When a mortar round exploded on top of their American-made Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, the Ukrainian soldiers inside were shaken but not terribly worried, having been hardened by artillery shelling over three years of war.
But then the small drones started to swarm.
They targeted the weakest points of the armored Bradley with a deadly precision that mortar fire doesn’t possess. One of the explosive drones struck the hatch right above where the commander was sitting.
“It tore my arm off,” recounted Jr. Sgt. Taras, the 31-year-old commander who, like others, used his first name in accordance with Ukrainian military protocols.
Scrambling for a tourniquet, Sergeant Taras saw that the team’s driver had also been hit, his eye blasted from its socket.
The two soldiers survived. But the attack showed how an ever-evolving constellation of drones — largely off-the-shelf technologies that are being turned into killing machines at breakneck speed — made the third year of war in Ukraine deadlier than the first two years combined, according to Western estimates.
Drones, not the big, heavy artillery that the war was once known for, inflict about 70 percent of all Russian and Ukrainian casualties, said Roman Kostenko, the chairman of the defense and intelligence committee in Ukraine’s Parliament. In some battles, they cause even more — up to 80 percent of deaths and injuries, commanders say.
When President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia sent troops storming into Ukraine three years ago, setting off the biggest ground war in Europe since World War II, the West rushed billions of dollars in conventional weapons into Ukraine, hoping to keep Russia at bay.
The insatiable battlefield demands nearly emptied NATO nations’ stockpiles.
The war has killed and wounded more than a million soldiers in all, according to Ukrainian and Western estimates. But drones now kill more soldiers and destroy more armored vehicles in Ukraine than all traditional weapons of war combined, including sniper rifles, tanks, howitzers and mortars, Ukrainian commanders and officials say.
Until recently, the clanging, metallic explosions from incoming artillery, ringing out around the clock, epitomized the war. Ukrainian soldiers raced at high speed in armored personnel carriers or pickup trucks, screeching to a stop and spilling out to run for cover in bunkers.
The artillery gave soldiers a sense of impersonal danger — the dread that you could die any moment from the bad luck of a direct hit.
The conflict now bears little resemblance to the war’s early battles, when Russian columns lumbered into towns and small bands of Ukrainian infantry moved quickly, using hit-and-run tactics to slow the larger enemy.
The trenches that cut scars across hundreds of miles of the front are still essential for defense, but today most soldiers die or lose limbs to remote-controlled aircraft rigged with explosives, many of them lightly modified hobby models. Drone pilots, in the safety of bunkers or hidden positions in tree lines, attack with joysticks and video screens, often miles from the fighting.
Speeding cars or trucks no longer provide protection from faster-flying drones. Soldiers hike for miles, ducking into cover, through drone-infested territory too dangerous for jeeps, armored personnel carriers or tanks. Soldiers say it has become strangely personal, as buzzing robots hunt specific cars or even individual soldiers.
It is, they say, a feeling of a thousand snipers in the sky.
“You can hide from artillery,” said Bohdan, a deputy commander with the National Police Brigade. But drones, he said, “are a different kind of nightmare.”
The war’s evolution could have major geopolitical implications.
As the precarious relations between Ukraine and the Trump administration threaten future military aid, the kind of conventional weaponry that the Americans have spent billions of dollars providing Ukraine is declining in importance.
Of the 31 highly sophisticated Abrams tanks that the United States provided Ukraine in 2023, 19 have been destroyed, disabled or captured, with many incapacitated by drones, senior Ukrainian officials said. Nearly all of the others have been taken off the front lines, they added.
Drones, by contrast, are much cheaper and easier to build. Last year, they helped make up for the dwindling supplies of Western-made artillery and missiles sent to Ukraine. The sheer scale of their wartime production is staggering.
Ukrainian officials said they had made more than one million first-person-view, or FPV, drones in 2024. Russia claims it can churn out 4,000 every day. Both countries say they are still scaling up production, with each aiming to make three to four million drones in 2025.
They’re being deployed far more often, too. With each year of the war, Ukraine’s military has reported huge increases in drone attacks by Russian forces.
Ukraine has followed suit, firing more drones last year than the most common type of large-caliber artillery shells. The commander of Ukraine’s drone force, Colonel Vadym Sukharevsky, says Ukraine is now pursuing a “robots first” military strategy.
However effective they may be, the drones fall far short of meeting all of Ukraine’s war needs and cannot simply replace the demand for conventional weapons, commanders warn. Heavy artillery and other long-range weapons remain essential for many reasons, they say, including protecting troops and targeting command-and-control outposts or air-defense systems.
But the emerging dominance of drones could change the nature of warfare itself, leaders note.
The battlefield tactics shaping Ukraine are sure to be emulated by Western allies and adversaries alike, including Iran, North Korea and China.
“The war is a mix of World War I and World War III — what could be a future war,” said NATO’s supreme allied commander for transformation, Adm. Pierre Vandier of France.
NATO just opened a joint training center with Ukrainian soldiers to develop new warfighting strategies with A.I., advanced analytics and other machine-learning systems.
Admiral Vandier said it was vital not just for the current war, but also to understand how the changes playing out across Ukraine can prepare NATO for future conflicts.
“A war is a learning process, and so NATO needs to learn from the war,” he added.
The pace of advances has astonished even close observers of the war, forcing many to rethink the viability of weapons that cost millions of dollars on a battlefield where they can be destroyed by a drone that costs a few hundred dollars.
Drones armed with shotguns are now shooting down other drones. Antiaircraft drones are being designed to take out surveillance drones flying higher in the sky. Larger drones are being developed to serve as motherships for swarms of small drones, increasing the distance they can fly and kill.
The proliferation of drones, many equipped with powerful cameras, has also provided a closer glimpse of the fighting in frontline areas often inaccessible to journalists. The New York Times analyzed dozens of video clips posted online by military units on both sides of the war. While these videos are sometimes used for promotional purposes, they also help illustrate how new battlefield technologies are reshaping the war.
Drones, of course, were deployed in the earliest days of the invasion as well. When Russian armored columns streamed into Ukraine at the start of the war, some civilians — calling themselves “the Space Invaders” — organized through an informal chat group to help defend the country. They quickly modified their own drones to drop hand grenades and other munitions on the advancing enemy soldiers.
