr. Vance’s remarks drew a furious response from German leaders across most party lines. They immediately rejected Mr. Vance’s suggestion that they should drop their firewall against the AfD, pointing to past comments by the party’s members in support of the National Socialists, or Nazis.

Boris Pistorius, the German defense minister and a member of the governing Social Democrats, deviated from his planned speech on Friday afternoon to rebuke Mr. Vance.

“If I understood him correctly, he is comparing parts of Europe with authoritarian regimes — this is not acceptable,” Mr. Pistorius said, drawing sustained applause. “This is not the Europe, not the democracy, where I live.”

Thomas Silberhorn, a member of Germany Parliament for the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party of the Christian Democrats, also said: “This is our business. My message to the U.S. administration is: German extremists who explicitly refer to National Socialism — part of the AfD — are clearly anti the U.S. that liberated us from National Socialism.”

The AfD and its members have a history of use of Nazi language and antisemitic and racist comments, along with plots to overthrow the federal government. The party has surged to second in the polls with its call to crack down on immigration.

Mr. Vance did not note that baggage, nor did he mention any extremist elements of anti-immigration political parties. But, without naming any parties specifically, he cast the AfD and its counterparts across Europe as legitimate vessels of voter anger over the millions of refugees who have entered the European Union from the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere over the past decade.

Germany has been the most successful major European power at shutting its hard-right party out of power, along with France, where a group of rival parties engaged in strategic voting last summer to deny the hard-right National Rally a parliamentary majority.

Other firewalls have fallen around Europe, including in the Netherlands, Hungary and Italy. In Austria, the hard-right Freedom Party has been part of federal coalitions and appeared set to lead its next government, before negotiations with a center-right party collapsed this week.

In his speech, Mr. Vance seemed to lump those restrictions into a long list of what he called European deviations from democratic values and attacks on free speech.

Those failures, Mr. Vance said, included efforts to restrict misinformation and other content on social media, and laws against abortion protests that he said unfairly silenced Christians.

“If you are running in fear of your own voters,” Mr. Vance said, “there is nothing America can do for you.”

European intelligence agencies have raised alarms about what they consider to be a systematic effort by Russia at mass disinformation and propaganda, often by using fake social media accounts to sow division and doubt about democratic systems.

Mr. Vance ridiculed and diminished that threat.

“It looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion, or, God forbid, vote a different way, or, even worse, win an election,” he told a largely stony audience.

He also poured scorn on the decision in “remote Romania,” as he called it, to cancel a presidential election because of clear evidence of Russian manipulation of the political campaign.

“If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with,” he said.

Such statements came as something of a shock for attendees who had hoped to learn more about the administration’s plans for peace negotiations with Russia. Mr. Vance barely mentioned Ukraine.

“While the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine, and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense,” Mr. Vance said.

“The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor.” He added, “What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States.”

Mr. Vance also denounced the mass migration into Germany and other nations in 2015, which included many asylum seekers fleeing wars in Afghanistan and Syria. He tied the migration to terrorist crimes, including a car attack in Munich on Thursday by an Afghan asylum seeker, which injured 30 people.

“Over the span of a decade, we saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city,” he said.

Even before Mr. Vance spoke, experts at the security conference were warning European leaders that they could be in for a fast and painful reordering of the continent’s relationship with the United States.

Mr. Trump’s push to negotiate directly with Russia’s president over Ukraine and his transactional approach to trade policy and military spending dominated a breakfast panel discussion hosted by the American Council on Germany and the global accounting firm KPMG.

One panelist, Jana Puglierin, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, said that it was possible Mr. Trump would build a new Euro-American alliance between parties that share core values of immigration opposition, unregulated social media speech and “anti-woke” attitudes.

The council released new polling this week that suggests that value shift has already resonated in Europe. It found that majorities of Europeans now view America as a “necessary partner” and not an “ally” under Mr. Trump. It also found that Mr. Trump’s return to the White House was most celebrated in Europe among members of several hard-right parties.

There is one, perhaps paradoxical, exception. The poll found that members of the AfD were more likely to say Mr. Trump’s election would be bad for Germany than to say it would be good.

Emma Bubola contributed reporting from Rome.

The nonprofit groups track the imprisonment of Chinese political dissidents and the expansion of state censorship. They speak out for persecuted minority groups like the Uyghurs and Tibetans. And they help sustain attention on Beijing’s crackdown of freedoms in Hong Kong.

