Israel ground forces pushed deeper into the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, taking over parts of a major corridor that bisects the Palestinian enclave, in the most significant ground operation since the collapse of the cease-fire with Hamas.

The operation followed wide-scale Israeli aerial bombardment in Gaza that began early on Tuesday morning, ending the fragile truce between Israel and Hamas that had held since mid-January. More than 400 people were killed, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

The Israeli military said soldiers had begun “targeted ground activities” along the road — known as the Netzarim Corridor — to create a “partial buffer zone” between northern and southern Gaza. Israeli forces had widened their control “to the center of the Netzarim Corridor,” the military said.

Israel has not returned to full-scale war in Gaza that would match the intensity of its 15-month aerial bombardment and ground invasion. But by gradually stepping up attacks, Israeli leaders appeared to be trying to force Hamas to come to more favorable terms for a settlement.

In a televised address, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, vowed that Israel would negotiate only alongside attacks on Hamas. He said the latest wave of airstrikes was “just the beginning.”

“From now on, Israel will act against Hamas with increasing might,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a televised statement. “And from now on, negotiations will only take place under fire.”

During the 15-month campaign against Hamas, Israeli forces captured and fortified the area around the Netzarim Corridor, which cuts the enclave roughly in half. Control of the road enabled the Israeli military to prevent hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians from returning to their homes in northern Gaza.

Israeli troops gradually withdrew from Netzarim after the truce with Hamas went into effect in mid-January. Palestinians returned home en masse in emotional scenes, often finding little but rubble where their homes and neighborhoods once stood.

President Trump fueled new speculation this week about a meeting with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, when he told reporters that Washington needed to be cleaned up to prepare for a summit between the two leaders in the “not too distant future.”

Mr. Trump provided no details, and China has said nothing publicly about any such meeting. The stakes of a visit would be high: Mr. Trump has imposed 20 percent tariffs on China’s shipments to the United States and may order another round next month. China wants to try to head off further escalations in the trade war that would set back its efforts to revive the country’s beleaguered economy, experts say.

But before any summit can take place, China still needs answers to two pressing questions: What does Mr. Trump want? Who can Beijing talk to in Washington whom Mr. Trump might listen to?

To try to answer these questions, China sent scholars to the United States to take part in unofficial diplomatic talks last month with Trump administration officials and American foreign policy experts. China has grown concerned that the officials Beijing has been dealing with at the State Department and the National Security Council, who are outside Mr. Trump’s inner circle, are not conveying their messages to him, some of the scholars said.

“We talk through the diplomatic channel,” said Da Wei, the director of the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University in Beijing, who was among the scholars. “That’s the normal channel. But can that reach President Trump? Do those people we talked to really know what President Trump is thinking?”

China has also been publicly signaling its interest in talks. The Chinese commerce minister said this month that he wrote a letter to the U.S. commerce secretary and U.S. trade representative inviting them to meet. And Chinese officials describing Beijing’s efforts to curtail the production of fentanyl last week urged the United States to return to dialogue.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi held a phone call days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January, but high-level communication between China and the United States has been limited ever since. China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke in late January, and Vice Premier He Lifeng talked to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent late last month.

Beijing wants to know what Mr. Trump wants from China in a potential trade deal as well as how he might respond to China’s wish list. China probably wants Mr. Trump to lift the tariffs; loosen restrictions on U.S. technology exports and Chinese investment in the United States; and offer assurances that he will not provoke Beijing over Taiwan, the self-governed island claimed by China.

At the same time, China has been trying to hold firm against the Trump administration. Beijing responded to the tariffs with countermeasures like levies on U.S. agricultural imports that are calibrated to exact some pain, but also leave the door open for future trade negotiations. A Chinese official said Beijing would “fight to the end” in a “tariff war, trade war or any other war” with the United States.

But China also thinks a high-level meeting needs to take place before Mr. Trump has an opportunity to impose more tariffs on Chinese goods, analysts said. Such a move would raise tensions between the two sides to the point where Mr. Xi would look weak for agreeing to come to the table.

“The challenge is, can we move quickly enough before the window of opportunity is closed?” Mr. Da said. “When you see these negative signals sent out without any positive agenda to offset them,” he continued, then “bilateral relations could sour.”

