The visit had been advertised for weeks. Former President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines was going to a rally in Hong Kong during the second weekend in March. But as soon as it began, the trip took on a tantalizing element of intrigue: Was he ever coming back?

To many Filipinos, it appeared that Mr. Duterte was trying to outrun justice. The International Criminal Court, a sudden swirl of speculation in the Philippines posited, was about to seek his arrest, years after it started investigating the deadly antidrug campaign he had overseen as president and as mayor of Davao. By being in Hong Kong, the theory went, Mr. Duterte would remain free because China is not a member of the court.

Soon after Mr. Duterte, 79, landed in Hong Kong on March 7, the I.C.C. issued a sealed warrant for him. But wind of the move reached him.

Over that weekend in Hong Kong, his entourage — which included his partner, Honeylet Avanceña, and daughter Sara Duterte, the current vice president — debated whether to stay in Chinese territory or return home, according to two Philippine officials and a former lawmaker who spoke on the record and cited Philippines intelligence.

Salvador Panelo, his lawyer, disputed that account, saying Mr. Duterte had not even discussed seeking asylum in China. “Why would Duterte escape?” he said. “At his age, he no longer cares about what is going to happen to him.”

In public, Mr. Duterte stuck to his usual bluster. At the rally that Sunday, he told a throng of mostly Filipino women that if being arrested by the I.C.C. was his fate in life, he would accept it. His allies made pronouncements that he would be back in the Philippines that Tuesday at 4:30 p.m.

It was a bluff.

Mr. Duterte’s group had booked five flights back to Manila that day to obfuscate their actual arrival. And there was a private jet waiting at the airport for Mr. Duterte, presumably to take him on to his stronghold of Davao in the south, said Police Maj. Gen. Nicolas Torre III and Antonio Trillanes, a former senator who filed a complaint against Mr. Duterte with the I.C.C. in 2017. (Mr. Panelo, Mr. Duterte’s lawyer, denied this.)

Mr. Duterte landed around 9:30 a.m., hours before his camp had telegraphed. But he was detained soon after and, by the end of the day, shipped off to The Hague, where he is awaiting trial.

This account of that day, much of it previously unreported, is based on recollections from General Torre, Mr. Trillanes and Interior Secretary Jonvic Remulla, as well as public statements from Mr. Duterte and interviews with three of his allies.

It was perhaps the most high-profile arrest for the I.C.C. For the relatives of the tens of thousands of victims of Mr. Duterte’s drug war, it was, finally, a tangible step toward justice. And it is likely to define the presidency of the current leader, Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. Thousands of protesters have since accused Mr. Marcos of persecuting Mr. Duterte, his predecessor and onetime ally.

The gravity of the day seemed clear to Mr. Marcos. “There is no reason to be happy,” Mr. Marcos told Mr. Remulla. “We shouldn’t celebrate.”

An 80-Page Plan

Mr. Marcos was elected president in 2022, succeeding Mr. Duterte. He rose to power after forming an alliance with Sara Duterte, who won the race for vice president. Initially, he said that he would not cooperate with the I.C.C.’s investigation of Mr. Duterte’s drug war because his predecessor had withdrawn the Philippines from the court.

But relations between Mr. Marcos and Ms. Duterte soured soon, and he changed course on the I.C.C. In 2024, the Philippine Congress started an inquiry into the former president’s war on drugs. But Mr. Duterte still seemed untouchable, years after he first condoned thousands of summary executions.

Justice, many Filipinos hoped, would come from overseas. Mr. Marcos’s government was also expecting the I.C.C. to seek Mr. Duterte’s arrest. The Philippine police had prepared a secret 80-page plan called “Operation Pursuit” on how to detain Mr. Duterte. It included scenarios of arresting him in Manila or Davao, according to a copy that was viewed by The New York Times.

It also had maps of properties belonging to Mr. Duterte, his partner and his allies, with arrows labeling the nearby streets.

In The Hague, I.C.C. prosecutors applied for a warrant for Mr. Duterte on Feb. 10, accusing him of crimes against humanity. It was issued nearly four weeks later and the Philippine authorities received it via Interpol early on March 11. That cleared the way for Mr. Duterte’s detention because the Philippines was still a member of Interpol.