The future of their work is now in question as Elon Musk’s government efficiency operation takes aim at an important backer of such groups: the National Endowment for Democracy, or N.E.D., an American nonprofit largely funded by the United States.

Several China-focused nonprofits told The New York Times that the endowment had informed them this past week that their funding had been suspended indefinitely. Money distributed to the endowment was no longer being delivered after members of Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency gained access to the Treasury Department’s payment system.

The stoppage of N.E.D. funds affects groups all over the world, but activists say the impact on groups focused on China will be especially severe. Such work has become more crucial — and risky — as Xi Jinping, the most powerful Chinese leader in decades, has waged a far-reaching crackdown on civil society and tightened control on information.

Across China, scores of activists, lawyers, journalists and intellectuals have been harassed, detained or jailed since Mr. Xi came to power in 2012. In the far-western region of Xinjiang, officials have detained and imprisoned an estimated hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and members of other Muslim ethnic minorities.

It is unclear how many organizations have been affected by the cuts to the endowment’s funding. The Treasury Department and the endowment, which was allocated $315 million by Congress this year, did not respond to requests for comment. The Department of Government Efficiency could not be reached for comment.

The National Endowment for Democracy was established by Congress during the Reagan administration to bolster democracy worldwide. It has long attracted the ire of Beijing, which has accused the group of committing “evil deeds” by instigating protests and “colluding with anti-China destabilizing forces” in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet.

Among the endowment’s grantees is China Digital Times, a United States-based website that monitors Chinese internet controls and censorship. It recently exposed a Chinese state-sponsored disinformation campaign targeting Canada’s former finance minister Chrystia Freeland, who is running to succeed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The website’s founder, Xiao Qiang, said his operations were “severely disrupted” by the funding suspension, resulting in pay cuts and work-hour reductions for staff.

“We are facing significant financial challenges that threaten our ability to continue our work,” said Mr. Xiao, whose website has been financially supported by the endowment since the site was established in 2013.

A representative of the World Uyghur Congress, a group of exiled Uyghurs, which has also seen its N.E.D. funding frozen, said the cuts came at a difficult time for their advocacy work. The group said that the plight of Muslim Uyghurs in China had been overshadowed by other global crises, like the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. And its advocacy efforts have been complicated by Beijing’s growing ability to silence its critics abroad by targeting their family members still in the country and pressuring governments to repatriate asylum seekers.

The funding was especially important, the group said, because private donors like companies or entrepreneurs with overseas business interests were more vulnerable to Chinese retribution.

Some activists had hoped that the Trump administration’s appointment of politicians with hawkish views on China was a sign that they would retain support from the United States. They lamented how abruptly the funds were cut.

“We in the China community were initially hopeful and optimistic about this administration because of appointments like Marco Rubio,” Zumretay Arkin, the vice president of the World Uyghur Congress, said about the secretary of state, who has long been critical of Beijing’s human rights record.

“We are shocked by how rapidly things have changed in not even a month,” she continued.

Li Qiang, the founder of the New York-based China Labor Watch, which seeks to end the forced labor and trafficking of Chinese workers, said he was told on Wednesday that N.E.D. funds to his group would be halted for the first time in the 23 years he has been a grantee of the organization.

He said the sweeping way in which Mr. Musk had mobilized people online to attack groups like the National Endowment for Democracy reminded him of political crackdowns in China aimed at consolidating control under a top leader.

“History has proven that this approach ultimately led to chaos in China, resulting in the deaths of thousands of innocent people,” Mr. Li said.

Chinese nationalist voices, on the other hand, applauded President Trump’s and Mr. Musk’s moves to cripple the endowment. China has accused it of fomenting all kinds of dissent against Beijing, including the 2019 antigovernment protests in Hong Kong. Beijing said the endowment’s support for rights groups there was an attempt at destabilizing the city and weakening Beijing’s control over it. (Hong Kong activists have rejected the accusation of foreign meddling as an attempt at belittling their grievances.)

“I’m undoubtedly happy about it, and, hopefully, this cutoff will be long-term instead of temporary,” said Hu Xijin, a retired editor in chief of The Global Times, a Communist Party tabloid, in an interview.