China may see the lack of urgency from the U.S. side for high-level talks as reflecting an effort by Mr. Rubio and Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, to stonewall China. (Both are considered hawks on China.)

“Rubio is not in the mood to do anything” in terms of talks because he considers China a threat, said Wang Dong, executive director of the Institute for Global Cooperation and Understanding at Peking University.

The next month will be critical for U.S.-China relations, analysts say. Mr. Trump may impose a third round of tariffs on Chinese goods unless there are serious talks between senior officials, said Wu Xinbo, the dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, who also attended back-channel talks in the United States last month.

“My impression is that at the moment there is no substantive contact, let alone negotiations” between the two governments, Mr. Wu said.

Mr. Trump’s blunt-force approach to diplomacy, as it were, is a challenge for China’s officials. The American leader has shown a willingness to use economic coercion and strong-arm tactics even on his country’s allies. He considers unpredictability to be his signature weapon. Chinese officials are often focused on protocol, on maintaining control and on ironing out details before summits to avoid surprises or loss of face.

Mr. Trump’s comment on Monday about a visit by Mr. Xi to Washington was probably more an indication of Mr. Trump’s interest in a meeting with the Chinese leader rather than a reflection of any summit that is actually in the works, said Evan Medeiros, a professor of Asian studies at Georgetown University who served as an Asia adviser to President Barack Obama.

China is likely to want Mr. Trump to come to Beijing, rather than have Mr. Xi travel to the United States, as a matter of pride, Mr. Medeiros said.

Trump officials appear to be concerned that any first moves by Mr. Trump to engage the Chinese or visit Beijing would reward China before officials have made any moves to benefit the United States and could lock the United States into a cycle of drawn out and unproductive negotiations that characterized previous administrations. U.S. officials may also want to put a firmer agenda around any such meeting, to prevent Mr. Trump from impulsively striking a deal with Mr. Xi that could compromise U.S. interests, analysts said.

In the absence of official meetings between the governments, other figures are stepping up to pitch themselves as emissaries. Senator Steve Daines of Montana, who will be visiting China this week to attend a business forum, said on Tuesday on Fox News that he would be “talking with the Chinese leadership about what they can do” about fentanyl. He will also discuss the purchases by China of more American planes, beef, wheat and other products. China has not commented on any meetings with Mr. Daines.

The tougher question for China is what deal, if any, can be made between the countries. Trump administration officials may want China to buy more from the United States, but the challenge is that America doesn’t have that much to sell, from China’s perspective, said Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington.

The United States refuses to sell high-tech products to China, and some officials regard Chinese investment as a threat. China has said any deal would be acceptable only if it is in line with market principles, meaning the United States can’t simply sell China products at a much higher price to meet a target.

For now, Mr. Trump may be biding his time to build leverage in a future negotiation with China, Ms. Sun said, dealing with other trading partners while letting the Chinese “stew in their own juice at the same time.”

Ana Swanson contributed reporting from Washington.

On Tuesday night, outside the Rome hospital where Pope Francis is being treated for a complex lung infection, the 8th King of Rome, a self-described “trash influencer” embarked on a secret mission. He wore a wig, hid his pink-and-blue-dyed beard behind a surgical mask and then ventured inside the hospital to show his followers what he thought was the truth: that the pope was not actually there.

The 8th King of Rome, a former funeral home worker whose real name is Simone Basile, is one of many Italians who have flooded social media, telegram channels and WhatsApp chats with unsubstantiated claims that Francis has in fact died and that the papal deep state is hiding the news.

Roman Catholic cardinals have issued calls to “free ourselves from much fake news” on the pope’s health and blamed anti-Francis forces for the circulation of false information. Vatican officials said they were privately discussing the reports as the misinformation traveled from the internet to bar counters, locker rooms and the officials’ own smartphones.

“They say we, the Roman Curia, keep Francis frozen so that we can do our scheming,” said Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi.

The chatter seems impervious to the new, more forthcoming communication strategy of the Vatican. The church has broken from its long tradition of secrecy and obfuscation on matters relating to the health of popes by issuing daily, granular updates on Francis’ condition. Some have included graphic detail, such as the pope inhaling on his own vomit.

To online skeptics, that has not been enough. It does not seem to matter that the Vatican said that Francis had improved, and posted a photo and an audio recording of his voice. The church’s reputation as a den of intrigue, coupled with an age in which nothing is taken at face value, has let conspiracy theories run wild.