At about 9.30 a.m., Mr. Duterte landed in Manila on Cathay Pacific flight 907. Mr. Duterte, who often uses a cane, was waiting for his wheelchair when an official boarded the plane and told him that he would be arrested on an Interpol warrant on behalf of the I.C.C.

“You would have to kill me first, if you are going to ally with white foreigners,” he told the official.

‘My Children Will Go After You’

But Mr. Duterte did not offer much resistance and was sent on a bus with a police escort to Villamor Air Base near the airport. There he waited in the presidential lounge where he had once greeted dignitaries including former Secretary of State Michael Pompeo.

Mr. Duterte’s lawyers tried to delay the reading of his rights so that he would not be taken into custody, and his wife refused for Mr. Duterte to get a checkup by a government doctor, according to General Torre.

After the police officer formally arrested him, Mr. Duterte said: “You will retire one day, and my children will go after you.”

About 90 minutes after Mr. Duterte had landed in Manila, Mr. Marcos’s office in Malacañang Palace announced the arrest.

But Mr. Duterte continued to argue that the I.C.C. had no jurisdiction in the Philippines.

“You should prosecute me in the Philippine courts, with a Filipino judge and a Filipino prosecutor,” Mr. Duterte told General Torre and other police officers, according to a video shared by his daughter Veronica Duterte. “You know this is politics.”

The government was racing to fly Mr. Duterte on a chartered flight to the Netherlands to avoid any possible civil unrest.

Mr. Duterte’s allies tried to get the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing that his detention was illegal and unconstitutional. Their request was filed three minutes before the court closed for the day.

International Obligations

To outsiders, Mr. Duterte’s fate seemed unclear as the hours ticked by. Inside the lounge, Mr. Duterte sat on the presidential chair, the same one that Mr. Marcos uses now, and had rice and barbecued meat with a Coca-Cola.

In the meantime, the government was caught up in a bureaucratic nightmare. Officials needed to secure permission from other nations so the chartered plane could fly in their airspace en route to The Hague. Vietnam, the first country on their list, took three hours to respond. Another delay came because officials in Oman and the United Arab Emirates had shortened their working hours for Ramadan.

Mr. Duterte then asked to see Sara Duterte, the vice president, a request the authorities rejected. At around 9.40 p.m., Ms. Duterte turned up at the base, but guards turned her away. She told reporters there that her father’s arrest was a “state kidnapping.”

Inside, General Torre asked Mr. Duterte to move toward the plane. But Salvador Medialdea, Mr. Duterte’s former executive secretary, stepped between the two men, trying to physically shield the former president. General Torre then arrested Mr. Medialdea for obstruction of justice, handcuffing him personally, and sent him to the plane.

General Torre then turned to Mr. Duterte to say: “It is time. If I have to bodily carry you to the jet, I would.”

Mr. Duterte complied. His daughter Veronica and his partner, Ms. Avanceña were in tears. Mr. Duterte and Ms. Avanceña hugged. At 11:03 p.m., he was in the air, accompanied by a retinue that included two doctors, a nurse, three police officers and Mr. Medialdea.

About 15 minutes later, Mr. Marcos addressed the nation from Malacañang Palace on the banks of the Pasig River. He rejected the notion that Mr. Duterte’s arrest was political, saying, “This is what the international community expects of us as the leader of a democratic country that is part of the community of nations.”

After his speech, Mr. Marcos boarded his bulletproof boat to head back to his residence. The river was calm, and, behind him, the lights of the palace were twinkling.

Aie Balagtas See contributed reporting.

Ukraine agreed to halt strikes on energy sites

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine agreed yesterday to Russia’s offer of a mutual pause in attacks on energy targets for 30 days as a step toward a broader cease-fire.

He accepted the pause in a phone call with President Trump, who described the conversation as “very good.” Zelensky called the talk “positive, very substantive and frank,” making clear that he had thanked Trump for America’s support.

The two leaders spoke a day after Trump’s conversation with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s leader. It was the first time Trump and Zelensky had talked since their disastrous Oval Office meeting last month.

Trump also floated the idea that the U.S. could take control of Ukrainian power plants — an idea that Ukrainian energy experts said was probably unworkable. The White House said teams would meet in Saudi Arabia “in the coming days” to discuss broadening the pause to cover activity in the Black Sea, “on the way to a full cease-fire.”

What’s next: Zelensky said that the agreement would require U.S. monitoring, and that Kyiv would prepare a list of sites that needed protection. “Just the assertion and the word of Putin that he will not strike energy sites is too little,” he said. “War has made us practical people.”

Analysis: Most of what Putin agreed to on the Tuesday call with Trump was spun as a concession, but the Russian leader didn’t really give ground.

More on the Trump administration

Canada moves closer to Europe

As Canada is threatened by President Trump, talks aimed at letting it join a project to expand the E.U.’s military industry are underway. An agreement would allow Canada to help build European fighter jets and other equipment at its own industrial facilities.

The goal is to strengthen Europe’s defense industry and offer Canada a credible alternative to the U.S. market, officials said. Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, this week visited Paris and London in his first overseas trip since taking office, calling Canada “the most European of non-European countries.”

Background: Canada has been a regular U.S. contractor, and its factories produce munitions, tanks, aircraft, technological defense systems and naval ships. A review in 2022 found that the top destination of its military equipment, by far, was the U.S.

What’s next: The partnership, and the E.U. initiative, will take years to bear fruit. European defense has been falling behind because of underinvestment and U.S. dominance, a situation that became more apparent as the drive to arm Ukraine depleted E.U. members’ arsenals.

Israel seized territory in Gaza

Israeli forces pushed deeper into the Gaza Strip yesterday, seizing parts of a major corridor that divides it, in the most significant ground operation since the collapse of a fragile truce with Hamas.

Soldiers began “targeted ground activities” along the road, known as the Netzarim Corridor, to create a “partial buffer zone” in the territory between the north and south, the military said.

The operation followed wide-scale aerial bombardment in Gaza that began on Tuesday. Hamas has not responded militarily. In Jerusalem, thousands of Israeli protesters called for a renewed cease-fire.

Photos from Gaza: For two months, a cease-fire spared Palestinians the grim task of identifying bodies. Now they are back at it.

Yemen: President Trump said the Houthi militants would be “completely annihilated” by U.S. military strikes and warned Iran to “immediately” stop giving them military equipment and general support.

In Paraswara, a village in a rural corner of India, a dozen men were sworn in this month to form a local government. Half hadn’t been elected — their wives had.

The sidelining of women in rural Indian politics is nothing new, but some are starting to push back against “boss husbands.”

Lives lived: Anthony Dolan, who as Ronald Reagan’s chief speechwriter deployed the phrase “evil empire” in 1983 to describe the Soviet Union, died at 76.

CONVERSATION STARTERS

ARTS AND IDEAS

Why airline pilots don’t always seek help

In times of struggle, U.S. pilots face a high-wire calculation: stay silent, or receive the help they need and risk being formally diagnosed with a mental-health condition. Those who do may never fly again.

Troy Merritt, above, was struggling with thoughts of suicide when he eventually sought the care he needed. But taking antidepressants required a full 18 months away from his work as a pilot — and spending more than $10,000 on medical evaluations.

“Because a pilot’s work is safety-sensitive, they are held to a higher standard,” said Susan Northrup, the U.S. official flight surgeon since 2021. But the authorities may have inadvertently created a process so burdensome that it deters pilots from being honest.

A few years ago, George Lewis was driving back from performing in a comedy club when he realized he had to change his life.

He had played the same club several years earlier, also for just a few minutes and also for little more than gas money. Both times, he did what he had to do. He showed up. He made the audience laugh.

Now, though, he was a parent. He needed a more stable income, and his material felt tired. Yet the thing that filled his days — looking after his children — was a no-go for standup, older comics told him: a sure way to get pigeonholed.

“It was like: ‘Maybe when you have kids, don’t mention that you’ve got kids,’” he said, recalling their earlier advice.

“Obviously,” he continued, “now I realize it’s quite the opposite.”

In the years since that night, Mr. Lewis, now 37, has become a bard of British parenting comedy. He’s on his first tour as a headliner, and his shows keep selling out. His route to success began after the pandemic, when he began posting short online videos that gently mocked (and commiserated with) his fellow British millennial parents.

In some sketches, Mr. Lewis acts the harried grown-up. In the clip below, he’s trying to adhere to a nap schedule while driving. There’s an unseen toddler in the back who mustn’t be allowed to fall asleep. As they approach home, he gets increasingly desperate.

“Should we sing?” he asks. “Do the actions! Big energy!” he commands. Then, he tries swerving, which is more dangerous than fun.

Other times, he pretends to be a kid. In one long-running series, he stages conversations between toddlers who sound a lot like adults but who deadpan the baffling logic of two year olds. (The series, Two Toddlers Chatting, is his most popular, he said, with about 60 million views on Instagram alone.)

In one sketch, a toddler shares some real concerns. His father keeps covering his face — which makes him disappear. Then, his dad comes back, saying this odd, upsetting word.

“He was behaving so erratically,” the toddler tells his friend. “He just started shouting, ‘Peek-a-boo.’”

“‘Peek-a-boo?’” his friend replies. “Is he OK, like, mentally?”

It’s a low-budget effort, run almost entirely off his phone. He films in his kitchen, plays all the characters and edits clips between school pickups and bath time. In video after video, he unspools comedy gold about the gulf between the earnest rituals of modern parenting and the essential, eternal weirdness of a small child’s inner life.

“The more mundane and frustrating, the better the sketch that comes out,” he said. “So it really is a great way of going about your day.”

He has the timing just right: TikTok and Instagram have arguably become comedy’s biggest stage. And it’s not just videos: Several parenting and relationship podcasts took off during the pandemic and now crowd the top of British comedy lists.

“The audience has always been there,” said Sophie McCartney, a Liverpool-born comedian, who turned her “Tired and Tested” mom persona into a comedy career with a podcast, two books and live stand-up tours. But the pandemic supercharged demand and supply of parenting comedy online, she said. “We were all trapped inside of our houses with our children of varying ages, and the internet was just pure escapism.”

Celebrities come on “Parenting Hell with Rob Beckett and Josh Widdicombe” (episodes include “The Christmas Stress Tornado” and “Playdate from Hell”) to dish about life with kids.

“The reason it works is it comes from a place of ‘We’re really trying,’” said Mr. Widdicombe, a veteran of Britain’s stand-up circuit. It would be grating to listen to venting, he said. Instead, it’s precisely because they actually like being parents that their jokes land. “You can love your kids, but also think, ‘I can’t engage with playing shop for three hours without feeling like my brain is rotting,’” he added.

Mr. Lewis and Mr. Widdicombe are among the British comics riffing on millennial parenting, in which men are expected to — and want to — play more active roles at home than their fathers or grandfathers did. Many households are also juggling the particular challenges of this era: expensive child care and housing shortages, both partners working and a perfectionist approach to child rearing that can be intensified by sunshine-and-rainbows influencers and the latest “gentle parenting” edicts.

Yes, the comics say, their kids are wonderful, hilarious, the actual lights of their actual lives. But also, parenting can be isolating. And even with the best of intentions, things go wrong.

“Failure is funny,” explained Sam Avery, a British comic who has long joked about raising kids. “And parenting is 90 percent failure.”

The increasing success of the genre may also be a function of the technology itself, several British comedy critics and experts said. Online, specificity sells. The almighty algorithm sorts users by interests, so creators who stay on message get more traction. They do one thing, over and over, to delight their followers. Much like playing with a toddler.

For Mr. Lewis, the dad stuff was kind of an accident (His children — now 6, 5 and almost 2 — were not). He’d post a sketch, then wait anxiously by his phone, as likes trickled in. He does cover other subjects — like cringe-watching the surprisingly explicit movie, “Saltburn” — but his most successful work is parenting-related. Of his more than half-a-million followers on Instagram, about 80 percent are women, he said, and most are between the ages of 30 and 44. (“Quite clearly, overwhelmingly, mums!” he said.)

“Have we got parents in?” he said, opening a show in Brighton, a city on Britain’s south coast. The packed club laughed and cheered. “Yeah,” he grinned. “I thought there might be.”

“He kind of makes light the really challenging parts of parenthood,” said Hannah Worrell, a mother in her 30s who came to the show. “It makes you feel like it’s, ‘Oh, it’s not just us that go through that.’”

Mr. Lewis keeps track of ideas in disordered lists on the Notes app — a fragment of a joke, a sentence he overheard at a school pickup. He writes when his older children are at school and his toddler is asleep, a stolen hour or two around midday. Sometimes, he reminds them to be quiet while he records a few takes into his phone, often standing in the kitchen (it gets the best light).

The kids only kind of understand what he does for work.

“Tells jokes?” his daughter said, squirming in her seat once her parents had served dinner.

“What’s daddy’s job?” prodded Harriett Brettell, his wife, who is an education consultant. “Who does he try to make laugh?”

“Grown-ups?” his son asked.

But they are his inspiration.

“This is all actual research,” Ms. Brettell, 36, joked as she and her husband orbited each other in the controlled chaos of mealtime.

Minutes later, their 5-year-old daughter walked up to them with blue marker drawn on her lips like lipstick (it was not toxic, luckily). Mr. Lewis bent down, gently explaining that markers are not makeup, while Ms. Brettell wiped it off.

Maybe there would be a joke in that, too.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary pioneered many of the themes dear to conservatives in the United States, railing for years against “migration insanity,” “the woke virus” and “gender madness.”

Now Mr. Orban is engaged in an effort that veers away from the orthodox conservative view that the state should stay out of the economy: He’s trying to set the price of eggs and other goods.

Unable to curb Hungary’s inflation rate, the highest in the European Union, and facing a surge of support for a political rival, Mr. Orban last week ordered price controls on 30 basic foodstuffs. And he accused supermarkets of price gouging, particularly on eggs and butter.

Mr. Orban said the Hungarian government would starting this week force supermarkets to bring down their prices by ensuring that what they charge for essential foods does not exceed a 10 percent markup on what they cost wholesale. The current markup for eggs, he said, was an “unacceptable” 40 percent.

“Prices don’t rise, they are raised,” Mr. Orban thundered, blaming inflation on grocery stores, the biggest of which in Hungary are foreign companies like Britain’s Tesco and Austria’s Spar.

Hungary has been hailed by many American conservatives (and President Trump) as a beacon for how a country should be run. But the move by Mr. Orban underlines how he has struggled to manage the thing many Hungarians care about most: their country’s ailing economy.

Economic troubles have weakened Mr. Orban at home and abroad. The Hungarian Economic Research Institute, an independent body, reported recently that its business confidence index had “slipped to a 50-month low.”

Those troubles have badly dented Mr. Orban’s popularity ahead of an election next year that, according to some opinion polls, his governing Fidesz party could lose to an upstart opposition movement led by Peter Magyar, a former party loyalist.

Mr. Magyar has rocketed to national fame as the leader of a mass movement built on denunciations of Mr. Orban over Hungary’s “staggering cost-of-living crisis,” its faltering public services and an economic playing field tilted in favor of businesses controlled by the prime minister’s relatives and political allies.

In Budapest on Saturday, Mr. Magyar drew tens of thousands of anti-government protesters to a rally commemorating Hungary’s failed 1848 revolution, far more than attended a similar event held earlier in the day by Mr. Orban.

Mr. Magyar mocked Marton Nagy, the economy minister, for trying to dictate the price of sour cream, a Hungarian staple, by “circling numbers with a ballpoint pen to see how much the price can be cut” while Mr. Orban, his family and friends “become rich stealing your money.” The crowd roared.

Erika Lapos, a retiree who traveled more than 100 miles with her husband from their home in northeastern Hungary to attend Mr. Magyar’s rally, blamed corruption for the weak economy. “Is not just a scandal, it is a crime,” she said.

Mr. Orban had until recently largely succeeded in deflecting criticism of his economic record and corruption by blaming high prices on the war in Ukraine. He also sought to focus public attention on issues like illegal immigration and his false accusations that the European Union was trying to turn Hungarian children transgender or gay.

But the Ukraine war and migration no longer dominate voters’ concerns, said Agoston Mraz, director of the Nezopont Institute, which conducts polls for Mr. Orban’s government.

“The inflation issue is now the most important by far,” he said.

Still, eager to change the topic and rev up Mr. Orban’s conservative base, his supporters in Parliament on Tuesday amended a law on public assembly to ban gay pride parades, the latest in a series of efforts to target the country’s L.G.B.T.Q. community.

But there’s no escaping the economic realities.

Overall, Hungarian food prices in February, according to official figures released last week, were 7.1 percent higher than a year earlier, meaning that food is now more than 80 percent dearer than five years ago, according to calculations by ING Bank.

Mr. Mraz said that, according to his institute’s polling, Fidesz still had a solid lead over Mr. Magyar’s Tisza party but was vulnerable on the economy.

Economic woes have also weakened Hungary’s hand in its long struggle with the European Union over sanctions on Russia — Mr. Orban wants them removed — and a host of other issues relating to the rule of law, democracy and corruption.

Short of cash to fill a big hole in its budget, Hungary has no real chance of getting financial aid from Mr. Trump, despite their close political ties, and increasingly needs money from the European Union, which has frozen more than $20 billion earmarked for it years ago.

In a blunt warning to Mr. Orban, who has infuriated European leaders by constantly vilifying them, the European Union’s executive arm on Dec. 31 took about 1 billion euros, or about $1.1 billion, of Hungary’s frozen money off the table, saying a time limit had expired.

On Friday, after weeks of attacks on the bloc by Mr. Orban as an “empire” of “warmongers” before which his country would never bow, Hungary quietly sheathed its veto power and agreed to allow the renewal of European sanctions imposed on more than 2,400 mostly Russian individuals and entities.

Mr. Orban’s jeremiads against Brussels, said Zoltan Pogatsa, an economics professor at the University of West Hungary, play well with his nationalist political base but “don’t help pay the bills.”

Before the European Union froze the bulk of its funding, he added, “money from Brussels drove most of the growth during what Mr. Orban calls the golden years,” a period of high growth and relatively stable prices during his first decade in power before the Covid pandemic.

After slipping into recession last year, Hungary’s economy is growing again, albeit at a very slow pace. But investment, a key driver of future growth, has plummeted, Mr. Pogatsa said. And the hole in the budget — a gap criticized by the European Union last month as an “excessive deficit situation” — is likely to balloon if, as he did before the last election in 2022, Mr. Orban offers handouts to voters before the one next year.

Mr. Orban last month announced what he described as the “biggest tax reduction program in Europe,” promising to exempt mothers with two or more children from income tax and give pensioners a rebate on the value-added tax they pay on foodstuffs.

At 27 percent, Hungary has the highest such tax in the European Union, and many economists say the easiest way to reduce food prices would be to reduce it, and also a special 4.5 percent tax on retailers.

But doing that would increase the budget deficit at a time when neither the European Union nor the United States is offering cash.

The ratings agency Standard & Poor said in November that it had downgraded its outlook for Hungary to negative, largely because it “may ultimately lose out on a substantial amount of the envisaged European Union funds.”

“No matter how much anti-E.U. rhetoric he uses, Orban realizes that he still has to squeeze some juice out of Brussels,” said Lajos Bokros, a former finance minister.

He said Mr. Orban viewed inflation and other problems entirely through a political lens. “His government created inflation with its loose spending,” he said, “but lies to voters that it was imported from outside” — by supermarket chains, most of which are foreign-owned, and by higher energy prices because of the war in Ukraine.

Sensing political danger ahead, Mr. Orban responded swiftly to the release of official data showing that Hungary’s year-on-year inflation rate had risen in February to 5.6 percent.

“We will put an end to excessive and unjustified price increases,” he said. He did not specify how this would be done, but Hungary’s state statistics office on Wednesday said that Mr. Orban’s intervention had already lowered egg prices by nearly 20 percent.

Geza Sebestyen, the head of the Center for Economic Policy at Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a conservative government-affiliated university, said Mr. Orban was unlikely to send inspectors to punish shopkeepers who hadn’t lowered prices. “Socialism obviously doesn’t work,” he said, “and Eastern Europe knows that better than anyone.”

But Peter Brod, a former governor of Hungary’s central bank, fears Mr. Orban is reaching for communist-era tools in what is supposed to be a free market.

“Instead of goulash communism,” he said, referring to the country’s idiosyncratic reworking of Soviet-imposed socialism in the 1960s and ’70s, “we got goulash capitalism.”

A North Dakota jury on Wednesday awarded damages totaling more than $660 million to the Texas-based pipeline company Energy Transfer, which had sued Greenpeace over its role in protests nearly a decade ago against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

The verdict was a major blow to the environmental organization. Greenpeace had said that Energy Transfer’s claimed damages, in the range of $300 million, would be enough to put the group out of business in the United States. The jury on Wednesday awarded far more than that.

Greenpeace said it would appeal. The group has maintained that it played only a minor part in demonstrations led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. It has portrayed the lawsuit as an attempt to stifle oil-industry critics.

The nine-person jury in the Morton County courthouse in Mandan, N.D., about 45 minutes north of where the protests took place, returned the verdict after roughly two days of deliberations.

It took about a half-hour simply to read out the long list of questions posed to the jurors, such as whether they found that Greenpeace had committed trespass, defamation and conspiracy, among other violations, and how much money they would award for each offense.

Afterward, outside the courthouse in Mandan, both sides invoked the right to free speech, but in very different ways.

“We should all be concerned about the attacks on our First Amendment, and lawsuits like this that really threaten our rights to peaceful protest and free speech,” said Deepa Padmanabha, a senior legal adviser for Greenpeace USA.

Just moments before, Trey Cox of the firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, the lead lawyer for Energy Transfer, had called the verdict “a powerful affirmation” of the First Amendment. “Peaceful protest is an inherent American right,” he said. “However, violent and destructive protest is unlawful and unacceptable.”

Earlier in the week, during closing arguments on Monday, Energy Transfer’s co-founder and board chairman, Kelcy Warren, an ally and donor to President Trump, had the last word for the plaintiffs when his lawyers played a recording of comments he made in a video deposition for the jurors. “We’ve got to stand up for ourselves,” Mr. Warren said, arguing that protesters had created “a total false narrative” about his company. “It was time to fight back.”

Energy Transfer is one of the largest pipeline companies in the country. The protests over its construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline drew national attention and thousands of people to monthslong encampments in 2016 and 2017.

The demonstrators gathered on and around the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, arguing that the pipeline cut through sacred land and could endanger the local water supply. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe sued to stop the project, and members of other tribes, environmentalists and celebrities were among the many who flocked to the rural area, including two figures who are now members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.

But the protests erupted into acts of vandalism and violence at times, alienating people in the surrounding community in the Bismarck-Mandan area.

Greenpeace has long argued that the lawsuit was a threat to First Amendment rights, brought by a deep-pocketed plaintiff and carrying dangerous implications for organizations that speak out about a broad range of issues. Greenpeace has called the lawsuit a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or SLAPP suit, the term for cases meant to hinder free speech by raising the risk of expensive legal battles. Many states have laws that make it difficult to pursue such cases, though not North Dakota.

Mr. Cox laced into Greenpeace during closing arguments on Monday. The company accused Greenpeace of funding and supporting attacks and protests that delayed the pipeline’s construction, raised costs and harmed Energy Transfer’s reputation.

Jurors, Mr. Cox said, would have the “privilege” of telling the group that its actions were “unacceptable to the American way.” He laid out costs incurred that tallied up to about $340 million and asked for punitive damages on top of that.

“Greenpeace took a small, disorganized, local issue and exploited it to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline and promote its own selfish agenda,” he said. “They thought they’d never get caught.”

The 1,172-mile underground pipeline has been operating since 2017 but is awaiting final permits for a small section where it crosses federal territory underneath Lake Oahe on the Missouri River, near Standing Rock. The tribe is still trying to shut down the pipeline in a different lawsuit.

Lawyers for Greenpeace called the case against the group a “ridiculous” attempt to pin blame on it for everything that happened during months of raucous protests, including federal-government delays in issuing permits.

Three Greenpeace entities were named in the lawsuit: Greenpeace Inc., Greenpeace Fund and Greenpeace International. Greenpeace Inc. is the arm of the group that organizes public campaigns and protests. It is based in Washington, as is Greenpeace Fund, which raises money and awards grants.

The third entity named in the lawsuit, Greenpeace International, based in Amsterdam, is the coordinating body for 25 independent Greenpeace groups around the world.

It was principally the actions of Greenpeace Inc. that were at the heart of the trial, which began Feb. 24. They included training people in protest tactics, dispatching its “rolling sunlight” solar-panel truck to provide power, and offering funds and other supplies. Greenpeace International maintained that its only involvement was signing a letter to banks expressing opposition to the pipeline, a document that was signed by hundreds and that had been drafted by a Dutch organization. Greenpeace Fund said it had no involvement.

On Wednesday, the jurors found Greenpeace Inc. liable for the vast majority of the damages awarded, which came to more than $660 million, according to representatives for both Greenpeace and Energy Transfer. The damages cover dozens of figures that were read out in court for each defendant on each claim.

Separately, Greenpeace International this year had countersued Energy Transfer in the Netherlands, invoking a new European Union directive against SLAPP suits as well as Dutch law.

During closing arguments on Monday in North Dakota, Everett Jack Jr. of the firm Davis Wright Tremaine, the lead lawyer for the Greenpeace Inc., was a study in contrast with Mr. Cox. Both men wore dark suits and red ties to make their final arguments before the jury. But their demeanors were polar opposites.

Mr. Cox was energetic, indignant, even wheeling out a cart stacked with boxes of evidence during his rebuttal to argue that he had proved his case. Mr. Jack was calm and measured, recounting the chronology of how the protests developed to make the case that they had swelled well before Greenpeace got involved.

Given the months of disruptions caused locally by the protests, the jury pool in the area was widely expected to favor Energy Transfer.

Among the observers in the courtroom were a group of lawyers calling themselves the Trial Monitoring Committee who criticized the court for denying a Greenpeace petition to move the trial to the bigger city of Fargo, which was not as affected by the protests. The group included Martin Garbus, a prominent First Amendment lawyer, and Steven Donziger, who is well-known for his yearslong legal battle with Chevron over pollution in Ecuador.

After the verdict, Mr. Garbus called it “the worst First Amendment case decision I have ever seen” and expressed concern that an appeal that reached the Supreme Court could be used to overturn decades of precedent around free-speech protections.

The group also took issue with the number of jurors with ties to the oil industry or who had expressed negative views of protests during jury selection. But Suja A. Thomas, a law professor at the University of Illinois and an expert on juries, said the precedent in North Dakota courts was not to use “blanket disqualifications of jurors just because they might have some kind of interest,” whether it’s financial or based on experience or opinion.

Rather, the judge has to determine whether each individual juror can be impartial. “There can be interest; they have to determine whether the interest is significant enough such that the person cannot be fair,” Ms. Thomas said.

Natali Segovia is the executive director of Water Protector Legal Collective, an Indigenous-led legal and advocacy nonprofit group that grew out of the Standing Rock protests. Ms. Segovia, who is also a member of the trial monitoring group, said her organization was involved with about 800 criminal cases that resulted from the protests. The vast majority have been dismissed, she said.

What had gotten lost during the Greenpeace trial, she said, was the concern about water that had spurred so much protest. She said she saw a larger dynamic at play. “At its core, it’s a proxy war against Indigenous sovereignty using an international environmental organization,” she said.