Wang Yiwei, the director of the Institute of International Affairs at Renmin University in Beijing, said the dismantling of U.S. foreign aid pointed to a retreat by the United States from the global stage. He said the endowment’s work was America’s way of interfering in the internal affairs of other countries and a waste of taxpayers’ money.

“China welcomes this, of course, and so do other countries,” he said.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an excerpt from an NBC interview published Friday night that Ukraine had a low chance of surviving Russia’s assault without U.S. support.

In the excerpt from “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker,” Mr. Zelensky said: “Probably it will be very, very, very difficult. And of course, in all the difficult situations, you have a chance. But we will have low chance — low chance to survive without support of the United States.”

The full interview is set to be broadcast on Sunday, according to NBC.

His comments were aired on the first day of the Munich Security Conference, where hundreds of anxious European diplomats and others gathered expecting to hear Vice President JD Vance speak about President Trump’s strategy to broker peace negotiations with Russia to end the war in Ukraine.

But Mr. Vance mentioned Ukraine only in passing and offered no road map for negotiations or even any strategic vision of what Europe should look like after the most devastating ground war being waged on the continent in 80 years. Instead, he urged European nations to stop isolating their far-right parties, saying the biggest security threat was the suppression of free speech.

Earlier in the week, Pete Hegseth, Mr. Trump’s defense secretary, jolted Kyiv and European allies of Ukraine by saying in a meeting with NATO and Ukrainian defense ministers in Brussels that the United States did not support Ukraine’s desire to join NATO as part of a peace plan. He also described a return to Ukraine’s borders before 2014 — when Russia annexed Crimea — as “unrealistic.”

Mr. Trump has repeatedly suggested trading U.S. aid for Ukraine’s critical minerals, telling Fox News earlier this month that he wanted “the equivalent of like $500 billion worth of rare earths,” a group of minerals crucial for many high-tech products, in exchange for American aid. Ukraine had “essentially agreed to do that,” he said.

In Munich, the Ukrainian president did get to make his case while sitting across a table on Friday from Mr. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Keith Kellogg, the retired general who is Trump’s envoy for Ukraine and Russia.

Mr. Zelensky asked for “security guarantees.” Mr. Vance stressed the importance of beginning conversations about ending the war in Ukraine but declined to discuss specifics, he said, to preserve negotiators’ options.

“Fundamentally the goal is, as President Trump outlined it, we want the war to come to a close, we want the killing to stop,” Mr. Vance said. “But we want to achieve a durable, lasting peace.”

Later, Mr. Zelensky expressed thanks for American support but said there was much work to be done “to prepare the plan to stop Putin.”

In a social media post, he said, “We addressed many key issues and look forward to welcoming General Kellogg to Ukraine for further meetings and a deeper assessment of the situation on the ground.” He added, “We are ready to move as quickly as possible towards a real and guaranteed peace.”

Reporting was contributed by Jim Tankersley, David E. Sanger, Steven Erlanger and Maria Varenikova.

Five technicians secured by wires worked near the curved top of an arched steel structure that loomed the equivalent of 40 stories high, trying to extinguish the last bits of smoldering insulation left by a drone strike. It was snowing; the temperature was below freezing; the steel was covered with ice.

The hole from the strike was quite large, about 540 square feet, and dangerous for many reasons — primarily because it jeopardized the safety of the protective shell covering Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history.

The breach was also deliberate, Ukrainian officials said, punched through at 1:59 a.m. on Friday by a Russian drone with a high-explosive warhead. Nuclear experts called it one of the most potentially dangerous attacks since Russia invaded Ukraine almost three years ago.

Despite the strike, radiation levels at Chernobyl remained normal on Friday. Far below that arched hood, the concrete-and-steel “sarcophagus” encasing the reactor and highly radioactive debris held. No one was injured or killed.

Still, Ukrainian authorities described the strike as audacious, hitting a nuclear power plant on the eve of a gathering of world leaders in Munich and risking a disaster.

The Kremlin denied that Russia’s military had struck the plant. Its spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, implied that the breach was some kind of fraud by the Ukrainians. “The Russian military does not do this,” he said.

Workers extinguished the fire early Friday, but insulation still burned as of the late afternoon, said Andriy Danyk, the head of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, as he stood in the median of a parking lot in front of Reactor No. 4. But the hole will take months to fix, he added, and it’s not yet clear all the work that has to be done for it to be sealed.

