The American vice president visited a concentration camp on Thursday afternoon. He laid a wreath at the foot of a statue, made the sign of the cross and paused before a memorial wall where in multiple tongues, including German and English, the words “Never Again” were written.

JD Vance told reporters he had read about the Holocaust in books, but that its “unspeakable evil” was driven home by his trip to Dachau, where more than 30,000 people died at the hands of the Nazis. “It’s something that I’ll never forget, and I’m grateful to have been able to see it up close in person,” Mr. Vance said.

But after Mr. Vance spoke in Munich the next day, Germany’s leaders effectively questioned if he had understood what he had just seen.

Eighty years after American soldiers liberated Dachau, top German officials this weekend all-but accused Mr. Vance — and by extension, President Trump — of boosting a political party that many Germans consider to be dangerously descended from Nazism.

That party, called the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is sitting second in the polls for next Sunday’s parliamentary elections, with about 20 percent of the public saying they support it. But no other German party is willing to govern with it. That’s because the AfD has at times downplayed Hitler’s atrocities. Some party members have reveled in Nazi slogans.

German intelligence agencies have classified parts of the AfD as extremist. Members have been arrested in connection with multiple plots to overthrow the government. Some reportedly attended last year a gathering that included discussions of deporting not only asylum seekers, but German citizens who immigrated to the country.

“A commitment to ‘never again’ is not reconcilable with support for the AfD,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in Munich on Saturday morning, as part of a lengthy rebuke of Mr. Vance.

“This ‘never again’ is the historical mission that Germany as a free democracy must and wants to continue to live up to every day,” he said. “Never again fascism, never again racism, never again war of aggression.”

Decades of German law and political practice have revolved around the belief that to prevent another Hitler from coming to power, the government must ban hate speech and shun political parties deemed extreme. The nation has an Office for the Protection of the Constitution, with intelligence tools to monitor extremists, and a constitutional court that in rare cases can ban parties entirely.

Mr. Vance, like another Trump administration official, Elon Musk, has parachuted into the country’s parliamentary elections, criticizing that approach. Both men say it is time for Germans to stop policing speech and to start treating the country’s hard-right flank as the avatars of disenfranchised voters who share Mr. Trump’s opposition to large-scale immigration.

Mr. Musk has publicly endorsed the AfD, telling party members last month that Germans have “too much of a focus on past guilt.”

The Musk and Vance prescriptions add up to perhaps the most verboten message in mainstream German politics — made all the more surprising coming from the country that Germans have long thanked for putting an end to a deeply shameful period in their history.

A writer for Der Spiegel, a leading German newspaper, declared on Saturday morning that Mr. Vance had given the AfD a “Wahlkampfgeschenk” — German for “campaign gift.”

Even before the speech, analysts at the Munich conference were warning that the administration’s worldview would upend alliances on both sides of the Atlantic.

“We have an American government that has different values, and a different vision of what the West should be,” Jana Puglierin, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, said in a panel discussion on Friday.

In his speech, Mr. Vance called Europe’s restrictions on speech a greater threat than military attack by Russia or China, comparing them to those imposed by the Cold War Soviet Union.

“I look to Brussels,” Mr. Vance said, “where E.U. Commission commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they judge to be ‘hateful content,’ or to this very country, where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of ‘combating misogyny.’”

Intentionally or not, Mr. Vance’s speech landed in the midst of a pair of contentious political debates. Europe is currently struggling with questions of how to handle hard-right parties that have gained voter share. In some countries, like Austria and the Netherlands, those parties have joined federal governments. In others, like France and Germany, mainstream parties have blocked them — so far.

Even so, some lines are fuzzy: The leading candidate for chancellor, Friedrich Merz, drew condemnation last month for pushing a set of migration restrictions in Parliament that would need AfD votes to pass, a move long considered taboo. Mr. Merz defended the decision but said he would never allow the AfD to formally join a government with his Christian Democrats.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Germans’ criticism of Mr. Vance.

Germany has also had a long-running debate over the reach of its speech laws, most recently inflamed by the war in Gaza. The restrictions ban antisemitic speech, but some Germans — including in Berlin’s art community — have complained they are too broadly defined and that they effectively bar any criticism of Israel or its conduct in the war.

Two overlapping factors appear to be driving Mr. Musk and Mr. Vance in their German forays.

One is an attempt to forge new trans-Atlantic alliances between parties that share Mr. Trump’s core values, most notably a hard-line opposition to mass migration.

The other is an effort to sweep away laws and social norms in Europe against speech, online or otherwise, that governments deem hateful or “misinformation” but that conservatives say are meant to suppress their political opinions. Mr. Musk has denounced those restrictions as assaults on freedom. He has amplified such speech on his social media platform, X.