“It’s the first time, Cardinal Ravasi said, that they are saying the raw truth about the pope’s condition.” Still, he added, “It doesn’t work.”

He said that even reputable reporters were inquiring about unfounded rumors. One found him in St. Peter’s square, the cardinal said, and asked if he had seen Francis being taken back to his residency to die.

“It’s a toxic atmosphere,” Cardinal Ravasi said.

Often the talk of machinations involving the Holy Father has come from unorthodox sources.

“He is really dead,” Fabrizio Corona, an Italian celebrity paparazzo involved with many of the country’s sordid scandals, said onstage outside a shopping mall in Italy’s northern Emilia-Romagna region. He offered no evidence for the claim, and he dismissed the material put out by the Vatican.

“The audio is fake,” he said. “It’s done with artificial intelligence.”

It is unclear how many Italians have been taking the spurious claims seriously, but there’s no doubt there are a lot of false reports. Cyabra, a social media intelligence company in Tel Aviv that monitors disinformation, said that of a sample of over 3,600 accounts posting about Pope Francis’ health that it looked at, about a third were fake.

“It becomes worrying and incredibly alarming,” said Rafi Mendelsohn, a spokesman for the company.

The death of a pope, Mr. Mendelsohn noted, is an emotional topic that can trigger strong reactions. “It’s really ripe as a topic, if your objective is to create chaos and create distrust and spread confusion,” he said.

The Catholic Church, ideologically divided as it is between Francis’ supporters and his critics on the right, is no stranger to machinations and conspiracy theories.

In 2020, the American Cardinal Raymond Burke, a vocal critic of the pope, repeated a conspiracy theory that Covid vaccines were being used to implant microchips “under the skin of every person, so that at any moment, he or she can be controlled.”

And while social media has offered a megaphone to spread it, rumor has long run rampant inside and outside Vatican walls. A Vatican official said that he had come across a theory that Pope Paul VI, during his pontificate in the 1960s and 70s, had been shut in the basement of the Vatican and replaced by a look-alike.

Now, obscure social media accounts claim that the photo of Francis the Vatican shared on Sunday was old, or generated by A.I. A former member of the European Parliament questioned Francis’ supposed “tan” in the photo.

The Gemelli hospital, where Francis is being treated, has become a new TikTok destination. Mr. Basile has already gone three times, the videos of his visits gathering millions of views. Another influencer, who goes by Er Bombolino and has a tattoo of Francis’ face on his forearm, also made a trip.

“I want to know if the pope is dead or alive!” he said before peering through a hospital window and asking, “Is the pope dead?”

Nicola Cerbino, a spokesman for the hospital, said that the influencers “are going to places that have absolutely nothing to do” with Francis’ ward. The pope’s private apartment, he said, was “impregnable.”

But the 8th King of Rome was not buying it.

“I did not find him,” he said as he left the hospital on Tuesday. “It’s an unmistakable sign that he is no longer.”

When the Kremlin released its summary of President Vladimir V. Putin’s call Tuesday with President Trump, one thing was unmistakable: The Russian leader hadn’t retreated from his maximalist aims in Ukraine and so far has conceded little.

Much of what Mr. Putin agreed to during the call — including a limited 30-day halt on energy infrastructure strikes by both sides, a prisoner exchange and talks about security in the Black Sea — was spun as a concession to Mr. Trump in the respective summaries of the conversation released by Moscow and Washington.

But all were goals that the Kremlin has pursued and seen as advantageous in the past. Russia and Ukraine previously reached a tacit mutual agreement to refrain from energy infrastructure strikes, which have caused pain for both Moscow and Kyiv. Russia has long conducted prisoner exchanges with Ukraine, seeing the repatriation of its soldiers as a key Kremlin interest. And uninterrupted trading in the Black Sea is critical to Russia’s economy.

The lack of clear concessions on the Russian side stoked fears among Ukraine’s backers that Mr. Putin was playing for time, hewing to his staunch demands while hoping, in the meantime, that Washington’s tattered relationship with Kyiv fully breaks or that Ukrainian forces face a battlefield collapse.

Mr. Putin’s demands on Ukraine appeared unchanged. During the call, according to the Kremlin, Mr. Putin reiterated requirements for a comprehensive 30-day cease-fire that he knows are nonstarters for Ukraine. According to the Kremlin, he claimed that the Ukrainians had sabotaged and violated agreements in the past, and accused Ukraine of committing “barbaric terrorist crimes” in the Kursk region of Russia.

By Wednesday, the Kremlin was already accusing Kyiv of violating the limited cease-fire on energy infrastructure, even though President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine had yet to be briefed by Washington on the call or formally agree to the deal.

During Tuesday’s call, the Kremlin said, Mr. Putin also identified his “key condition” for settling the conflict more broadly: a complete cessation of outside military and intelligence support for Kyiv. Such an outcome, analysts say, would make Ukraine, a country far smaller than Russia, permanently hostage to Moscow’s overwhelming military superiority and forever stranded within the Kremlin’s orbit, without any counterbalancing backers.

The Kremlin may be hoping that during the course of negotiations, an already impatient Washington walks away from Ukraine for good, freeing Mr. Putin to continue his war while also separately re-establishing relations with the United States. Russia may also be counting on the possibility that Kyiv, facing an increasingly dire picture on the battlefield and the loss of its biggest backer, ultimately agrees to an erosion of its sovereignty that benefits the Kremlin.

“The best outcome for Putin is one where he accomplishes his aims in Ukraine and can normalize relations with the U.S.,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a former U.S. intelligence official who is now an analyst at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank in Washington. “So Putin wants to string Trump along to give him just enough to see if he can accomplish that.”

Ms. Kendall-Taylor added that Mr. Putin will feel he has little to lose, believing that Mr. Trump, who has made no secret of his dim view of Ukraine and of Washington’s European allies, “won’t be willing to really ramp up pressure on Russia or recommit to Europe.”

“There is a lot of incentive for the Russians to participate, to play along and look for every opportunity to use this construct to their maximum advantage,” Ms. Kendall-Taylor said.

Mr. Putin also has significant advantages on the battlefield. His forces are winning back territory. Ukraine’s biggest and most important supporter, the United States, is openly itching to abandon Kyiv, as well as Europe more broadly. Europe, suddenly realizing its peril without U.S. backing, has been caught flat-footed and is now scrambling to figure out how to secure its own defense — let alone that of Ukraine.

“In Russian diplomatic functioning, negotiations often are just tools of winning time and depriving the adversary of its balance,” said Andras Racz, a senior research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Mr. Racz said that Washington’s stated desire to reach a quick resolution to the conflict confers a certain advantage to Moscow, which is “not in a hurry.”

He held out the possibility that the Trump administration, faced with Mr. Putin’s refusal to cede ground on Ukraine, could begin applying pressure on Russia. Mr. Trump has made such threats in the past.

The White House could also offer Mr. Putin more.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Washington’s power in Europe grew significantly, with many of the countries that once answered to Moscow joining NATO and ultimately the West. Mr. Putin has never accepted that outcome, making him eager to hold broader discussions on European security with the Trump administration. His apparent hope is that Washington will not only agree to an arrangement that places Ukraine in Russia’s orbit but also will concede a broader curtailment of U.S. influence on the continent. Washington’s ability to grant those broader wishes gives the White House some measure of leverage, even if previous administrations ruled them out as impossible.

“Trump has few options to counter either a Russian rejection or protracted feigned compliance,” wrote Alexander Baunov, a Russian author and political analyst. “The most effective method will be the carrot rather than the stick: the temptation of a major deal.”

Russia, while giving little on Ukraine, has begun trying to lure Washington with the fruits of a rapprochement. Russian officials have been touting their vast reserves of rare earth metals, saying they would be happy to exploit them with American companies, and holding out possible deals for American investors in the Russian energy sector.

Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump spent part of the discussion on Tuesday talking about what the Kremlin called “a wide range of areas in which our countries could establish interaction,” including ideas about cooperation in the energy sector. The Russian leader, according to the Kremlin, secured Mr. Trump’s agreement to hold hockey tournaments with Russian and American professional players facing off against one another.

Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said that the Kremlin would be hoping to get the United States to restore ties without predicating renewed relations on an end to the fighting in Ukraine. That’s why, he added, the Kremlin is front-loading the discussion with all the potential benefits for the United States from a renewed relationship with Russia.

“The impression is that they have a very, very, very good reading of Trump,” Mr. Gabuev said of the Kremlin. “They know where the weak spots are, they know how to massage his ego. To me, the Russian team is winning at this point.”

From Brussels to Berlin, leaders across Europe are getting ready to spend hundreds of billions to rebuild their armies. The spending, they say, is necessary to prepare Europe for the dangers of a world where the United States no longer guarantees its security.

But many of them are also hoping that the surge of money will have another important effect: revitalizing the continent’s slumping industrial sector and opening a new front for economic growth.

That connection between defense investment and competitiveness is one of the topics European leaders are likely to discuss when they meet in Brussels on Thursday, after the European Commission publishes a long-awaited paper on the future of European defense on Wednesday.

“Economic strength and Europe’s plan to rearm are two sides of the same coin,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said in a recent speech, calling the potential investments a “powerful tailwind for important industries.”

But whether that will be the case is far from certain, and the challenges to Europe actually making it happen are enormous.

While there is a growing consensus that new military spending is likely to offer some boost to European economies in the near term, just how much will depend on how well that money is spent and where.

Most European economies have relatively modest defense industries, though France and Germany in particular are seeking to grow theirs. For decades, Europe has depended significantly on imports of American arms and equipment, particularly when it comes to the most sophisticated weapons. That makes the continent not particularly well suited to absorb new military spending immediately.

But European leaders are keen to change that, in order to keep tighter control over their own security, and to best reap the economic impact from that investment.

President Emmanuel Macron of France is pushing allies, including Germany, to buy French missile-defense systems instead of American ones. Portugal’s defense minister said last week that the country might replace aging fighter jets with European ones, not American-made F-35s, citing concerns over the Trump administration’s embrace of Russia.

The European Union’s recently unveiled 150 billion euro loan program — meant to finance shared military development — will prioritize European-made products, officials announced on Wednesday. Members states must ensure that 65 percent of the costs of what they buy comes either from within the E.U. or from partners including Ukraine and Norway.

But building out Europe’s modest military industries to meet those ambitions will take time.

Friedrich Merz, Germany’s likely incoming chancellor, laid out the challenges to lawmakers on Tuesday, before Germany’s lower house of parliament voted to loosen constitutional limits on debt to allow more billions more in spending to revamp the country’s military. The measures must now pass the upper chamber and survive legal challenges before becoming law.

“Now we need to rebuild defense capabilities, in part from scratch, with a technology-driven defense and procurement strategy, with automated systems, with independent European satellite surveillance, with armed drones and with many modern defense systems and, above all, with reliable and predictable orders that should go to European manufacturers whenever possible,” Mr. Merz said.

European nations have increased spending on defense by nearly a third since 2021. But even combined, their annual military budgets remain less than half of the United States’. Defense industries employed just under 600,000 Europeans last year. By comparison, automobile manufacturers alone employed more than 3 million.

In some cases, like tanks and missile batteries, Europe will need to scale up existing industries or repurpose other industrial production lines. In others — including drone technology and some of the most cutting-edge weapons and military support equipment — Europe will need to quickly build its own rivals to compete with American players. Defense officials caution it could take years to pull that off, if not a decade.

And there is a risk that when European nations buy close to home, they will want to buy domestically rather than from Germany or France — duplicating efforts across the bloc. Europe already has some redundancy problems in defense. Ukraine, for example, has been sent at least 17 different kinds of howitzers, not all of which use the same type of shell.

If Europe’s new spending ends up being duplicative, both the economic and strategic benefits could be muted.

That is why some economists caution that the economic lift, while likely, might not be enough to buffer European governments against the populist backlash they have faced in recent years.

But if the E.U. can add new industries with coordinated investment and purchasing, then the growth effects could be significant.

They might even be enough to help aging European countries temper a downward spiral of shrinking workforces and plunging investment, spurring new technologies that would spill over into civilian sectors and providing a more lasting benefit.

Much depends on how the new spending plans play out.

The philosophy, at the moment, appears to start with spending big — and staying close to home. In Brussels, European Union officials have made clear that they want to build up defense production abilities across their 27-member block. To catalyze investment, they have pitched a 150 billion euro loan program.

They have also proposed loosening European fiscal rules so that individual nations will be able to spend more, which they estimate could unleash as much at 650 billion euros, more than $710 billion, in additional spending. Whether that much spending actually happens will hinge on whether national governments are willing to take on more debt for military spending.