“You have an amazing, terrible situation, because that’s not supposed to happen,” said Shaun Burnie, a senior nuclear specialist at Greenpeace who has monitored nuclear power plants in Ukraine since 2022 and who visited Chernobyl on Friday. “It was never designed for a deliberate military attack. We’ve been investigating Russian war crimes, and this looks like another one.”

On Friday, Ukrainian officials showed journalists bits of the drone they say hit the plant — a Shahed, typically deployed by Russia and stamped with the code of 15480. They displayed it near a radioactivity warning sign, as if to prove the seriousness of the attack.

An initial analysis by McKenzie Intelligence Services, a British consulting company, that was commissioned Friday by Greenpeace, said video footage showed some minor internal damage to the facility. The analysis also said that drone engine debris “is almost certainly” the remains of a piston engine that powers the Shahed drone, supplied by Iran to the Russians.

The analysis also said that the drone’s system is guided by preset coordinates for an intended target. “This would indicate the almost certain deliberate targeting” of the plant by the Russians, the analysis added.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine told journalists at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that the drone was flying at an altitude of about 278 feet, which is undetectable by radar.

“It wasn’t a case of the drone changing course or anything like that,” Mr. Zelensky said.

The $1.7 billion protective shell that was damaged was completed in 2019, built with the help of 45 countries to make sure that a nuclear accident like the one that occurred in 1986 would not happen here again.

The structure was an engineering feat, designed to seal in vast quantities of radioactive isotopes from the fire and meltdown in 1986 at Reactor No. 4. The hastily built sarcophagus was deteriorating, but the arched steel shell was intended to last generations. It was brought in on railway tracks, Mr. Burnie said, and at about 40,000 tons, is the largest movable structure ever built.

Outside the entry checkpoint for Chernobyl, a yellow sign advertises the “Large Construction” program of Mr. Zelensky, proclaiming “Chernobyl — from the exclusion zone to the renaissance zone.”

More than a disaster area, much of the 1,000-square-mile Chernobyl exclusion zone, where access is strictly limited, resembles a storybook forest, with snowcapped pine trees and small villages. But the homes are abandoned; most are marked with signs saying how many people used to live there.

On Friday, military and police checkpoints stopped cars every few miles. A convoy of military trucks moved toward the plant. Two fire engines drove toward the exit.

At the plant itself, an unfinished reactor resembled an abandoned giant erector set. A billboard near Reactor No. 4 portrayed a large fire and urged people to call Ukraine’s 101 emergency number in case of a disaster.

Snow made it difficult to see much of anything at the plant. Fire trucks were parked in the lot near Reactor No. 4. Mr. Danyk said snow and icy surfaces made the emergency work much more dangerous, but workers hoped to fully extinguish the insulation by Friday night.

He added that the Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Center was monitoring radiation levels nationwide. They remained normal.

“Our team is rotating constantly to ensure no one is exposed to radiation,” he said.

Oleksandr Tytarchuk, the chief engineer at the plant, said his team and other specialists plan to do a “preliminary analysis and temporarily seal the opening,” to prevent more moisture from entering the structure, which can speed corrosion. But this would not be a radiation-proof seal, meaning the shell would no longer serve the function it had before the strike.

“We understand that snow is falling, rain is expected and water used during fire suppression has also become radioactive waste,” Mr. Tytarchuk said. “That said, I must emphasize that the radiation levels have not increased and remain under control.”

Workers will then have to figure out a more permanent solution — one that didn’t appear obvious on Friday afternoon.

Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed reporting.

Two years ago on Valentine’s Day, Olha Chesnokova told Yevhen Volosyan she loved him. They had met a month earlier on Tinder, bonding over music. Ms. Chesnokova, a 46-year-old psychotherapist, said she had wanted “to wait for the right moment to tell him” — but not too long. Mr. Volosyan had decided to join the army, and soon they would be separated.

Two months later, Mr. Volosyan, 37, left for the front. He served as a radio operator, sapper and eventually drone pilot, remotely flying suicide quadcopters into Russian forces.

The couple married a few months into Mr. Volosyan’s service, with him briefly returning to Kyiv to say, “I do.” Back at the front, he would stay in touch with his new wife through text messages during the day and video calls at night, when darkness grounded the drones.