Those ad hoc weapons have become so common that one of those early defenders, Serhiy, said he was later attacked by the same kind of bomber drone he had developed.
“I was wounded by the same technology I worked with,” said Serhiy, using his first name for fear of retribution from Russia.
The Ukrainians make use of a wide range of explosives to arm drones. They drop grenades, mortar rounds or mines on enemy positions. They repurpose anti-tank weapons and cluster munitions to fit onto drones, or they use anti-personnel fragmentation warheads and others with thermobaric charges to destroy buildings and bunkers.
Capt. Viacheslav, commander of Ukraine’s 68th Separate Jaeger Brigade’s strike drone company, scrolled through his phone to show some of the 50 types of munitions the Ukrainians use.
“This is called ‘White Heat,’” with over 10 kilograms of explosives, he said. “It burns through everything.”
“This one is called ‘Dementor,’ like in Harry Potter,” he added. “It’s black, and it’s a 120-millimeter mortar. We just repurpose it. This one’s called ‘Bead.’ This is ‘Kardonitik.’ The guys really like it.”
The proliferation of drones inevitably gave rise to widespread electronic warfare — tools to jam the radio signals that most drones need to fly.
Tens of thousands of jammers have been littered across Ukraine’s front lines to disable drones, cluttering the electromagnetic spectrum that also enables GPS, military communications, navigation, radar and surveillance.
The jammers have made it much harder for even skilled Ukrainian pilots to hit their targets, Ukrainian soldiers and commanders said.
That has fueled innovative ways of overcoming jamming.
Ukrainian engineers have built drones and robots with “frequency hoppers,” automatically switching from one radio signal to another to evade jammers.
Surveillance drones that guide themselves with A.I. — instead of being remotely operated by radio — are starting to take flight, too. Last fall, a drone being tested by the American company Shield A.I. found two Russian Buk SA-11 surface-to-air missile launchers, and sent their location to Ukrainian forces to strike.
Ukraine and Russia have also reached back to older technologies to thwart jammers, including tethering drones to thin fiber-optic cables that can stretch for more than 10 miles.
With its long tail, the drone remains connected to a controller, so it doesn’t need to use radio signals, rendering it immune to jamming.
Russia has been quicker to churn out these fiber-optic workarounds on a mass scale, partnering with Chinese factories to make the spools of cable for the “fly-by-wire” drones, Ukrainian officials say.
In recent videos from the front lines, fiber-optic cables crisscross fields, glinting in the sun. The production of this new weapon follows a pattern in the war: Ukraine has a broader variety of new designs, but Russia has a numerical advantage, able to make them more quickly.
Other adaptations to the swirl of drones are surprisingly low-tech. Soldiers cover tanks in anti-drone netting or makeshift structures of metal sheets, with rubber and logs nestled between to protect them.
Ground drones have also been thrust onto Ukraine’s battlefields at a time when they are still being tested by many modern militaries.
The so-called battle bots sometimes look like remote-controlled toy cars with puffy tires or small tanks on tracks, scattering land mines, carrying ammunition or helping to evacuate the wounded. They have been packed with explosives to slam into enemy positions and outfitted with machine guns and other weapons.
In December, the 13th Brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine carried out what the Ukrainian military said was the first fully robotic combined arms assault in combat.
Russian forces tried to destroy the remote-controlled vehicles with mortars and by dropping explosives from their own drones, said Lt. Volodymyr Dehtyaryov, a brigade spokesman. Soldiers were kept at a distance, operating from a bunker behind the Ukrainian front line.
“Drones show that the one who is quicker to adapt,” he said, “wins the war.”
Air defenses remain one of Ukraine’s most urgent needs, so much so that the F-16 jets that NATO countries have donated mostly fly air patrol and other defensive missions, rather than attacking. But A.I. is about to enter the picture, commanders hope — particularly to counter Russian bombs.
Russia has outfitted its Soviet-era bombs with pop-out wings and satellite navigation, turning them into guided munitions called glide bombs. More than 51,000 of them have been dropped on Ukrainian cities, towns and positions near the front, the Ukrainian military says. It has tried to intercept them, including by shooting them down with costly missiles. But it does not always succeed.
So NATO is trying to use artificial intelligence and other machine learning to find patterns in glide bomb attacks, hoping to intercept or jam them more precisely, NATO officials said.
Ukrainian officials say they have also made strides in drone-on-drone warfare to bolster traditional air defenses.
Small quadcopter drones can now spring off the ground and crash into long-range Russian drones. Ukraine also recently claimed to have developed a laser weapon that can hit low-flying aircraft, including the Iranian-designed Shahed drones that Russia has used since the war’s early days.
Long-range weapons are also a priority. Russia has launched more than 10,000 missile strikes across Ukraine and is continually replenishing its missile arsenal. Ukraine, by comparison, has depended on a limited number of Western-made weapons to hit targets far inside Russia, and some of them are so old that officials in Kyiv doubt their effectiveness.
As an alternative, Ukraine has developed long-range drones to attack Russia at distances that would have been unthinkable when the war started. Some have struck more than 700 miles beyond the front, and it is not uncommon for more than 100 long-range attack drones to fly into Russia and Ukraine on any given night.
At sea the battle is no less surprising, especially given that Ukraine started the war with almost no navy.
For months, Russian warships, visible from shore, menaced the coast of Odesa, one of Ukraine’s biggest cities. Even after the Ukrainians sank the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, using domestically produced Neptune anti-ship missiles, the Kremlin effectively blockaded Ukrainian ports.
Three years later, Russian ships rarely enter the northwestern Black Sea, while its navy has pulled most of its valuable assets from ports in the occupied Crimean Peninsula, fearing Ukrainian attack.
Crude Ukrainian robotic vessels packed with explosives sail hundreds of miles across choppy waters to target enemy ships. Russia’s fleet in the Crimean port of Sevastopol now has layers of buoys and barriers to protect itself against naval drones.
Ukraine often sends its drones to hunt in “wolf packs,” hoping the lead drone can blast a path for those that follow.
The commander of Ukraine’s naval forces, Vice Adm. Oleksiy Neizhpapa, said that while traditional naval weapons and warships remained necessary, drones have “ushered in a new era in maritime operations.”