The AfD has climbed in the polls over the last decade on the strength of promising tough restrictions on the millions of asylum seekers who have flowed into Germany from the Middle East and elsewhere, including promised deportations. Its candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, has accused German and European Union officials of censorship. She met Mr. Vance on the sidelines in Munich.

Ms. Weidel has made similar complaints to those of Mr. Vance, paradoxically enough as part of an ongoing effort to distance the AfD from the Nazis, and to cast mainstream parties as the true threat to the country.

“What Adolf Hitler did,” she told Mr. Musk in an X interview last month, “the first thing — he switched off free speech. So he controls the media. Without that, he would have never been successful.”

The senior American diplomat slipped quietly into Belarus, a police state run by a strongman reviled for decades in the West, traveling by car across the border for meetings with President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko and the head of his KGB security apparatus.

It was Mr. Lukashenko’s first meeting with a senior State Department official in five years, and the start of what could be a highly consequential thawing of frozen relations between the United States and Russia’s closest ally.

The below-the-radar American visit to Minsk, the Belarusian capital, on Wednesday came just a day after President Trump had a long telephone call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Both events signaled Washington’s departure from a yearslong policy of trying to isolate leaders out of favor in the West because of their repressive policies and the war in Ukraine.

After talks with Mr. Lukashenko, Christopher W. Smith, a deputy assistant secretary of state, and two other American officials drove to a village near the border with Lithuania. There, courtesy of the Belarusian KGB, three people who had been jailed — an American and two Belarusian political prisoners — were waiting to be picked up.

As darkness fell, the Americans and the freed prisoners drove back across the border to Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. Speaking outside the U.S. Embassy there on Wednesday evening, Mr. Smith hailed the successful completion of what he called “a special operation,” describing the prisoners’ release as a “huge win and a response to President Trump’s peace through strength agenda.”

The next step, Mr. Smith told a gathering of Western diplomats on Thursday in Vilnius, according to people who attended, is a possible grand bargain under which Mr. Lukashenko would release a slew of political prisoners, including prominent ones. In return, the United States would relax sanctions on Belarusian banks and exports of potash, a key ingredient in fertilizer, of which Belarus is a major producer.

The people who relayed Mr. Smith’s account of his talks in Minsk spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a confidential meeting. Mr. Smith himself has not publicly disclosed whom he met with or what was discussed, and the State Department did not respond to questions about those details.

Belarus, which usually gloats over any sign that it is breaking out of its isolation, has also been mostly silent, though an anchor on state television, Igor Tur, introduced a note of mystery, suggesting that Mr. Smith was not the real leader of the American delegation and that a more senior official also took part.

Franak Viacorka, the chief of staff to the exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who has long called for toughening of sanctions, said: “We are very grateful to President Trump that he managed to move things forward.” But, he added, sanctions should be eased only when “Lukashenko stops repression and new arrests” and “releases all political prisoners, including top figures.”

Viasna, a human rights group that keeps a tally of political prisoners in Belarus, put their number this week at 1,226. Mr. Lukashenko has in recent months released more than 200 of them, including two Americans set free since Mr. Trump took office, but opposition activists say that even more people have been arrested during the same period.

Tatyana Khomich, a sister of one of Belarus’s most prominent political prisoners, Maria Kolesnikova, welcomed the American outreach to Mr. Lukashenko. “The past pressure strategy has failed to release political prisoners, halt repression or change the regime’s behavior,” she said.

Mr. Smith also steered Belarus policy during the Biden administration, and started tentative discussions last year with U.S. allies about easing sanctions, but until this week he had never traveled to Minsk to meet Mr. Lukashenko.

That “direct diplomatic approach could yield concrete results, including the release of individual prisoners or even a broader amnesty,” Ms. Khomich said, while loosening Belarus’s dependence on Russia and “preserving some leverage for the U.S. and E.U.”

An American-led drive to isolate and bankrupt Mr. Lukashenko under the Biden administration produced a raft of Western penalties. The sanctions on potash cut an important economic lifeline for the Belarusian ruler but handed a windfall to Russia, another big producer, as global prices spiked. Some Belarusian potash continued to reach global markets via Russia, instead of by the previous, cheaper route through Lithuania.

Artyom Shraibman, a political analyst who fled Belarus after a brutal crackdown on protests in 2020, said Western sanctions had little impact because of Russia’s expansive support for Mr. Lukashenko. But a release of prisoners in return for relaxing sanctions, he said, would “mean they have finally been used with some effect.”

“This would be definitely a positive development for the prisoners themselves, their families — and potentially for solving broader issues of the relationship” between Belarus and the West, said Mr. Shraibman, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

How to deal with Mr. Lukashenko has vexed Western policymakers for decades. A master at maneuvering between East and West, and silencing his critics at home, he took power in 1994 and has won seven increasingly dubious elections in a row, most recently in January, when he claimed 87 percent of the vote, his biggest landslide yet.

In 2005, the U.S. secretary of state at the time, Condoleezza Rice, denounced Belarus as the “last true remaining dictatorship in the heart of Europe” — though that was before Mr. Putin consolidated his autocratic control of Russia.

Dispirited by the longevity of Mr. Lukashenko, now 70, his exiled opponents, like Mr. Putin’s, have often sought solace in rumors that he was seriously ill. But Mr. Smith, briefing Western diplomats in Vilnius, reported that Mr. Lukashenko showed no sign of ill health and seemed confident and in full control, several of those who attended said.

Beginning a decade ago, efforts to isolate Mr. Lukashenko gave way for a time to engagement, amid signs that Belarus wanted to avoid becoming too dependent on Moscow, the country’s increasingly overbearing neighbor.

While heavily reliant on Russia for deliveries of cheap oil, which he needed to keep his faltering economy afloat, Mr. Lukashenko resisted pressure from Mr. Putin to fully implement a 1990s agreement to form a “union state” that he feared would reduce Belarus to a province of Russia.

Before a presidential election in 2020, relations with Russia became so tense that Belarus jailed a challenger it described as a stalking horse for Moscow, and later arrested 33 Russians it said were mercenaries from the Kremlin-linked Wagner Group who had infiltrated the country to disrupt voting.

But the pendulum swung hard the other way after Mr. Lukashenko claimed an implausible victory over Ms. Tikhanovskaya in that election, which Western governments denounced as rigged, and huge street protests broke out in Minsk and cities across the country.

Mr. Lukashenko appealed to Mr. Putin, who rushed in security advisers to help restore control. Vicious repression followed, with mass arrests and torture of detainees.

Less than a year and a half later, Mr. Lukashenko allowed Russia to use his country as a staging ground for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with an abortive thrust south from Belarus toward Kyiv.

Mr. Smith, according to diplomats who attended his briefing, said the primary U.S. goal was to secure freedom for more political prisoners. He said he had asked Mr. Lukashenko whether he was ready to scale back repression and was assured that he was. Another important aim, Mr. Smith told the diplomats, is to give Mr. Lukashenko some breathing room outside Russia’s orbit of influence.

Piotr Krawczyk, a former head of Poland’s foreign intelligence service who worked with the first Trump administration on loosening Russia’s grip on Belarus, said Belarus was “part of a wider American approach toward Russia.”

The United States is “confronting Russia in Ukraine, in Africa, in the oil and gas sector, and in several other strategic areas,” he said. “Negotiating with Belarus creates additional leverage for the U.S. to signal to Russia that they should be more attentive to American arguments.”

Mr. Shraibman, the exiled analyst, said a big question now was how the Kremlin would react to any rapprochement between Belarus and the West. Many Russian officials “would likely panic at the prospect,” he said, but “there is no quick or easy way for Belarus to distance itself from Russia given Moscow’s economic dominance over the country.”

He added that it was unlikely that President Trump “has any particular interest in, understanding of or a plan for Belarus.” Even so, he said, the “Trump factor certainly creates some momentum, as everyone, including Lukashenko, tries to impress the U.S. president and compete for his attention.”

Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany on Saturday accused Vice President JD Vance of unacceptably interfering in his country’s imminent elections on behalf of a party that has played down the atrocities committed by the Nazis 80 years ago.

A day after Mr. Vance stunned the Munich Security Conference by telling German leaders to drop their so-called firewall and allow the hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to enter their federal government, Mr. Scholz accused Mr. Vance of effectively violating a commitment to never again allow Germany to be led by fascists who could repeat the horrors of the Holocaust.

“A commitment to ‘never again’ is not reconcilable with support for the AfD,” Mr. Scholz said at the conference on Saturday morning, in an address opening the gathering’s second day.

Mr. Scholz said the AfD had trivialized Nazi atrocities like the concentration camp at Dachau, which Mr. Vance visited on Friday. The chancellor said Germany “would not accept” suggestions from outsiders about how to run its democracy — or directives to work with such a party.

“That is not done, certainly not among friends and allies,” Mr. Scholz said. “Where our democracy goes from here is for us to decide.”

Attendees at Mr. Vance’s speech had been expecting to hear details of the Trump administration’s plans for Ukraine peace talks and NATO defense policies. On Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine himself put the focus on the Ukraine war in his remarks, starkly laying out the threat from Russia’s battle-hardened military and making an impassioned appeal for Europeans to take their security into their own hands, including by forming an “Army of Europe” that would supplement U.S. power on the continent.

His speech drew standing ovations, in contrast to Mr. Vance’s speech the day before.