On Nov. 24, 2023, Ms. Chesnokova texted him around midday.

Ms. Chesnokova, reassured, went on with her day, waiting for sunset to reconnect with Mr. Volosyan. She checked in again around 5 p.m., but he didn’t answer.

Her husband had bought her a ticket to a concert that night of Serhii Zhadan, their favorite Ukrainian artist, and they had agreed that she would call him from the show, so he too could listen. But he didn’t show up online.

Growing worried, Ms. Chesnokova texted him again.

Ms. Chesnokova returned home and waited anxiously. Just before midnight, Mr. Volosyan’s commander called to tell her he had died in shelling. Stunned and in tears, she spent the night trying to grasp the loss. Then the next morning she sent him a final message — knowing it would never be read.

Love for a flying ace

Melaniya Podolyak, 29, and Andrii Pilshchykov, 30, didn’t even have time to marry.

They met in the spring of 2023 when Ms. Podolyak, a media project manager, interviewed Mr. Pilshchykov, a fighter pilot. Better known by his call sign, Juice, Mr. Pilshchykov was a prominent face of the Ukrainian Air Force. He had helped defend Kyiv at the beginning of the war and visited the United States to lobby for the supply of F-16 jets to Ukraine.

Like many Ukrainian women, Ms. Podolyak was initially hesitant about dating a service member, worried that his combat duties would leave them little time together. But Mr. Pilshchykov’s kindness and thoughtfulness won her over.

For six months, she traveled every weekend to see him where he was stationed. During the week, they talked for hours at night, when he wasn’t flying. “I was sleep-deprived the entire time,” she said with a laugh.

On Aug. 24, 2023, they were driving to Mr. Pilshchykov’s base, two hours west of Kyiv. They talked about his possibly moving to the United States for a program to train pilots on F-16s. They also discussed marriage — that would make it easier for Ms. Podolyak to visit him there.

The next day, Mr. Pilshchykov left for a training mission.

Mr. Pilshchykov was supposed to return in a couple of hours. When he did not, Ms. Podolyak messaged him.

Then came a call from an air force acquaintance, informing her that Mr. Pilshchykov’s plane had collided midair with another jet.

She wouldn’t believe it, and sent him desperate messages.

Dreams of France

Like Ms. Podolyak, Valeriia Parfeniuk tried to visit her boyfriend, Danyil Kunchenko, as often as possible. But opportunities were scarce — he was a machine-gunner on the eastern front.

Their relationship began on a chat website where they met randomly and then talked for three hours straight. It blossomed from there.

They would call each other whenever they could — video calls only, never audio — and dream about the future. He wanted to move with her after the war to France, where part of her family lived, and become a military instructor there.

Last month, Ms. Parfeniuk, a 28-year-old visa manager, had a rare opportunity to visit Mr. Kunchenko, 22, in Izium, a war-ravaged eastern city where troops often rest between combat missions. She took a 12-hour overnight train from Kyiv and arrived on Jan. 8.

True to form, the couple spent over an hour on video calls that day and then texted about how eager they were to meet the next day.

But Mr. Kunchenko didn’t show up in Izium the next day.

Ms. Parfeniuk checked when he had last been active online: 3:39 a.m. As the day wore on, her concern deepened, and she came up with reasons for his absence. Maybe he had been assigned a new task? Maybe he was injured? She called and texted him.

It was only on the following day that Mr. Kunchenko’s comrades gave her the news: He had died during a combat mission, just hours before he was set to meet her.

“I just stood there, unable to comprehend it,” Ms. Parfeniuk said. “And I still can’t. I keep waiting for him to come online.”

A sniper’s bullet

Darya Ulman’s wait for word about her husband, Kirillo, was agonizing.

They had met in late 2022 in Dnipro, a large city in eastern Ukraine. With war leaving little time to waste, they became a couple within three days and married within six months. “Something just clicked,” Ms. Ulman said. “It all happened so fast.”

Mr. Ulman, 36, served in some of the worst hot spots of the eastern front. In early 2023, he was in Bakhmut, a city whose smoldering ruins became a symbol of the war’s brutality. Later, he moved to Avdiivka, captured by the Russians last year after a prolonged siege.

The specter of death loomed over the couple. Mr. Ulman had lost many friends in Bakhmut. At times, Ms. Ulman would find him filling out forms before a combat mission, detailing whom to notify if he didn’t return and how he wished to be buried.