“This is not just a tactical tool but a strategic shift in the approach to naval warfare,” Admiral Neizhpapa said in a statement, crediting the drones with “altering the balance of power in the Black Sea.” American military leaders have noted the Ukrainian approach to see if there are lessons should China make a move to attack Taiwan.
Taken together, what has unfolded in the war’s first three years has made some Western leaders question longstanding military assumptions.
“I think we’re moving to technological warfare,” President Alexander Stubb of Finland said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January. “Not only the Ukrainians are a step ahead of us, which I think is great, but the Russians are adapting to a new situation as well.”
“So we really need to think about collective defense comprehensively,” he said. “The advancements are so quick that all of us need to be alert to that.”
With Cease-Fire Shaky, Israel and Hamas Weigh Diplomatic and Military Options
When the cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas was announced in January, Israelis and Palestinians burst into simultaneous celebrations, optimistic after 15 months of war.
Now, with the first phase of the deal over on Sunday and Israel introducing an entirely new proposal that Hamas has already rejected, concern is rising that the fighting that reduced Gaza to rubble, killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and threatened the lives of hostages could resume.
As the cease-fire teeters, both Hamas and Israel are pursuing two paths, one diplomatic and another military.
On the diplomatic front, Hamas is insisting on the implementation of the second phase of the original agreement, which calls for an end to the war, a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the release of more hostages and prisoners.
Israel, though, has made a new proposal for a seven-week extension of the current cease-fire, during which Hamas would be required to release half the remaining living hostages as well as the remains of half the deceased ones. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Sunday attributed the proposal to the work of President Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff.
For weeks, Israel has been sending signals that it wasn’t interested in moving forward with the second phase of the agreement. While the two sides agreed to the second phase in principle, they never worked out the details and have staked out irreconcilable visions.
Mr. Netanyahu has said repeatedly that Hamas’s government and military wing must be dismantled, a position shared by his right-wing coalition partners in the government. Hamas has suggested it was willing to give up civilian governance of Gaza but has firmly rejected dissolving its military wing, a critical source of its power in the enclave.
The new proposal, as described on Sunday by Mr. Netanyahu, appears to be an attempt to replace the cease-fire deal with terms that would enable Israel to bring home dozens of hostages and remains of hostages without committing to the end of the war.
But the suggestion, analysts said, may be an effort to shake up the cease-fire talks in a way that breaks the deadlock between Israel and Hamas, at least temporarily.
“It’s not really feasible, but it’s an opening offer,” said Shira Efron, an analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, a New York-based research group. “It could force a discussion that bridges the two sides’ positions to extend the cease-fire for a couple weeks or more.”
Still, she said, it does not resolve the underlying differences between Hamas and Israel about the end of the war.
At a government meeting on Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu said the proposal included a temporary cease-fire during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan and the Jewish holiday of Passover. Half of the remaining hostages in Gaza, he said, would be returned to Israel at the beginning of the temporary cease-fire and the other half would be repatriated at the end, if an agreement on a permanent cease-fire is concluded.
In the first phase of the three-stage deal agreed to in January, Hamas released 25 Israeli hostages and handed over the bodies of eight others in exchange for more than 1,500 Palestinians jailed by Israel. But without further planned exchanges of hostages and prisoners, Israel will have fewer incentives to keep the truce going.
On Sunday, Hamas dismissed the new proposal as “a blatant attempt to renege on the agreement and evade negotiations for its second phase.”
Hamas considers the idea of immediately giving up half of the hostages a nonstarter, but it could consider exchanging a small number of hostages or bodies for Palestinian prisoners, even without a commitment to the end of the war, analysts said. The hostages represent Hamas’s most powerful leverage, and every time it trades an Israeli captive for Palestinian prisoners, its negotiating hand is weakened.
Two Israeli officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, acknowledged that Hamas would probably be willing to give up only a small number of hostages, or their remains, without guarantees for the end of the war. That dynamic, the officials said, may eventually make Israel choose between restarting a war to unseat Hamas or saving hostages still believed to be alive.
About 25 captives and the remains of more than 30 others are still in Gaza, according to the Israeli government.
“Israel stands on the horns of a dilemma,” said Yaakov Amidror, a retired major general who served as Mr. Netanyahu’s national security adviser.
On Sunday, Hazem Qassim, a spokesman for Hamas, said the militant group was insisting on negotiating the second phase because it wanted to prevent the resumption of the war and ensure Israel withdraws from Gaza.
“This is a fundamental position for the Hamas movement,” he told the Qatari-funded broadcaster Al Jazeera.
Both Israel and Hamas have sent negotiators to speak with Egyptian and Qatari mediators. But even as the diplomatic discussions continue, the two sides are preparing for the possibility of a return to war.
Hamas has been collecting unexploded bombs throughout Gaza and repurposing the explosives and their metal cases as improvised explosive devices, according to one member of the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details. The militant group has also been recruiting new members and replacing commanders killed in the fighting, the person said.
Israel has prepared extensively for a new and intense campaign in Gaza, according to Israeli officials. They said any new operations would include targeting Hamas officials who siphon off aid supplies meant for civilians, as well as destroying buildings and infrastructure used by the Hamas-run civilian government.
Such a plan has not yet been approved by the Israeli cabinet, the officials said, but they believe that only Mr. Trump could dissuade Mr. Netanyahu from renewed war.
While Israel and Hamas struggle over Gaza’s future, Palestinian civilians in the enclave, and the families of hostages, are facing an anxious period of limbo.
“They’re being left in a state of perpetual worry,” said Akram Atallah, a London-based Palestinian columnist originally from Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip. “If the war returns, they stand to lose the most.”
Patrick Kingsley and Ronen Bergman contributed reporting.
Economic Upheaval and Plans to Retaliate: Canada Braces for Tariffs
It is not an exit anyone would have expected. Justin Trudeau will end his final days as Canada’s prime minister with the country tossed into economic turmoil if President Trump follows through on his plan Tuesday to impose 25 percent tariffs on Canadian exports.
While Canadian officials have spent much of last week in Washington trying to fend off the president’s tariffs, which will also apply to Mexico, those efforts have so far been futile. If tariffs do go into effect, Canada is poised to retaliate, setting off a trade war.
Mr. Trump has offered various rationales for the tariffs, which were supposed to go into effect at the beginning of February but were suspended for 30 days. He says the United States has been destabilized by large numbers of unauthorized migrants, as well as large quantities of fentanyl, crossing the border from Canada. U.S. government statistics do not support either claim.