Even with the challenges of buying local, many economists think that European growth as a whole will see some benefit from the defense buildup. Goldman Sachs estimated a modest bump in the eurozone in each of the next three years, with the largest benefit in 2027.

The Goldman economists upgraded their growth estimates in part because of the German plan to ease debt limits. But others tempered expectations.

The German military spending plan “is really about security,” said Clemens Fuest, an economist who is the president of the ifo Institute in Munich, and who helped advise Mr. Merz.

“It’s good for the country because we want to avoid war in Europe,” Mr. Fuest said in an interview. But, he added, “It’s not good in terms of, ‘It’s going to create more growth,’ or anything.”

Still, at a time when German automakers and their suppliers have shed some 46,000 jobs since 2019, some Germans wonder if it may be time to turn idled automotive factories into cutting-edge plants for tanks or drones.

The German arms maker Rheinmetall has already taken a lead role in scaling up the country’s weapons-production capacities. It has provided new jobs to dozens of workers from one of Germany’s struggling auto suppliers, Continental AG. It has also been in talks with Volkswagen about the possibility of taking over an underperforming factory near Osnabrück.

“If German taxpayer money is being spent, then we need to create German jobs,” Armin Papperger, Rheinmetall’s chief executive, told reporters last week, adding that he expected Rheinmetall alone to add 10,000 jobs in Germany over the next two years.

That growth may be felt beyond Germany, too. Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, Rheinmetall has built new factories in Spain, Lithuania and Romania, growing into the one of the largest munitions producers in the West.

Every new factory creates 500 to 1,000 new jobs directly, and several thousand more in the surrounding area, Mr. Papperger said.

And even though France has limited room to borrow to scale up its own spending, it, too, could benefit from higher military outlays in the rest of the region, Goldman Sachs economists say. It hosts the largest military in the E.U. and is a major arms exporter.

Vicky Redwood, an economic adviser at Capital Economics, wrote in a March 13 analysis that in general, increasing military spending by 1 percent of G.D.P. would lift growth by around 0.5 percent. Outside of Germany, she wrote, a “reasonable” estimate is that European nations will raise their military spending by between 0.5 and 1.5 percent as a share of output.

But several factors could affect how much military expenditure boosts growth, she wrote. Those include how much of the spending goes toward research and development and how efficiently the spending is done. Nothing is certain.

Apart from Reinmetall, “the others are rather smaller players,” said Marcel Fratzscher, president of the German Institute for Economic Research. “I have doubts that this will be the future of Germany’s comparative advantage, changing from building cars to building tanks.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that he expected to speak with President Trump later on Wednesday to “discuss the details of the next steps” after the American leader’s call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

The Kremlin said that in a call with President Trump on Tuesday, Mr. Putin had agreed to a limited cease-fire that would halt attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure. The proposal fell short of a 30-day unconditional truce that Kyiv had agreed to at Washington’s urging.

On Wednesday, Mr. Zelensky appeared open to the latest offer of a limited cease-fire, but said he thought that such a truce would need U.S. monitoring to work.

“If the Russians do not strike our facilities, we will definitely not strike theirs,” Mr. Zelensky told a news conference in Helsinki alongside Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb.

Underscoring the lack of trust between Ukraine and Russia, the two countries traded accusations on Wednesday about attacks against each others’ energy infrastructure.

Mr. Zelensky has characterized some of the conditions Mr. Putin has set for a broader cease-fire — such as a demand for a complete cessation of foreign military and intelligence aid to Ukraine — as an attempt to stall for time so that Russia can improve its forces’ positions on the battlefield and its negotiating hand.

The Ukrainian president reiterated that point on Tuesday night after the call between Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump, saying that it was clear Russia was “not ready to end this war.”

“They are not even prepared to take the first step toward a cease-fire because they will continue to impose additional conditions,” he said.

The 30-day cease-fire proposal that Ukraine had agreed to after talks with U.S. officials in Saudi Arabia was more extensive. It would have applied to land, air and sea — the first cessation of hostilities since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than three years ago. That monthlong truce, Mr. Zelensky has said, was meant to give time for fuller negotiations about a longer-term peace.

Anastasia Kuznietsova contributed reporting.