On Valentine’s Day last year, he sent her a terse message to say he was leaving for a new mission.

Mr. Ulman didn’t respond. The next day, his wife texted him again, telling him that she had kissed her wedding ring several times during the night and that she hoped he had somehow felt it.

Two days passed. She kept texting him, clinging to the hope that he would answer.

On the morning of Feb. 17, Ms. Ulman learned from her husband’s deputy commander that he had been killed by a sniper. For nearly two months, his body lay in a buffer zone, unreachable by Ukrainian forces because of fighting. Eventually, Russian troops retrieved the remains and returned them a month later. A sniper’s bullet had torn through his face.

Mr. Ulman’s messages on Valentine’s Day were the last he ever sent her. She still tops up his phone account, to make sure no one else ever takes his number.

“It’s all I have left,” she said.

After 15 months of war, Hani al-Dibs, a high-school teacher, thought his greatest wish was to see the bombardment of Gaza come to an end. But the long-awaited cease-fire has brought only bitterness and dread.

Mr. al-Dibs is one of countless Gazans burdened with an agonizing duty: trying to recover the remains of loved ones trapped beneath the swathes of rubble left by Israel’s war against Hamas.

Some families have returned home to find corpses of loved ones so decomposed, they cannot tell them apart. Others cannot even enter the wreckage to dig, so strong is the stench of human decay. And some have searched and searched, only to find nothing at all.

As they prepared to return to their hometown, Jabaliya, in northern Gaza, Mr. al-Dibs’s two surviving children kept asking him whether their mother and little brothers might somehow have survived the blast that had trapped their bodies for three months beneath the rubble of the family home.

“They’d ask: What if they were still sleeping after the explosion, and climbed out later? What if, later on, the Israelis heard them screaming, and got them out?” he said in an interview. “Their questions torment me.”

Gazan health authorities have tallied nearly 48,000 among the dead, without distinguishing between civilians and combatants.

Beyond that is an untold toll: those whose bodies have yet to be found.

Families have reported 9,000 people as missing and presumed dead under rubble. Most of those have yet to be unearthed from Gaza’s ruins, health officials said. Several thousand of these are still not counted among the dead, as the authorities investigate the backlog of requests.

In mid-October, amid heavy clashes with Hamas, Mr. al-Dibs said Israeli forces blew up the building that housed three generations of the Dibs family.

Desperate to seek medical help for family members dug out from the rubble, Mr. al-Dibs was forced into a terrible choice: He had to leave behind his wife, his two youngest children, his mother, his sisters and his nieces — 14 loved ones in all — beneath the ruins. As the Dibs family survivors fled south to safety, he vowed to return for their bodies. It was a pledge that took months to fulfill.

For weeks after he fled, Mr. al-Dibs filed repeated requests to Israel to reach the site, using a process the U.N. set up to try to coordinate with Israel to allow Gazan rescuers access to blast sites. Israel denied all of the Dibs family’s requests, the U.N. said.

COGAT, the Israeli military body that handles coordination with humanitarian organizations in Gaza, did not respond to a written request for comment.

Nearly three months later, as the cease-fire began, Mr. al-Dibs and his children finally set off home on foot, picking their way over mounds of rubble and debris.

What they found was worse than they had imagined. Bombings had leveled buildings, scattering piles of rocks on top of his family’s collapsed home.

Relatives arrived, eager to help. But with Israel’s punishing siege still blocking new equipment from entering the enclave, no one had drills or other power tools to break through the rubble.

“We used what we could find: shovels, picks and our bare hands,” he said.

After hours of digging, they finally reached the flattened floor where his family had lived.

Mr. al-Dibs found parts of a skeleton that he believed belonged to his son Hasib, who was 8. But he could find nothing of his wife and 6-year-old Habib — only a few charred fragments of bone that crumbled as he tried to grasp them between his fingers.

An Al Jazeera television segment filming retrieval efforts in the neighborhood caught on camera Mr. al-Dib’s realization that he would never find their bodies. Trembling with fury, he shook out some white plastic body bags.

“I brought big shrouds! And little shrouds! So I could put their bodies inside! But I found their bodies reduced to ashes!” he screamed.