Mr. Trump has also claimed that Americans “subsidize Canada” by providing hundreds of billions of dollars a year — though he has not provided any evidence — and has urged companies to move their plants out of Canada to the United States. Mr. Trump has complained about Canada’s trade surplus with the United States, which is mostly driven by oil and gas exports and totaled $63 billion last year.
Whatever the reason, there is widespread consensus in Canada that tariffs would inflict major damage on the country’s economy, which is dependent on exports as well as industries that are tightly integrated with the American market.
Jean Simard, the president of the Aluminium Association of Canada, recalled the effect of a 10 percent U.S. tariff on Canadian aluminum exports during the first Trump administration.
“The 10 percent tariffs years ago were highly disruptive,” Mr. Simard said. “Twenty-five percent tariffs will be highly destructive.”
Border Response
Just 19 kilograms of fentanyl were intercepted last year at the Canada-U.S. border, compared with almost 9,600 kilograms at the border with Mexico, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. And an investigation by The Globe and Mail, a newspaper in Toronto, found that the Canadian figure was inflated by the inclusion of seizures that were not related to the border.
U.S. authorities last year arrested roughly 24,000 people crossing illegally from Canada into the United States, compared with more than two million people who were apprehended at the southern border.
Still, Mr. Trudeau’s government moved swiftly to placate Mr. Trump’s concern about both issues by investing 1.3 billion Canadian dollars (about $900 million) on a series of measures to fortify the border.
They included the appointment of a “fentanyl czar,” providing the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with two Black Hawk helicopters to monitor the 5,525-mile-long border, assigning a large number of its officers to border patrol and purchasing of a variety of electronic surveillance devices, including drones.
The increased border security has led to the apprehension of a small number of people entering Canada from the United States.
While Mr. Trump said last week that he had seen improvement at both borders on migration, he added that he was not satisfied with how Canada and Mexico handled fentanyl smuggling.
Immediate Effects
While Mr. Trump insists that Canadian exporters will cover the cost of the tariffs, the levies would have to be paid by American importers. It is unclear if they would be able to recover the cost from Canadian firms.
The result, an overwhelming majority of economists agree, would be inflation and supply disruption in the United States, while Canadian industries could face large-scale layoffs.
Mr. Simard said that just the threat of the tariffs had already significantly raised the cost of aluminum in North America. If the tariffs go into effect, he estimates, the resulting aluminum price increases will add about $3,000 to the cost of making a Ford F-150 pickup truck.
Automotive trade between the two countries is roughly equivalent, and many auto parts cross the border several times before winding up in an assembled vehicle.
Because 25 percent is far higher than the profit margins on cars and trucks, as well as the parts used to make them, industry executives predict that parts makers would soon stop shipping and factories would quickly close in all three countries, laying off thousands of workers.
“A 25 percent tariff across the Mexico and Canadian border will blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we have never seen,” Jim Farley, the chief executive of the Ford Motor Company, said last month.
American farmers would also face increased prices for potash, a vital fertilizer. About 80 percent of potash in the United States comes from Canada because of limited U.S. reserves.
No Desirable Choices
Mr. Trump has repeatedly suggested that the easiest way for Canada to avoid tariffs is to become the 51st U.S. state. His call for Canada’s annexation, as well as his repeated denigration of it as a viable nation, has infuriated many Canadians. That’s already led to calls to boycott American goods, caused Canadians to cancel U.S. vacations and rekindled affection for the maple leaf flag.
Mr. Trudeau has promised that Canada is prepared to respond with tariffs on U.S. imports. It would initially target 30 billion Canadian dollars’ worth of products, including Kentucky bourbon, from Republican states whose elected officials might have sway with Mr. Trump.
There have been proposals to cut off shipments of oil, gas and electricity to the United States or impose steep export taxes on those products.
While the tariffs are a clear violation of the free trade deal among Canada, Mexico and the United States that Mr. Trump renegotiated during his first administration, using its dispute-settlement system to strike levies down could take years. Nor is it clear that Mr. Trump would accept any ruling against the United States.
More to Come
Canada also faces a global 25 percent tariff Mr. Trump has promised to apply on steel and aluminum. Canada is the largest foreign supplier of both materials to the United States, and Mr. Trump has suggested that those tariffs will be stacked on top of the 25 percent tariff he has promised will come on Tuesday.
He has also talked about creating specific tariffs against automobiles and copper.
And next month, Mr. Trump plans to introduce a worldwide reciprocity-based tariff system. It would set tariffs based on other countries’ policies that affect trade with the United States, such as tariffs, taxes and subsidies. These were the terms of the trading relationship between Canada and the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The potential effect on Canada is unclear. Because of the free-trade agreement between the three countries, Canada charges relatively few tariffs on American goods, so reciprocal tariffs from Washington would be similarly limited. The tariffs Canada does impose are mostly on dairy, poultry and eggs.
On Mexico’s Once-Packed Border, Few Migrants Remain
On the eve of President Trump’s deadline to impose tariffs on Mexico, one thing is hard to miss on the Mexican side of the border: The migrants are gone.
In what were once some of the busiest sections along the border — Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana, Matamoros — shelters that used to overflow now hold just a few families. The parks, hotels and vacant buildings that once teemed with people from all over the world stand empty.
And on the border itself, where migrants once slept in camps within feet of the 30-foot wall, only dust-caked clothes and shoes, rolled-up toothpaste tubes and water bottles remain.
“All that is over,” said the Rev. William Morton, a missionary at a Ciudad Juárez cathedral that serves migrants free meals. “Nobody can cross.”
Last week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, announced that Customs and Border Protection had apprehended only 200 people at the southern border the Saturday before — the lowest single-day number in over 15 years.
Mr. Trump has credited his crackdown on illegal immigration for the plunging numbers, even as he has also announced he will send thousands more combat forces to the border to stop what he calls an invasion.
But according to analysts, Mexico’s own moves to restrict migration in the last year — not just at the border but throughout the country — have yielded undeniable results. In February, the Trump administration said it would pause for a month the imposition of 25-percent tariffs on Mexican exports, challenging the government to further reduce migration and the flow of fentanyl across the border.
That progress has put Mexico in a far stronger negotiating position than when Mr. Trump first threatened tariffs, during his first term.
“Mexico has new leverage compared to 2019,” Ariel G. Ruiz Soto and Andrew Selee, analysts with the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, wrote in a report. Mexico’s cooperation, they said, has made it “indispensable” to the United States.
The number of people heading toward the United States dropped sharply after President Biden imposed sweeping restrictions on asylum last year. The Mexican government has also significantly stepped up its own measures in recent years to reduce the number of migrants reaching the border. The government has established checkpoints along migrant routes, imposed visa restrictions, dispersed caravans and bused people who arrived from places like Venezuela to remote corners of southern Mexico to prevent them from reaching the U.S.
Since last spring, the Mexican authorities have been apprehending more people than their American counterparts every month. Now, the numbers at the border have fallen to almost nothing.
“We no longer have major flows of people coming — they have declined by 90 percent,” Enrique Serrano Escobar, who leads the Chihuahua State office responsible for migrants, in Juárez, said last week.
And those migrants who do make it to the border are no longer trying to enter the United States, shelter operators say.
“They know they can’t cross,” said Father Morton, in Juárez. “All the holes underground, the tunnels, the holes in the wall, they’ve virtually sealed it — it’s much, much more difficult.”
Empty Shelters
In Mexican border cities, the scene at migrant shelters is much the same: tables sitting empty at meal time, bunk beds, unused.
Even before Mr. Trump took office, the number of people apprehended trying to cross the border had been dramatically dropping, according to U.S. government data.
Many of those waiting in border cities had appointments through CBP One, an application that allowed people to make asylum appointments with the authorities rather than to cross the border, shelter operators say.
After Mr. Trump canceled the app on his first day in office, people gave up after a few days and headed south to Mexico City or even for the southern border, said the Rev. Juan Fierro, a pastor at the Good Samaritan shelter in Ciudad Juárez.
At a once-crammed shelter in Matamoros whose name translates to Helping Them Triumph, only a handful of Venezuelan women and their children remain, according to its directors.
In Tijuana, at a shelter complex within view of the border wall, the Foundation Youth Movement 2000, which once held hundreds of people of all nationalities, there are now just 55, according to its director, José María Lara.
They are the same people who have been there since Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
“There have been the same number” Mr. Lara said. They include people from Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia and Guatemala, as well as Mexican migrants from states considered dangerous to return to, such as Michoacán.
There are no figures available for how many migrants like these may be living in the border’s shelters, hotels and rented rooms, and biding their time.
“We are going to wait to see if God touches Mr. Trump’s heart,” said a 26-year-old woman from Venezuela, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Maria Elena, as she sat eating with her 7-year-old son at the cathedral in Ciudad Juárez.
Guardsmen on the Border
In response to Mr. Trump’s demands last month, Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, dispatched 10,000 national guardsmen to the border and sent hundreds more troops to Sinaloa state, a major fentanyl trafficking hub.
Officials and those who work with migrants are split on whether the troops, several hundred of which began to appear in and around every border city over the last month, have had an effect on illegal border crossings.
At the end of the border wall between Tijuana and San Diego, Calif., the National Guard has set up large tents on the Mexican side, in an area called Nido de las Águilas. About 15 miles from downtown Tijuana, it has long been used by coyotes, the smugglers who take advantage of the steep hills and lack of police presence to lead migrants into California, the authorities say.
The guard has also placed checkpoints at spots up and down the border.
In Tijuana, José Moreno Mena, a spokesman for the Coalition for the Defense of Migrants, said that the presence of the guard has been a major deterrent to migration, along with Mr. Trump’s promised mass deportations in the United States.
“This doesn’t mean that they won’t keep coming,” Mr. Moreno said. “It’s just a pause, perhaps, until they see better conditions.”
But in the state of Tamaulipas, where more than 700 guardsman arrived last month in places like Matamoros, the guardsman do not appear to be curbing migration, residents say. They seem to be concentrated on the bridge into the United States, while migrants are now seeking to enter through the desert or other rural areas.
In Ciudad Juárez, where hundreds of guardsman were also dispatched in early February, the troops and military personnel have been stopping cars to inspect them, and searching for border tunnels.
“They have inspection spots at night, in the street,” Father Morton said. “There are more here, ostensibly to stop the fentanyl, but I doubt they know where it is.” He said they mainly stopped young men who were driving souped-up cars or had tattoos, creating an environment of “low intensity conflict.”
The real work of curbing migration has been happening far from Mexico’s northern border.
At the southernmost point in Mexico, in Tapachula, few migrants are entering. Shelters that recently housed 1,000 people now serve just a hundred or so, according to operators. Waiting for visas that allow them to head north, and dispersed if they try to form caravans, these migrants are all but blocked.
Many are weighing their options. Some have even asked the Mexican government to deport them on flights back to their country.
Staying Put in Mexico
The migrants who now sit on the U.S. border are generally those who come from places they cannot return to.
“They can’t go back,” said the Rev. Francisco González, president of a network of shelters in Juarez called We Are One for Juarez.
While his 12 shelters housed only 440 people last week after often being filled to their capacity of 1,200 in recent years, the people who are arriving are staying longer, he said.
Some are starting to fill out forms to gain asylum in Mexico, fearing they could be caught and deported if they have no legal status, Mr. González said.
“We still have faith and hope that at some point Trump will recover from his insanity,” said Jordan García, a former mining worker from Venezuela who said he and his wife and three daughters had spent 7 months making the journey to Ciudad Juárez.
Mr. García carried his infant, Reina Kataleya, through the dangerous jungle pass known as the Darién Gap when she was seven months old. Now the family’s makeshift home consists of a bunk bed in one of Mr. González’s shelters on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, draped in plush blankets for privacy.
But shelters at the border have started to shut down. In Ciudad Juárez, 34 were open in November; by last month, that number had dropped to 29. Shelter operators say that not only are there significantly fewer arrivals but that they are losing backing from international groups such as the U.N. International Office for Migration, and UNICEF, which relied on foreign aid frozen under Mr. Trump.
Before the new American administration, “there were more people, and there was more support,” said Olivia Santiago Rentería, a volunteer at one of the shelters run by We Are One for Juarez. “Now,” she said, “everyone here is living with that uncertainty.”
Reporting was contributed by Rocío Gallegos from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; Aline Corpusfrom Tijuana; Enrique Lerma from Matamoros; and Lucía Trejo from Tapachula.
Mexico braced for the worst when President Trump threatened steep tariffs on its exports. But as a deadline looms, Mexico’s leaders hope they have found a formula for staving off tariffs by moving decisively on several fronts to appease Mr. Trump.
Focusing on Mr. Trump’s complaints over migration and illicit drugs, President Claudia Sheinbaum is deploying 10,000 troops to deter migrants from reaching the United States, building on efforts to break up migrant caravans and busing migrants to places far from the border.
Ms. Sheinbaum is also handing over to the United States dozens of top cartel operatives and accepting intelligence from C.I.A. drone flights to capture others. Breaking with her predecessor, who falsely claimed that Mexico did not manufacture fentanyl, she is unleashing a crackdown resulting in record seizures of the drug.
At the same time, Mexico’s leaders are imposing their own tariffs and restrictions on a wide range of Chinese imports, seeking to persuade Mr. Trump that Mexico, and its low-cost industrial base, can be a strategic partner to blunt China’s economic sway.
Mr. Trump is still vowing to impose 25 percent tariffs on Tuesday. But Mexico’s financial markets remain calm, reflecting expectations in the country’s business establishment that Ms. Sheinbaum can find a way to strike a deal.
“The way she’s been able to manage this crisis has been far superior than any other leader,” said Diego Marroquín Bitar, a scholar who specializes in North American trade at the Wilson Center, a Washington research group.
Mr. Trump praised Ms. Sheinbaum as a “marvelous woman” after speaking with her in February.
Ms. Sheinbaum has mixed her conciliatory public moves to appease Mr. Trump, such as deploying troops, with greater security cooperation behind the scenes and a modest dose of pushback against Mr. Trump on subjects like renaming the Gulf of Mexico.
It’s not an easy balancing act for Ms. Sheinbaum, even as her approval rating has soared to 80 percent. Skepticism of Mr. Trump’s xenophobic politics runs deep both in Mexican society and within Morena, Ms. Sheinbaum’s political party, which blends nationalist and leftist ideals.
After decades of integration, Mexico relies on trade with the United States more than any other major economy. Tariffs, even if imposed briefly, could deal a blow, economists warn.
Mr. Trump is also threatening separate 25 percent tariffs on global steel and aluminum imports, which would also affect Mexico. And the Trump administration is formulating additional “reciprocal” tariffs aimed at offsetting trade restrictions and matching the import duties charged by other countries.
The uncertainty over tariffs is already weighing on Mexico’s economy as companies put plans on hold. The central bank slashed its growth projection to 0.6 percent for this year from 1.2 percent.
Still, Mr. Trump’s repeated threats and subsequent pullback on those threats have nurtured hopes that tensions could ease. He initially vowed to impose the tariffs on his first day in office, but then backtracked twice.
Mexican negotiators are in Washington to meet with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, in a bid to reach a last-minute deal.
Here are three areas where Mexico is mobilizing to align with the Trump administration’s priorities.
Curbing Migration
Mexico’s pledge to send 10,000 additional National Guard members to the U.S. border was cited as a win by Mr. Trump in early February, when he paused imposing tariffs for 30 days.
For months, Mexico had already been dismantling migrant caravans well before they reached border cities and expanding a shadowy program that transported thousands of migrants to places deep in Mexico’s interior.
Mexico detained about 475,000 migrants in the last quarter of 2024, according to government figures, more than double the amount detained in the first nine months of the year.
The border was already exceptionally quiet before Mr. Trump took office in January, reflecting Mexico’s enforcement measures and the Biden administration’s asylum restrictions.
The Trump administration’s new efforts to choke off migration flows, along with Mexico’s troop deployment, are making it even harder for migrants to enter the United States.
Migrant crossings have dropped to once unthinkable levels. At one point in February, U.S. personnel on the Mexican border encountered only 200 migrants in a single day, the lowest such figure in recent history.
If the trend holds on an annualized basis, Border Patrol apprehensions could decline to levels last seen nearly 60 years ago around the end of the Johnson administration, according to Adam Isacson, a migration expert at the Washington Office on Latin America.
Targeting Cartels
Mexico has sought to crack down on cartels producing illicit narcotics, especially fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that Mr. Trump has cited as the leading cause of overdose deaths in the United States.
Marking a break from past policies, when cartels managed to produce fentanyl with negligible interference from the authorities, Mexican officials have been announcing new seizures of fentanyl pills on a regular basis in recent weeks.
These moves include the capture last week of six kilos of fentanyl at Mexico City’s new international airport, in a package being sent to New Jersey. That followed the discovery of 18 kilograms of fentanyl hidden in a passenger bus in the northwestern border state of Sonora.
In December, shortly after Mr. Trump began threatening Mexico with tariffs, the authorities made a colossal seizure of 800 kilograms of fentanyl in Sinaloa state, Mexico’s largest capture of synthetic opioids.
In February, Mexican authorities in Puerto Vallarta also arrested two American citizens who faced arrest warrants in the United States for trafficking fentanyl. Both were extradited to Oklahoma.
Mexico followed up on Thursday by sending to the United States nearly 30 top cartel operatives wanted by American authorities, one of the largest such handovers in the history of the drug war.
The moves are aimed both at avoiding tariffs and military intervention by the United States, which Mr. Trump has threatened to take against drug cartels operating in Mexico.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Ms. Sheinbaum’s mentor and predecessor as president, had limited anti-narcotics cooperation with the United States. Ms. Sheinbaum appears to be taking a different approach.
Mexican officials, for instance, have been welcoming intelligence from the C.I.A., which has stepped up secret drone flights over Mexico to hunt for fentanyl labs. Mexico’s defense minister said in late February that U.S. drones had been used to track down top Sinaloa Cartel figures.
Greater enforcement could potentially contribute to reducing overdose deaths in the United States, which have already been on the decline.
In what could be a promising sign for Mexican negotiators seeking a deal on tariffs, overdose deaths fell about 24 percent in the 12-month period ending September 2024, compared with the same period the previous year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
Countering China
Trade between China and Mexico had been surging, fueling concerns that China could use its foothold in Mexico to gain greater access to U.S. markets. A year ago, shipping from China to Mexico was one of the world’s fastest growing trade routes.
But now Mexico is overhauling its ties with China, its second-largest trading partner. Just days after Mr. Trump first vowed to impose tariffs, the authorities raided a vast complex of stores in downtown Mexico City selling counterfeit Chinese goods.
Then Mexico imposed a 35 percent tariff on Chinese apparel imports, while also targeting Chinese online retailers like Shein and Temu by implementing a 19 percent tariff on goods imported through courier companies originating from China.
Still, with various tariff threats on the horizon, Mexico could do more to placate the Trump administration by moving to curb the import of products like semiconductors or automobiles, which are quickly making inroads in an important market for U.S. car manufacturers.
Who Will Join Europe’s ‘Coalition of the Willing’ to Help Ukraine?
European leaders met in London to form a plan to help end the war in Ukraine. But even potential peacekeepers face political and economic hurdles.
Britain and France have promised to muster a “coalition of the willing” to secure a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia. Now comes the acid test for Europe: How many countries will step up, and does that even matter, given Russia’s rejection of such a coalition as part of any settlement?
Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain left those questions unanswered as he bade farewell to fellow leaders after a summit meeting in London on Sunday. He conceded that “not every nation will feel able to contribute,” though he expressed optimism that several would, and that this would send a signal to President Trump that Europe was ready to “do the heavy lifting.”
Drawing Mr. Trump back into the process is as important as the mission and scope of a European coalition, analysts say. For the moment, the United States appears determined to strike a deal with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia over the heads of Europe and Ukraine, and without any security guarantees.
Mr. Starmer presented his coalition of the willing as one of multiple steps that included continued military aid for Ukraine to improve its position on the battlefield, a seat at the table for Kyiv in any peace negotiation and further help with its defensive capabilities after a settlement. That is where the coalition would come in.
In addition to Britain and France, northern European countries like Denmark and the Netherlands seem obvious candidates to take part. Both have been strong financial supporters of Ukraine’s war effort and are NATO members who contributed to other security campaigns, like that in Afghanistan. Germany is the second-largest contributor of military and other aid to Ukraine, after the United States.
But each country faces political and economic hurdles, such as the need to pass specific parliamentary measures in the Netherlands and the lack of a new government in Germany after recent elections. Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said she had an “open mind.” Dick Schoof, prime minister of the Netherlands, said he had not yet made concrete commitments.
“We will renegotiate precisely these issues,” the departing German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said after Sunday’s meeting, in what sounded like something less than a stirring call to arms. Ramping up military spending, he added, “will require an effort that many are not yet really sufficiently prepared for.”
Mr. Scholz’s likely successor, Friedrich Merz, is scrambling to obtain a huge amount of funding for defense — potentially at least 200 billion euros, about $207 billion — in the current German Parliament because he faces the prospect of an opposition minority in the next that is big enough to block additional spending.
President Emmanuel Macron of France said the nascent British-French plan would begin with a one-month truce between Ukraine and Russia. Any deployment of peacekeeping troops would come only after that, he said in an interview with the French paper Le Figaro on Sunday evening.
“There will be no European troops on Ukrainian soil in the coming weeks,” Mr. Macron said, noting the need for negotiations first. “The question is how we use this time to try and obtain an accessible truce, with negotiations that will take several weeks and then, once peace has been signed, a deployment.”
“We want peace,” Mr. Macron said. “We don’t want it at any price, without guarantees.”
France’s prime minister, François Bayrou, took a harder line on Monday night, telling lawmakers during a debate on Ukraine that “what we have brutally discovered over the past few weeks” was a “stunning reality” that the international rule of law was broken.
“They want to encircle us, to subjugate us, to bend us, too, to the law of the strongest — and this on the part of our allies,” Mr. Bayrou said, who plays little role in France’s foreign policy.
But Mr. Bayrou insisted that “we Europeans are stronger than we believe,” as he called for increased military spending around the continent. “On this point, France is for once in agreement with Mr. Trump,” he said. “If we are strong, we can’t ask others to defend us over the long term.”
Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who has cultivated friendly ties with the Trump administration, remains skeptical of a peacekeeping force. On Sunday, she noted that deploying Italian troops “has never been on the table” and added that such an operation ran the risk of being “highly complex and less effective.”
There are also openly unwilling countries, notably Hungary, which has in the past tried to hold up additional European aid to Ukraine. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, thanked Mr. Trump for his hostile treatment of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine during their Oval Office meeting last week.
Mr. Orban and Robert Fico, Slovakia’s prime minister, have demanded that the European Union push for an immediate cease-fire in Ukraine. Both have threatened to block statements of support for Ukraine at an E.U. summit meeting this week. Neither leader was invited to the gathering in London.
European leaders fear that Mr. Orban could also hold up efforts to keep about $200 billion in Russian assets frozen when the decision to keep them locked up is up for renewal this summer. London just lent Ukraine 2.26 billion pounds, about $2.8 billion, that it says will be paid back with the interest on frozen Russian assets held in Britain.
“This requires unanimity,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland said of the vote to keep the assets frozen. “We know what Hungary’s position is, what it may be.”
European leaders will gather on Thursday for a specially planned European Council meeting, where officials are expected to discuss support for Ukraine and how to build up defense capabilities across the European Union.
The point is to “approve concrete decisions,” Antonio Costa, president of the Council, said during a news conference on Monday.
Even if Europe marshals a robust coalition, it is not clear that will satisfy Mr. Trump. On Monday, he is expected to meet with top aides to discuss suspending or canceling U.S. military aid to Ukraine, according to an administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
In addition to shutting down military aid, Mr. Trump could also decide to pull back on intelligence sharing and training for Ukrainian troops and pilots, as well as on U.S. management of an office that coordinates international aid at an American military base in Germany, the official said.
For Mr. Starmer, who has cast himself as a bridge between Europe and the United States, the diplomatic risks are high.
Britain’s ambassador to the United States, Peter Mandelson, drew protests at home on Monday after he told ABC News that Mr. Zelensky needed to give “his unequivocal backing to the initiative that President Trump is taking to end the war and to bring a just and lasting peace to Ukraine.”
James Cleverly, a Conservative former foreign secretary, posted on social media, “The UK ambassador to Washington isn’t meant to communicate his own opinion, he is meant to communicate the UK government opinion.” He urged Mr. Starmer and the current foreign secretary, David Lammy, to “grip this.”
But Mr. Starmer has also rejected calls for Europe to distance itself from Mr. Trump, who he said was committed to a “durable peace.” He said he had discussed Europe’s plans by phone with the American president on Saturday evening. He is likely to face close questioning about his strategy in Parliament on Monday afternoon.
“I wouldn’t be taking this step down this road if I didn’t think it would yield a positive outcome in terms of ensuring that we move together,” Mr. Starmer said after his day of whirlwind diplomacy in London.
Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from Berlin, Aurelien Breeden from Paris and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
President Volodymyr Zelensky returned to Ukraine on Monday after a whirlwind diplomatic mission that included both humiliation, by President Trump, and a warm embrace, from European leaders. He vowed to use all diplomatic avenues to pursue an end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, but acknowledged there was “a long way to go.”
Russia has given no indication that it will accept any terms other than Ukrainian capitulation and permanent conquest of a large swath of Ukraine — and Mr. Trump makes clearer by the day that his intent is to stand with Moscow.
Ukrainians have insisted they will not lay down their arms unless they receive security guarantees, supported by the United States, that would prevent the Kremlin from regrouping and attacking again.
After a disastrous meeting with Mr. Trump on Friday, in which the American president and Vice President JD Vance berated him as being ungrateful, Mr. Zelensky received a show of support from Europe’s democracies on Sunday, which pledged to work with Ukraine to come up with a peace plan that it could then present to the United States.
Mr. Zelensky has said American buy-in for a peace plan is important and seemed to go further in his efforts to smooth things over with the White House. “We are grateful for all the support we have received from the United States,” he said in his address to the nation Sunday night. “There hasn’t been a single day when we haven’t felt grateful.”
“There will be diplomacy for peace,” Mr. Zelensky said. “And for the sake of all of us standing together — Ukraine, the whole of Europe, and necessarily America.”
It seems not to have been enough. On Monday night, the United States temporarily suspended all military aid to Ukraine, according to a senior administration official. The order is to take effect immediately, affecting hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of arms and ammunition in the pipelines and on order.
The official said the aid would not resume until Mr. Trump determined that Ukraine had demonstrated a commitment to peace negotiations with Russia.
Once again, Mr. Trump seemed to be placing the burden of ending the war on Ukraine while saying he believed President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia wanted peace, despite Moscow’s continuing aggression.
A day earlier, in a series of coordinated interviews on American television on Sunday, top Trump administration officials assailed the Ukrainian leader, often in remarkably personal terms.
National security adviser Mike Waltz compared him to “an ex-girlfriend that wants to argue everything that you said nine years ago, rather than moving the relationship forward.”
The new director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, questioned whether Ukraine and the United States really share common values and extended her critique to European countries that rallied around Mr. Zelensky, saying they “don’t stand with us around these fundamental values of freedom.”
When asked by the host of “Fox News Sunday” if Russia stood for the same values as Americans, she said, “That’s not really what we’re talking about here.”
The Oval Office meeting fed into propaganda from the Kremlin, which added to the pile-on on Monday.
The meeting showed that “the Kyiv regime and Zelensky don’t want peace, they want continuation of the war,” the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told reporters on Monday. His comments connoted a tightening bond between Moscow and Washington as they falsely portray Ukraine as the aggressor, unwilling to make peace. Attempts by Washington and Moscow “will clearly not be enough” to end the fighting, Mr. Peskov said. “An important element is missing.”
He implied that Russia could now push for a harder bargain than it did during the failed peace talks at the start of the war, given Russia’s military gains. “Since then, 2 ½ years later, the situation has changed,” Mr. Peskov said. “Only the blind can’t see that or the deaf not wanting to hear that.”
Mr. Zelensky sought to defend himself from being painted as the obstacle to peace — a criticism many Ukrainians find hard to understand given that their country has been under fierce attack for three years.
Ukrainians almost universally want peace, just not peace at any cost. “We need peace, not endless war,” Mr. Zelensky said once again as he returned to Ukraine.
But bitter experience has Ukrainians worried that a cease-fire without security guarantees would only provide a brief respite for Russian forces to regroup and attack again. They point to the fact that Ukraine has been fighting Russia in the eastern Donbas region since 2014 and that Mr. Putin has violated multiple peace accords aimed at ending the violence there. The Russian leader also claimed he had no intention of mounting a broader invasion of Ukraine right up until his tanks rolled across the border three years ago.
Mr. Zelensky’s insistence on pushing for security guarantees was one of the things that apparently angered Mr. Trump.
As Mr. Zelensky now works with European leaders to come up with a peace plan, he said once again that there are some fundamental principles not open to negotiation.
“We need to proceed from the understanding of international law,” he said during a meeting with reporters in London. “We don’t want anything that doesn’t belong to us, but when you occupy something or when you break the law, everything will come back to you,” he said.
He emphasized that Ukraine will never recognize the occupied territories as Russian: “For us, this will be temporary occupations.”
Russia, he said, would need to take concrete actions before any deal.
“The cease-fire must begin with the exchange of prisoners and the return of children,” his office wrote in a statement. “This would be a step to demonstrate Russia’s genuine intent for peace.”
The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Putin and accused him of war crimes, based on Russia’s abduction and deportation of thousands of Ukrainian children during the war.
The French have also suggested a staged process, perhaps with a truce regarding strikes on energy infrastructure by both sides.
For now, the fighting rages on as violently as ever.
Since Mr. Trump spoke with Mr. Putin two weeks ago, there has been no letup in Russian attacks. Dozens of Ukrainian civilians have been killed in the past two weeks, according to Ukrainian officials, as Russia continues to launch nightly drone and missile attacks.
At the same time, Ukraine has kept up its campaign targeting Russian oil and gas refineries, hoping to deepen the economic pressure on Moscow.
In one attack, drones reportedly took aim at the Ufimsky refinery plant, more than 800 miles from the nearest Ukrainian-held territory. It was not possible to immediately assess the impact of the attack.
Hopeful that America’s turn against Kyiv could do for him what his military has failed to do, Mr. Putin has stuck to his maximalist goals in public comments in recent days.
Those include a desire to take control over wide swaths of land his forces do not yet occupy and which at the current pace of the Russian military’s creeping advances it would take many years to capture.
Anatoly Kurmanaev contributed reporting from Berlin.