Mr. Scholz’s comments underscored a growing unease among Europe’s leaders about their relationship with the United States, and their own domestic politics. They came as leaders scrambled at the summit to formulate a response to President Trump’s sudden shift in Ukraine policy — and the possibility that he could cut the continent out of negotiations.

Just a few days before Mr. Vance’s remarks, Mr. Trump threatened to impose new tariffs on virtually every country the United States trades with. Then he spoke of negotiating an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine directly with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, leaving Europeans, including Ukraine, wondering if they would be included. Poland’s foreign minister said at the conference that President Emmanuel Macron of France had called an emergency meeting of European leaders to discuss Ukraine on Sunday.

At the same time, far-right parties across Europe have gained ground by tapping into unease over immigration, which also helped propel Mr. Trump back to power in the United States. Mr. Vance’s comments suggested that a new kind of American alliance with Europe was forming, one that bypasses the official leadership in favor of movements like Germany’s AfD and France’s National Rally.

Saturday’s sessions of the security conference were dominated by reactions, predominantly negative, to Mr. Vance’s speech — and Mr. Trump’s agenda.

Mr. Scholz was joined in his criticism by Friedrich Merz, his rival as the chancellor candidate for the conservative Christian Democrats, who polls suggest is the favorite to be Germany’s next leader.

Mr. Vance spent much of his speech on Friday scolding Europeans for what he suggested were Soviet-style restrictions on free speech across the continent. On Saturday, Mr. Merz defended Germany’s laws that prohibit particular forms of speech, including hate speech and banned Nazi slogans, including on social media.

He also suggested that Mr. Trump’s administration was suppressing speech in the United States, after it moved on Friday to kick The Associated Press out of reporting pools and off Mr. Trump’s plane because the news agency refuses to go along with Mr. Trump’s directive to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

“We stick to the rules which are given by our democratic institutions,” Mr. Merz said. “Free speech remains free speech and remains part of our open, democratic society. And fake news, hate speech and offenses remain subject to legal restraints and controlled by independent courts.”

“I think I should say,” he added, “that in front of the events which took place in D.C. yesterday — we would never kick out the news agency, out of the press room of our chancellor.”

Mr. Merz also criticized Mr. Trump’s tariff policy, saying that Germany wanted to reduce tariffs, not increase them, and that “we don’t believe in trade conflicts.”

The White House had no immediate comment on the remarks by Mr. Scholz and Mr. Merz.

The comments were the latest in a series of critiques of Mr. Vance’s speech from German politicians before the election next Sunday. Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats are running third or fourth in most polls. The AfD is running second, and its chancellor candidate, Alice Weidel, met Mr. Vance on Friday in Munich.

Parts of the AfD have been classified as extremist by German intelligence. Some of its members have been convicted of violating German law against the use of Nazi slogans. Others have been arrested for trying to overthrow the federal government. So although AfD candidates have been able to win parliamentary seats, no other party has been willing to form a coalition with them to take control of the government.

That collective shunning of the AfD and other extremist parties is known as the firewall. Mr. Vance took aim at it on Friday, saying the AfD and other hard-right parties across Europe represented legitimate voter concerns about high levels of migration into European countries from the Middle East and elsewhere.

“There is no room for firewalls,” Mr. Vance said.

The vice president also called restrictions on free speech a greater threat to Europe than military aggression from Russia or China.

Mr. Scholz chided Mr. Vance for that focus in a question-and-answer session after his speech. He was asked by Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor in chief of The Economist, if Mr. Vance had made any points in his speech worth reflecting on.

“You mean all these very relevant discussions about Ukraine and security in Europe?” Mr. Scholz said, drawing laughter from the audience.

Then he addressed Mr. Vance’s critique of European speech restrictions directly.

“We should be very clear that free speech in Europe means that you are not attacking others in ways that are against legislation and laws we have in our country,” Mr. Scholz said. “And that’s the case. There is no difference between the digital world and the analog world to say it like this. And we have to be very clear that hate and all this, which is so bad for our societies, should be not the reality of public debate.”

Mr. Zelensky, in his remarks, focused on the question of European defense. He reiterated his position that the United States would be pivotal in securing any cease-fire in Ukraine but that it would need Europe to also step up. He pointed to what he said were intelligence warnings of Russian plans to conduct military exercises in Belarus next summer. He noted that Russia had invaded Ukraine after deploying troops to Belarus under the guise of exercises.

“Europe just needs to come together and start acting in a way that no one can say ‘No’ to Europe, boss it around, or treat it like a pushover,” Mr. Zelensky said.

Mr. Trump has said he wants access to minerals in Ukraine worth half a trillion dollars in exchange for continued military support; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent opened talks on that issue in Kyiv earlier this week.

Mr. Zelensky, in a conversation with the CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour after his speech, said, “We are still talking” about that possible deal.

He also said that Ukraine needed to be at the table at any cease-fire talks, and that he asked to meet with Mr. Trump before any meeting that Mr. Trump has with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

“It’s up to them, they can discuss anything they want, but not Ukraine without Ukraine,” he said.

Steven Erlanger contributing reporting from Munich.

Around 10:30 p.m. on a Friday in late January, David Fernando, a pharmacist, was working behind a counter at a drugstore in São Paulo when a man walked up to him and flashed a gun. “He asked for money from the register and medications from the refrigerator,” Mr. Fernando said.

These days, pharmacists in São Paulo — Brazil’s largest city — know exactly what thieves mean when they say “medications from the refrigerator.”

They’re after Ozempic, Wegovy and Saxenda, the injectable weight-loss drugs many Brazilians covet but that most can’t afford, in a country obsessed with body image but where obesity is on the rise.

The thief made off with five boxes, each of which typically holds a month’s supply and costs 700 to 1,100 Brazilian reais, or about $120 to $190, while the average monthly income is about $300.

Though the armed robbery unnerved Mr. Fernando, 36, it was not exactly a surprise. The same pharmacy was held up for the same drugs twice in late 2024, he said. Now a security guard is posted outside.

Four blocks north, another pharmacy has taken even greater precautions after a police officer interrupted an Ozempic robbery in August, resulting in a shootout that left an older woman injured.

On a recent afternoon two armed guards stood watch, one inside the front door and the other near a back room where the refrigerated weight-loss drugs are kept.

While a smattering of media reports show thieves are after Ozempic elsewhere in the world — including late-night break-ins at pharmacies in Michigan, and in Santiago de Compostela, Spain — Brazil has become a prime global hot spot for criminals coveting the hugely popular weight-loss drugs.

São Paulo, in particular, has become a nexus because it is by some measures Brazil’s richest city with many wealthy neighborhoods where plenty of pharmacies stock the drugs because enough people can afford them. And these days thieves have little problem finding buyers on WhatsApp and Facebook groups.

The targeting of pharmacies has left workers fearful and has led some stores to reduce their supply of weight-loss drugs. The robberies are “definitely a growing trend,” said Pedro Ivo Corrêa dos Santos, a police chief in São Paulo State’s Department of Criminal Investigation.

Pharmacies are often easy targets, the police chief added. “Many operate 24/7, storing the product in a fridge with no real security, only protected by the pharmacist,” he said.

A New York Times analysis of a São Paulo State database found that robberies of pharmacies in which Ozempic, Wegovy or Saxenda were stolen jumped notably in the last three years, from a sole recorded episode in 2022 — four boxes of Ozempic taken from a single drugstore — to 18 robberies in 2023, and 39 last year.

The numbers are almost certainly undercounts, since about half the reported robberies did not specify the medications taken.

RD Saúde and Grupo DPS, two companies that own pharmacy chains in São Paulo where many of the robberies have taken place, declined to comment. Many independent pharmacies say they no longer keep the drugs in the store.

“Anyone who stocks Ozempic can’t work in peace,” said Wilson Martins, the manager of Farma O Imperador, an independent pharmacy in western São Paulo. “People ask ‘Do you have Ozempic?’” he added. “No, we don’t. And that way, we don’t get robbed.”

Customers who want one of the weight-loss drugs now must order it in person and make an appointment to pick it up. But for good measure, Mr. Martins, 72, still keeps a leather-sheathed machete behind the counter.

Some criminal gangs have been robbing trucks making wholesale Ozempic deliveries, Mr. Corrêa dos Santos said. One gang that the police dismantled last year included employees of a transport company.

Drug producers and distributors must report losses of medications resulting from crimes or other reasons to Anvisa, the Brazilian agency that regulates food and drugs. Its figures show that 4,770 Ozempic injection pens were stolen or lost in 2023 and surged to 8,220 pens in 2024.

The rash of robberies of weight-loss drugs comes amid soaring sales of the medication in a country where achieving a finely tuned body is revered and that, like many countries, is growing fatter.

The percentage of adults in its largest cities considered obese increased to about 24 percent in 2023 from nearly 12 percent in 2006, according to a Health Ministry study.

Several Brazilian celebrities have spoken publicly about using Ozempic or similar drugs, including singers Luiza Possi, Wesley Safadão and Jojo Todynho.

“The wave of thefts began when social media started openly discussing the drug, particularly as celebrities and influencers showcased dramatic weight loss,” said Renata Gonçalves, the head of a union of pharmacists for the state of São Paulo.

Even Rio de Janeiro’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, said during his campaign in 2024 that he “took a lot of Ozempic” and lost about 65 pounds, and pledged to make the drug available for free.

“Rio will be a city without chubby people anymore,’’ he said.

In Brazil, Ozempic sales grew from $27.5 million in 2019, to $621.6 million in 2023, the last year for which complete figures were available, according to IQVIA, a global provider of health care data. (The Brazilian market still pales in comparison to the United States, where sales totaled $30.3 billion in 2023.)

Rodrigo Lima, who has worked for pharmacy chains for two decades and is now head of operations for Ultrafarma, a São Paulo-based chain, said other high-cost pharmacy products have been targeted in the past.

But the high cost of Ozempic, he said, has “sparked a huge demand for these items, leading to specialized gangs with an eye on that slice of the market.”

While it’s fairly easy to sell and buy stolen weight-loss drugs on the web, criminals may not be able to ensure buyers about the quality of the drugs once they are taken out of cold storage. Several pharmacists in São Paulo repeatedly stressed that just a few hours at room temperature renders the medications useless.

“They take the medications out to the car in a trash bag,” said Andrea Lima, the manager of a branch of the Drogaria São Paulo chain where a policeman foiled an attempted robbery last May. “How long do they leave it in the trunk?”

Ultrafarma’s strategy, said Mr. Lima, has been to install better security cameras and reduce stock in company-owned stores.

One Ultrafarma store that was robbed in 2023 has gone even further, said Leandro Rodrigo Santos, the store’s manager. It no longer keeps Ozempic in stock so customers have to order it and have it delivered to their home.

But even that has risks.

Wellington Vieira, chief of a Rio de Janeiro police division that investigates consumer-related crimes, said the agency had received reports of groups who order multiple boxes of Ozempic to a home and then pull a switcheroo.

When a delivery worker arrives, two people answer the door. One tries multiple times to pay with an invalid credit card, while the other accepts the package and switches out the real Ozempic for a counterfeit version. When the purchase is eventually canceled, the delivery worker unknowingly returns to the pharmacy with the fake medication.

Ozempic bandits may soon confront a force more powerful than the police: economics. Novo Nordisk’s Brazilian patent for semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, expires in 2026, and pharmaceutical companies are racing to get approval to produce generic versions that will almost certainly cause prices to tumble.

For now, some pharmacists are turning to a higher power for protection. Elis Regina Peixoto manages a pharmacy in eastern São Paulo that has so far gone unscathed. “In the name of Jesus,” she said, “we will not be robbed.”

A British couple who had been on a motorcycle tour around the world were detained in Iran, Britain’s foreign office said on Saturday.

The couple, Craig and Lindsay Foreman, were last heard from on social media in early January. But this week, Iranian state media reported that two British nationals had been detained on suspicion of “security crimes.”

Britain’s foreign office confirmed their detention after the Iranian reports, and on Saturday issued a statement on behalf of the couple’s family.

“This unexpected turn of events has caused significant concern for our entire family, and we are deeply focused on ensuring their safety and well-being during this trying time,” the family said.

Mr. and Ms. Foreman, both in their mid-50s, were on a motorcycle tour to Australia, where Ms. Foreman, was set to deliver a paper at a conference on psychology. They reside in Spain, where Ms. Foreman worked as a psychologist and life coach and Mr. Foreman as a carpenter.

The couple’s detention first came to light when Iranian state media published a photograph of Britain’s ambassador to Iran, Hugo Shorter, meeting with two British citizens accused of “security crimes.”

Iranian state media blurred the couple’s faces in the image, taken at the office of the prosecutor in Kerman, a city more than 600 miles east of the capital, Tehran.

In its statement, the family said it was “actively engaging with the British government and relevant authorities, working diligently to navigate the complexities of this matter.”

It is unclear how long the couple has been held in Iran. Before their detention, the Foremans shared their travels on social media. They last posted on Jan. 3, saying they were in Iran.

“To put your minds at rest, we are having the most amazing time in Iran,” the couple said in a Facebook post, adding that they were traveling with a tour guide. On Instagram, Ms. Foreman posted a picture of herself meeting a theologian at a madrasa in Isfahan, where she wrote that “travel continues to teach me that humanity’s core is shared.”

The couple had crossed into Iran from Armenia, and were planning to head to Pakistan next, they had said.

“The UK government advises against all but essential travel to these areas, and the news paints a pretty grim picture,” they posted on Facebook on Dec. 30. “We want to find out for ourselves. That is why we are here.”

The post included two images side-by-side: one of the Foreign Office’s orange and yellow map of Iran, advising British citizens not to travel to Iran, and another of a photo of the green lawns of a mosque, an image whose location was pinned to Norduz, near Iran’s border with Armenia.

The foreign office advises against all travel to Iran, issuing a warning that “British and British-Iranian dual nationals are at significant risk of arrest, questioning or detention.”

Iran has repeatedly jailed foreigners and dual nationals over the last decade, including an Iranian-American citizen and an Italian journalist detained last year and a Swedish E.U. official arrested in 2023.

Several British-Iranian dual-citizens have been among those arrested, among them Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was held for six years; Aras Amiri, a 32-year-old art student; and Abbas Edalat, an academic and antiwar activist. Ms. Amiri, arrested while visiting her grandmother and accused of espionage, was released after three years in prison, and Mr. Edalat was released after several months.

Human rights groups have said many of these detentions are part of a deliberate policy to extract concessions from other countries, including prisoner swaps.

After being hospitalized on Friday for bronchitis, Pope Francis has been prescribed “complete rest” and will not be leading his traditional Sunday noon blessing, according to the Vatican.

In a statement issued Saturday evening, the Vatican confirmed that Francis had a respiratory tract infection and said that doctors at the Policlinico Agostino Gemelli, a medical facility in Rome, had “slightly modified” his treatment based on the results of microbiological tests. The Vatican said diagnostic tests carried out Saturday showed “improvement in some values” and that Francis did not have a fever.

The pope’s hospitalization on Friday had revived concerns about the health of the pontiff, who is 88 and has been prone to respiratory infections during the colder winter months.

Francis had a part of one lung removed as a young man, and in recent years, he has been battling a number of health problems, using a wheelchair or a cane to move around. He was hospitalized with bronchitis in 2023, and again a few months later to undergo abdominal surgery for a hernia. In 2021, he had colon surgery. He underwent diagnostic tests at the Gemelli hospital last year after a slight flu.

He has also fallen twice in his suite in recent weeks, bruising his chin in December and injuring an arm last month.

On Friday, Pope Francis was taken to the Gemelli hospital so that doctors could treat an ongoing case of bronchitis “in a hospital environment,” the Vatican said.

The Vatican had announced in early February that Francis had bronchitis, and that “in order to continue his activities” he would be holding his audiences at the Casa Santa Marta, the Vatican guesthouse where he lives, instead of at the Apostolic Palace. In recent weeks, he has complained of respiratory problems, and Vatican aides have been reading his homilies and other addresses in his stead at events. This Sunday, Francis’ noon blessing, the Angelus prayer, will be published, not delivered, the Vatican said Saturday.

Francis has had a full schedule since the New Year’s Eve opening of the 2025 Jubilee, held every 25 years in the Roman Catholic Church. Apart from his usual agenda, he has been presiding over audiences on several Saturdays with hundreds of pilgrims who have come to Rome for the Jubilee, and celebrating Mass at the Vatican on several Sundays. Last weekend, so many people attended one Jubilee event that the Mass was instead celebrated outdoors, in front of St. Peter’s Basilica.

The Vatican announced Friday that the pope’s agenda would be cleared at least until Monday.

“Pope Francis has been kept up-to-date about the many messages of closeness and affection he has received and expressed his gratitude, while asking people to continue to pray for him,” the Vatican said.

Six months after the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny died in a Russian prison above the Arctic Circle, Konstantin A. Kotov woke up to find his Moscow apartment under siege.

After breaking down the door, Russian officers set about confiscating everything to do with Mr. Navalny, down to a campaign button from the activist’s 2018 presidential run and a book written by his brother. Then, they arrested Mr. Kotov and took him away.

His alleged crime: donating approximately $30 three years earlier to Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund, which the Kremlin considers an extremist group.

The death one year ago of Mr. Navalny, who once led tens of thousands of Russians against the Kremlin on the streets of Moscow, dealt a serious blow to Russia’s already beleaguered opposition. Much of that movement has fled abroad amid a crackdown on dissent that began before President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but escalated with the war.

Even with Mr. Navalny dead and his movement in tatters, the authorities have been going after people with links to him and his organization inside Russia. Some see the continued prosecutions as a repressive Russian machine operating on autopilot. Others see a Moscow that views the opposition figure’s legacy as an enduring threat.

“They seem to be doing it more out of habit, rather than as a new campaign,” said Sergei S. Smirnov, the editor in chief of the exiled media outlet Mediazona.

But there are also senior officers in the F.S.B., Russia’s domestic intelligence service, who see themselves as strangling a political underground that presents the same risk to the Kremlin that the Bolsheviks posed before Russia’s monarchy was toppled in 1917, said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian author and expert on the security establishment.

“The comparison to the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution is embedded in those people’s heads,” Mr. Soldatov said by phone from London. “Czarist Russia crumbled because of a big war and a major political party operating underground.”

The authorities have focused on a wide range of targets.

Last year, they went after journalists who remained in Russia and continued to cover Mr. Navalny’s ordeal, accusing them of cooperating with his organization.

Antonina Favorskaya, a reporter for the Sota Vision media outlet, was arrested last March on charges of “participating in an extremist organization.” She was accused of filming footage later used by Mr. Navalny’s associates on their media platforms.

A rare reporter to attend court hearings for Mr. Navalny shortly before his death, Ms. Favorskaya shot the last known video of him addressing the court via a video link from his Arctic prison colony the day before he died.

Russian authorities later arrested three more journalists and put them all on trial together. Artyom Kriger, one of the defendants, said he and others stood accused of filming interviews on the street in Russia for Mr. Navalny’s YouTube channel.

There has yet to be a verdict.

Moscow also pursued charges against Mr. Navalny’s lawyers.

A court some 80 miles east of Moscow last month sentenced three lawyers for Mr. Navalny to as much as five and a half years in prison for passing correspondence from the incarcerated politician to his allies. The court ruled that it was tantamount to “participating” in Mr. Navalny’s illegal movement.

Mr. Navalny’s lawyers insisted they were being tried for routine legal work that includes passing on communications on behalf of imprisoned clients.

Cases seeking to punish ordinary Russians for making donations to Mr. Navalny’s team, some of them as paltry as $3, have also cropped up in courts.

Russian authorities have prosecuted at least 15 people on charges of funding an extremist organization for sending donations to Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund. In the past few months, local media reported such charges against a physician from Biysk, an IT engineer from a St. Petersburg suburb and a political activist from Ufa.

“These are simply people who maybe just transferred 500 rubles a long time ago to the Anti-Corruption Fund,” Mr. Kotov, a wiry 39-year-old activist who works for a human rights organization, said, referring to a sum that is a little over $5.

By the time a donation case was opened against him, Mr. Kotov had long been on the radar of Russian authorities for rallying against Kremlin abuses.

In 2019, he was one of the first people to be arrested under a new Russian law restricting freedom of assembly at “unsanctioned protests.” (The law laid the groundwork for a near total protest ban that later helped pacify wartime Russia.)

He spent 18 months in prison, most of it at a harsh facility in Russia’s Vladimir region, about 60 miles east of Moscow.

Shortly after Mr. Kotov’s release, Mr. Navalny returned to Russia, having recovered abroad in Germany from a near-fatal poisoning. Within weeks, Mr. Navalny would end up in the same prison where Mr. Kotov had been jailed.

That year, a Russian court outlawed and liquidated Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund, labeling it extremist. The ruling criminalized fund-raising from ordinary Russians that for years had kept the group afloat.

Mr. Navalny’s top aides took to YouTube and made an urgent plea for donations to keep the organization alive, saying they had worked out a secure system for supporters to transfer funds to a bank account outside Russia.

Mr. Kotov saw how Mr. Navalny had landed in the same prison where he had suffered, and felt a personal connection. He signed up to give a 500 ruble donation per month, believing the new platform was secure.

“It was my gesture to show that I didn’t agree with the liquidation of the Anti-Corruption Fund and that I supported Aleksei Navalny, who was in prison,” Mr. Kotov said. “I wanted his activities to continue.”

Half a year later, in January 2022, Mr. Kotov got nervous and stopped the donations. But by then, it was too late. Some of the transactions had revealed the Anti-Corruption Fund’s foreign bank information to Russian authorities by including a reference to the group’s name in the transfer data. The donations had not been secure.

The following month, Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine, prompting Mr. Kotov to go out in the streets of Moscow and protest the war. He was quickly arrested and spent the next month in jail. Two and a half years later, the authorities came to his apartment and arrested him for the six 500 ruble donations he made to Mr. Navalny’s fund. He pleaded guilty.

A court released him under house arrest. At first, he thought he would stay in Russia. Other donors charged with the same crime had gotten away with fines.

But then, in December, a court in Moscow found Ivan S. Tishchenko, a 46-year-old heart surgeon, guilty for sending 3,500 rubles in donations to Mr. Navalny’s foundation. His sentence: four years in prison.

Dr. Tishchenko had subscribed to recurring donations to the Anti-Corruption Fund well before Russian authorities outlawed it as extremist in 2021.

Dr. Tishchenko’s lawyer, Natalya Tikhonova, described the verdict as “too harsh for a person who saved thousands of lives and definitely never intended to cause any harm to Russia’s constitutional order.”

Mr. Kotov, wary of a return to Russian prison, fled to Lithuania this year.

In an interview from there, Mr. Kotov described how Mr. Navalny had represented hope “that Putin isn’t immortal, that at some point this regime will come to an end.”

“Aleksei Navalny was the symbol of a beautiful Russia of the future, a happy Russia of the future,” he said. “When that symbol was gone, I started to feel much worse.”

“But we’re still living,” he added. “We can’t give up.”