Then, as his 12-year-old daughter Fatima, in a bright yellow jacket, ran up to the ruins, sobbing and calling out the names of her younger brothers, Mr. al-Dibs gently pulled her away: “Oh Habib! Oh Hasib! Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!”

“They were deprived of a last goodbye,” Mr. al-Dibs said.

The family has since buried Hasib’s remains, and now his daughter has new questions.

“She keeps asking, why we can’t have graves for her mother and Habib? Where will she go sit and confide in her mother, without a grave?”

Those who find their loved ones’ bodies face other psychological torments.

Ahmad Shbat, 25, found some of his relatives’ bodies in the northern town of Beit Hanoun completely intact, leaving him agonizing over the question of whether they had died, not from the bombing, but from prolonged suffering as they awaited a rescue that never came.

“The feeling of helplessness,” he said, “is overwhelming.”

Since the cease-fire, medical workers have been called to retrieve dozens of unidentified bodies, said Saleh al-Homs, deputy director of the European Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis.

They write the location and any identifying details on the body bags, and place inside any belongings they find, he said, then take them to the closest hospital morgue and post descriptions of their findings on social media.

Gaza’s emergency rescue services, the Civil Defense, have pleaded with residents not to attempt retrievals on their own, warning of the potential for bombs or unexploded ordnance beneath the wreckage. It says it cannot conduct major excavation efforts until heavy equipment, such as diggers, are allowed into Gaza— and which Israel says it will not permit.

But few Gazans, like Ramy Nasr, a trader from Jabaliya, have any intention of waiting on anyone for help.

Mr. Nasr, whose family tragedy was recounted in a report by The New York Times last year, returned to the site of the explosion last October that brought down the building where his siblings and their families had been sheltering.

He paid $500 to construction workers to drill a tunnel into the building to retrieve them. The bodies he found were so decomposed, he said, it was hard to tell them apart.

Eventually he was able to sort them into two piles.

The remains of what he believed to be his brother Ammar Adel Nasr, his wife, Imtiyaz, and their two daughters went into one grave. His brother Aref and sister Ola went into another.

Like so many graveyards in Gaza, he said, his family’s graveyard is now so crammed with new bodies, it has become difficult to secure plots.

“Before the war, every person was put into their own grave,” he said. “These days, there isn’t enough room — or time.”

Nader Ibrahim contributed reporting.

Liquor lobbyists gathered in a ritzy private club on a recent rainy evening in Brussels to swill cocktails with names like “Toasts Not Tariffs” and fret over the potential disaster confronting their industry. Again.

Seven years ago, the spirits industry found itself a casualty in a worldwide trade war as President Trump unleashed tariffs on America’s partners. The European Union retaliated with a spate of tariffs that included a 25 percent charge on American whiskey — aiming to deliver a blow to Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the then majority leader. A series of tit-for-tat tariffs followed, hitting spirits from rum to cognac on both sides of the Atlantic.

The levies were suspended during the Biden administration, but with Mr. Trump back in office and trying to rewrite the rules of global trade once again, alcohol is back in the crossfire.

The European Union suspended the tariffs in question in 2021 and extended that decision in 2023, but the hiatus lasts only until March 31. After that, ramped-up tariffs of 50 percent will automatically apply to American whiskey, and charges will hit a range of other goods, including motorcycles.

But it is the spirits industry that has been the most vocal about the risks the levies pose. Industry leaders and craft distillers say the taxes would decimate their export business, especially in growth markets like Germany and France, while risking retaliatory tariffs that would hit other kinds of alcohol.

Bars have been importing extra bottles to try to get ahead of a trade war, distilleries have been putting overseas expansion plans on ice, and industry leaders have been flocking to Brussels, Washington and Rome, where Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has become Mr. Trump’s bridge to Europe, to try to convince policymakers to help them avoid the looming pain of tariffs.

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A showdown is gathering pace in Syria as the country’s new leaders demand that a powerful Kurdish-led militia backed by the United States disarm and integrate into a unified national military force.

The tensions are centered around preparations to establish a caretaker government to replace the dictatorship that fell in early December. The new leaders want the Kurdish-led militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces, to commit to giving up its weapons as a condition to be included in a national dialogue. The dialogue is supposed to lead to the formation of an administration that will govern until elections can be organized.

The dialogue over Syria’s political future will be held during a conference, but no date has been set for it yet. Hassan al-Daghim, head of the government-appointed committee tasked with planning the dialogue, said on Thursday that armed groups would not be included “unless they lay down their arms and integrate” under the Ministry of Defense. “This is a fundamental issue,” he added.

That stance has raised the prospect that the Kurdish-led administration linked to the Syrian Democratic Forces and effectively controls an autonomous region in northeastern Syria could be excluded from the national dialogue and any caretaker national government.

The Syrian Democratic Forces have consistently refused to lay down their arms since the dictator Bashar al-Assad was ousted. The militia, which is mostly made up of members of the Kurdish ethnic minority, was the main U.S. partner in the fight in Syria against the terrorist group Islamic State, which was largely defeated in 2019 after it had taken over parts of the country.

The lingering threat of the Islamic State in Syria has remained a key concern internationally, particularly among Western countries.

At a conference in Paris on Thursday to help coordinate global support for state-building in Syria, President Emmanuel Macron of France urged the interim authorities to reach a détente with the Kurdish forces, whom he referred to as “precious allies” who must be integrated into the new political system.

In the years since helping to push back ISIS, the Kurdish-led militia has consolidated control over towns in northeastern Syria and has often clashed with Turkish-backed forces there amid the maelstrom of political and ethnic divisions in the country.

Turkey, a close ally of the rebel group that led the overthrow of Mr. al-Assad and formed the interim government, has for years sought to curb the power of the Syrian Democratic Forces, maintaining that the militia is linked to Kurdish separatist insurgents inside Turkey.

Since rebels seized control of the Syrian capital, Damascus, in December, fighting between Turkish-backed forces and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces has continued to flare in the northeast.

The interim government’s forces are overstretched, experts say, and have still not secured control over the entire country, including the Kurdish-administered region there.

Manbij, a city near Syria’s border with Turkey, has been a focal point of the fighting between Turkish-backed and Kurdish-led forces. The Turkish-backed forces wrested control of the city from Kurdish-led militia in December.

Negotiating an end to the skirmishes has become among the most pressing challenges for Syria’s new leaders.

The rebel coalition that toppled Mr. al-Assad’s government appointed its chief, Ahmad al-Shara, as temporary president and set up an interim government led by officials from a regional administration it had previously run in the northern province of Idlib.

In doing so, the rebel coalition became Syria’s de facto governing party. Still, Mr. al-Shara has pledged to create an inclusive political process, draw up a new constitution and establish a caretaker administration that will govern the country until elections, which he said might take years to set up.

On Thursday, Mr. al-Shara inaugurated the seven-member committee that will plan the national dialogue over a new caretaker government. The committee has been tasked with choosing participants for the conference based on expertise and public influence, and reflecting Syria’s diversity, though there will be no set quotas for the participation of any group.

Mr. al-Daghim, the committee’s head, underlined that point at a news conference on Thursday.

“No one will be invited based on religion, institutional ties or party affiliation,” he pledged.

Still, most members of the steering committee have strong links to Mr. al-Shara and his rebel coalition, stoking concerns about his promises of inclusivity in the political process.

In recent weeks, many other militias have agreed to dissolve their forces but, in negotiations with the interim government, the Kurdish-led forces have pushed to be merged into the army as a single military bloc that can continue to patrol northeast Syria. They have also pushed for guarantees that Kurdish will be made the official language of Syria’s northeast and that their leaders will continue to administer northeast Syria.

The tensions between the Kurdish forces and the leadership in Damascus come amid uncertainty over Washington’s role in the region. American support for the Kurdish militia has been crucial to keeping threats from the Islamic State in Syria at bay.

But President Trump has not made any commitments to continue supporting the group since his inauguration last month.

Underlining the shifting situation, a freeze on U.S. international aid funding in January threatened chaos at a Syrian camp housing thousands of ISIS fighters and family members. The freeze led to a group depending on the American support to provide services and security at the camp to briefly stop its work.

At the conference in Paris on Thursday, Mr. Macron urged Syria’s interim government to reach an agreement with the Kurdish forces.

“Syria must very clearly continue to fight against all the terrorist organizations that are spreading chaos,” Mr. Macron said, adding that cooperation with Kurdish-led forces would be critical to doing so.

Addressing Syria’s new leaders, he said their responsibility toward the Kurdish fighters was “to integrate them and also to allow these forces to join in.”

Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting.