The arrest warrant was delivered to President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. of the Philippines in Manila at 3 a.m. Monday. The person named on it: his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, the firebrand whose war on drugs left thousands of people dead.

But acting on the warrant from the International Criminal Court was not straightforward, since the Philippines is not a member of the court. So at 6:30 a.m., Mr. Marcos’s government received another warrant for Mr. Duterte, this time from Interpol, which was acting on the court’s behalf and of which the Philippines is a member.

Mr. Marcos recalled his next step in an address to the nation on Tuesday. “OK, we’ll put all our plans into place, and let’s proceed as we had discussed,” he relayed having told the head of his justice department.

Just over 24 hours later, Mr. Duterte — who long seemed above the law — was arrested in Manila. By the end of Tuesday, he had been put on a plane bound for The Hague to face charges of crimes against humanity.

It was a swift coda to a long chapter of impunity in the Philippines. Only a handful of people have been convicted in connection with the killings in Mr. Duterte’s drug war, in which as many as 30,000 are estimated to have died. Now, the man who publicly took credit for the carnage was being sent to a court of law to face justice, in part because of a shift in political winds.

Mr. Marcos, the son of the dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos, rose to power after forming an alliance with Sara Duterte, a daughter of Mr. Duterte’s. Running on a platform of national unity, they won the presidency and vice presidency in 2022. But their marriage of convenience started unraveling quickly, driven by mistrust.

Ms. Duterte, who is leading in the polls to succeed Mr. Marcos, has railed against him, saying that she wanted to cut his head off and threatening to dig up his father’s body and throw it into the ocean. Her own father called the younger Mr. Marcos a “drug addict” and a “weak leader.”

Mr. Marcos mostly brushed off the comments and said little in public. But his allies impeached Ms. Duterte last month, imperiling her political career.

Then came the arrest of her father, which she and her allies denounced as political oppression, although Mr. Marcos said he had simply been following international convention in complying with the Interpol warrant.

“This was justice, regardless of how we got here,” said Maria Ressa, the Nobel Prize-winning journalist who has long been a target of Mr. Duterte because her news website, Rappler, has investigated the drug war.

“Now, is there politics involved? There is always politics involved,” she added. “But it’s a reminder to the rest of the world that accountability comes for you sooner or later and that impunity doesn’t last forever.”

It was still hard for some Filipinos to believe that such a moment had arrived.

Florecita Perez and Joemarie Claverio’s son, Jenel Claverio, 27, was killed by masked men in Navotas in December 2019. This week, Ms. Perez said in an interview, she pumped her first in the air when she heard about Mr. Duterte’s arrest, but waited until nighttime to tell her partner, because she thought the news would make him cry.

As they were about to sleep, she hugged him from behind. “I said, ‘Hon, Duterte has been arrested.’ He turned to me and said, ‘Oh? Won’t he be able to get away?’”

Mr. Duterte landed in the Netherlands on Wednesday evening, and he was to be taken to The Hague, where both the I.C.C. and its detention facilities are based. A court official said that Mr. Duterte would not be expected to appear in court on Wednesday, but he would likely be arraigned before a three-judge panel in the next few days.

The I.C.C. typically has lengthy pretrial proceedings, and a planned trial is not expected to start for months.

Ms. Duterte was also on her way to The Hague, to help organize her father’s legal team. Another daughter of the former leader’s, Veronica Duterte, posted screen grabs of video calls with their father while he was on the plane. In one Instagram post, she wrote: “A flight lasting more than eight hours but left with just a sandwich to eat???”

But thousands of people rejoiced when the chartered flight carrying Mr. Duterte took off from an air base in Manila. To some, it was reminiscent of when Mr. Marcos’s father was ousted nearly four decades ago and fled to the United States.

“It’s not quite what it must have been like for my parents on Feb. 25 with those headlines in the newspaper, saying: ‘It’s all over, Marcos leaves,’ but it felt pretty close,” said Sol Iglesias, an assistant professor of political science at the University of the Philippines. (Critics accuse the younger Mr. Marcos of trying to whitewash history by not properly recognizing the significance of that day in 1986.)

Ms. Iglesias said it was clear that the current president had given clearance for the broad campaign to curtail the Dutertes’ power in recent months.

“None of these would have been possible without his assent,” she said.

Despite having once pledged not to cooperate with the I.C.C., Mr. Marcos told reporters in November that he would not block the court and that it had obligations with Interpol.

Mr. Duterte left office with one of the highest approval ratings in Philippine history, and Ms. Duterte is still leading polls for the presidency in 2028, but the arrest now leaves her in a highly vulnerable position. And in recent months, the Dutertes have not been able to galvanize large crowds for their protests.

In approving Mr. Duterte’s arrest, Mr. Marcos is gambling that he can eliminate the Dutertes as a political force without any major backlash. The issue is now likely to be front and center during the midterm elections, seen as a proxy battle between the Marcoses and the Dutertes, in May.

Two Duterte allies — his former aide, Christopher “Bong” Go; and a former police chief, Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa, the architect of Mr. Duterte’s drug war — are seeking re-election to the Senate. Later this year, Philippine senators will decide whether to convict Ms. Duterte over her impeachment. A ruling against her would all but put her out of the running for the top job.

So far, public sentiment seems to be behind Mr. Marcos. A March 2024 survey of more than 1,700 Filipinos showed that nearly three in five approved of the I.C.C. investigation.

On Wednesday night, in the city of Cotobato, a stronghold of Mr. Duterte, residents held banners and lit-up cellphones in protest of his arrest. A few hundred people turned up, but the demonstration soon petered out.

Marlise Simons contributed reporting from Paris, and Aie Balagtas See and Camille Elemia from Manila.

With Greenland thrust into the spotlight by President Trump’s insistence that the United States will somehow “get” it, Greenlanders held a closely watched election on Tuesday that took on unusual importance — not just for the outside world, but for them as well.

Voter turnout hit its highest level in more than a decade, and polling stations on the remote, sparsely populated island, which is partly controlled by Denmark, stayed open late to accommodate long lines.

But with all votes counted early Wednesday morning, the results were mixed.

The winner was Demokraatit, a party that has been critical of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric. It has taken a moderate stance on the subject of independence from Denmark, which most Greenland politicians support as a long-term goal.

The second most popular party, Naleraq, however, has pushed hard for independence as soon as possible — which some of its members have said would enable Greenland to associate more freely with other countries, including the United States. One of Naleraq’s most prominent figures is very pro-Trump and attended the American president’s inauguration.

Greenlanders are clearly divided, experts said, on how to handle this crossroads.

“What has become clear during the election — and what Denmark must now recognize — is that across the political spectrum, there is dissatisfaction with the current constitutional arrangement,” said Ulrik Pram Gad, a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. “Regardless of the outcome, there will be calls for renegotiating the structure of the kingdom of Denmark.”

Denmark colonized Greenland more than 300 years ago, and while the island is now considered a semiautonomous territory, Denmark still controls foreign policy, defense and other aspects of its governance. Demokraatit — which won just under 30 percent of the vote, ahead of Naleraq’s 24.5 percent — has consistently argued that independence must not imperil economic and social stability. There are only 56,000 people living on the island, and the difference between first and second place in this election was around 1,500 votes.

Lars Trier Mogensen, a political analyst based in Copenhagen, said he did not expect any drastic changes in Greenland’s geopolitical situation, at least for now.

“The new Greenlandic government is unlikely to rush into major shifts in U.S. relations anytime soon,” he said.

In interviews with voters these past few weeks and during town hall events with candidates, it was local issues like health care, schools and fishing (the island’s main industry) that kept coming up. Some observers said the two leading parties were clearer about what needs to be changed.

For example, they both campaigned on revamping the fisheries law, said Svend Hardenberg, a mining executive and, more recently, a star in a popular Danish Netflix series that, serendipitously, had a whole season about Greenland.

“The main direction is independence,” he said. “I think that can go quicker than most people expect.”

Greenland boasts a trove of minerals and is strategically located near increasingly important Arctic Ocean shipping lanes. Mr. Trump, in an address to Congress last week, said, “I think we’re going to get it — one way or the other, we’re going to get it.”

On Sunday, two days before the election, in a social media post, he made a direct pitch to Greenlanders: “We are ready to INVEST BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to create new jobs and MAKE YOU RICH.”

But Greenlanders have been clear that despite Mr. Trump’s entreaties, they don’t want to be absorbed by the United States, with polls showing that at least 85 percent oppose the idea. “Greenland is not a house that can be bought,” Demokraatit’s leader, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, has said.

Still, Kuno Fencker of Naleraq, who is Greenland’s most pro-Trump politician, got far more votes than he did in the last election, in 2021. Mr. Fencker attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration and took a tour of the West Wing, and his push for stronger ties with the United States drew fierce criticism from his rivals, some of whom labeled him a traitor. In a recent podcast, Mr. Fencker argued that Mr. Trump had been “misunderstood.”

Naleraq’s second-place finish means that pro-independence voices will remain influential, and the party could push for greater engagement with Washington. But Mr. Fencker’s enthusiasm for Mr. Trump might have turned off some voters, analysts said.

“Naleraq positioned itself in a way that made it seem like a vote for them would bring Trump too close,” Mr. Gad said.

Naleraq doubled its seats, from four to eight, in Greenland’s 31-seat Parliament, the Inatsisartut. At an election night party on the outskirts of Nuuk, the capital, party members and supporters embraced, danced and cheered.

Analysts predicted that Demokraatit was likely to form a governing coalition with the more moderate Inuit Ataqatigiit party, or I.A., which finished third, with 21.4 percent of the vote. Inuit Ataqatigiit, the dominant party in the outgoing governing coalition, embraced a go-slow approach to breaking off from Denmark.

Greenland, the world’s biggest island, is home to a mostly Inuit population that Denmark sidelined during the colonial era. Over time, demands for self-rule have led to greater autonomy and a Greenlandic government. One of Naleraq’s selling points, Mr. Gad said, was its “activist language” inspired by international movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.

Today, Greenland manages most of its domestic affairs. But full independence is not going to be easy. Denmark sends hundreds of millions of dollars to the island each year that pays for nice schools, cheap gas and strong social services — a Scandinavian standard of living in a very remote place. Many Greenlanders, even if they are leaning toward independence, have said they are reluctant to jettison all that, which is why the subject of breaking off from Denmark is so sensitive.

Many voters also expressed skepticism, worry and even anger about the way Mr. Trump has talked about their homeland. People have been living on this icy island for thousands of years, surviving off hunting and fishing. The sense of Greenlandic identity runs strong, and during the election, ballots had to be transported by helicopter, boat and snowmobile.

In the final televised debate on Monday, five of the six party leaders said they did not trust Mr. Trump. Only Karl Ingemann of the small Qulleq party said he did. And Mr. Ingemann failed to win a seat.

As recently as January, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia emphatically rejected the idea of a temporary cease-fire in Ukraine.

But after a month in which President Trump turned American foreign policy on its head and Russian forces made progress in a key battle, the Kremlin now appears keen at least to entertain the 30-day cease-fire proposal made by Ukraine and the United States on Tuesday.

Dmitri S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, told reporters on Wednesday that the Kremlin was “carefully studying” the outcome of Tuesday’s talks between the United States and Ukraine, and their call for a monthlong cease-fire.

He said he expected the United States to inform Russia in the coming days of “the details of the negotiations that took place and the understandings that were reached.” He raised the possibility of another phone call between Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump, signaling that the Kremlin saw the cease-fire proposal as just a part of a broader flurry of diplomacy.

Mr. Putin has seen a dizzying reversal in his geopolitical fortunes over the last month as Mr. Trump realigned American foreign policy in Russia’s favor, antagonized U.S. allies and excoriated President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine at the White House.

But the emergence of a joint cease-fire proposal from the United States and Ukraine complicates things for Mr. Putin. It deepens the tension between his desires for a far-reaching victory in Ukraine and for close ties with Mr. Trump.

While Mr. Trump says he wants to end the war as soon as possible, Mr. Putin has signaled he will not stop fighting until he extracts major concessions from the West and from Kyiv, including a pledge that Ukraine will not join NATO and that the alliance will reduce its presence in Central and Eastern Europe.

On Jan. 20, when he congratulated Mr. Trump on his inauguration, Mr. Putin made clear that the goal of any Ukraine talks must “not be a short cease-fire, not some kind of respite.” Russia, he said, sought “a long-term peace based on respect for the legitimate interests of all people, all nations who live in this region.”

Analysts say Mr. Putin’s opposition to a temporary cease-fire stemmed from the simple calculation that with Russian forces gaining on the battlefield, Moscow would only give up its leverage by stopping the fighting without winning concessions.

But a Feb. 12 phone call between Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump, and the White House’s subsequent alignment with Russia at the United Nations and elsewhere, may have affected Mr. Putin’s calculus by making him more eager to stay on Mr. Trump’s good side, analysts say.

That sets up a delicate balancing act for the Kremlin.

Ilya Grashchenkov, a political analyst in Moscow, said the Kremlin could be tempted to accept a truce that would be “tactically unfavorable but strategically favorable” in order to “show that it’s a peacemaker.”

While Russians were not present at Tuesday’s talks in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the Trump administration has kept up its engagement with the Kremlin. John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, spoke to his Russian counterpart, Sergei Naryshkin, on Tuesday, Russian news agencies reported on Wednesday.

Steve Witkoff, the envoy for Mr. Trump who met with Mr. Putin for several hours last month, plans to return to Russia in the coming days, according to two people familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to discuss internal plans. On Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Trump told reporters that he thought he would speak with Mr. Putin this week and that he hoped a lasting cease-fire would be negotiated in the coming days.

“It certainly is not impossible that the Russians would accept this,” Samuel Charap, a Russia analyst at the RAND Corporation, said of the 30-day offer. “Not because they want an unconditional, temporary cease-fire, but because they now have a stake in relations with Washington.”

In another sign of Moscow’s charm offensive directed at the Trump camp, Russia’s foreign ministry released a 90-minute interview on Wednesday that the foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, gave to three American video bloggers, including the former Fox News personality Andrew Napolitano.

Mr. Lavrov, speaking English, praised the Trump administration for reversing the Democrats’ “departure from Christian values” and said Russia was ready for the “normal relations” that the United States was offering.

Mr. Putin’s calculus could also be affected by Russia’s progress in recent days in pushing Ukrainian troops out of Kursk, the Russian border region where Ukraine occupied several hundred square miles of territory in a surprise incursion last August.

Mr. Zelensky had said he planned to use that land as a bargaining chip in future talks, but the Kremlin signaled that it would refuse to negotiate so long as Ukraine held the territory.

With the Kursk region mostly back in Russian hands, Mr. Putin no longer risks losing face by agreeing to a cease-fire that would leave Ukraine in control of a swath of Russian territory, said Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political analyst in Moscow.

A further incentive to agree, Mr. Markov said, was to make sure that Russia “doesn’t look like a war maniac” in the eyes of non-Western countries that have avoided imposing sanctions on Moscow. But, he said, he expected Mr. Putin to insist on preconditions, such as a halt on weapons supplies to Ukraine for the duration of the cease-fire.

“Russia will very likely say, ‘Yes, but —,’ ” Mr. Markov said in a phone interview.

Russia’s popular pro-war bloggers on Wednesday did not display much enthusiasm for a cease-fire. Some of them expressed concern that a truce could eventually lead to a broader deal with the United States that, in their view, would betray the original goals of the war and eventually lead to a Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.

One blogger, who goes by the name Alex Parker Returns, argued in a post on Wednesday that a peace deal would allow Ukraine “to get off easily and get ready for the next round.”

Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday that he hoped a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine could take place within “days” if Russian leaders agreed, and that he planned to get diplomats from the Group of 7 allied nations to focus on ending the war in a meeting this week in Canada.

“Here’s what we’d like the world to look like in a few days: Neither side is shooting at each other — not rockets, not missiles, not bullets, nothing, not artillery,” he told reporters during a refueling stop in Ireland as he flew from Saudi Arabia to Canada. “The shooting stops, the fighting stops, and the talking starts.”

Mr. Rubio also downplayed any notion that he would encounter hostility from American allies because of President Trump’s recent tariffs. And he said he expected to have cordial talks with Canadian officials, despite Mr. Trump’s threat to annex Canada and make it the 51st state. The president has also imposed coercive tariffs on Canada.

“That’s not what we’re going to discuss at the G7, and that’s not what we’re going to be discussing in our trip here,” he said. “They’re the host nation, and I mean, we have a lot of other things we work on together.”

“It is not a meeting about how we’re going to take over Canada,” he added.

Mr. Rubio and Michael Waltz, the White House national security adviser, met for hours on Tuesday with Ukrainian officials in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to work out how to start a negotiation process with Russia to end the war. Hostilities began in 2014 when Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, and then launched a full-scale invasion in 2022.

After the meeting on Tuesday, Ukrainian officials said they had agreed to an American proposal for a 30-day interim cease-fire. After berating the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the White House, Mr. Trump withheld U.S. weapons and intelligence aid to the Ukrainians to try to force them into negotiations. U.S. officials said after the Jeddah meeting that aid had restarted.

Mr. Rubio said U.S. officials planned to “have contact” with Russian officials on Wednesday to discuss the proposed cease-fire.

“If their response is no, it would be highly unfortunate, and it’d make their intentions clear,” he added.

Mr. Rubio said that when he, Mr. Waltz and Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, met with Russian officials in Saudi Arabia last month, the Russians appeared open to the idea of a settlement to the war. “They expressed a willingness under the right circumstances, which they did not define, to bring an end to this conflict,” he said.

Mr. Rubio said one of his main goals at the Group of 7 meeting was corralling the other countries — Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan, all supporters of Ukraine — to have a united front on encouraging peace talks. The meeting begins with a reception in Quebec City on Wednesday night.

He said a “perfect statement” to be issued from the meeting “would be that the United States has done a good thing for the world in bringing this process forward, and now we all eagerly await the Russian response and urge them strongly to consider ending all hostilities, so people will stop dying, so bullets will stop flying and so a process can begin to find a permanent peace.”

Ukrainian officials want to ensure several issues are addressed in any talks, he said, including exchanges of prisoners of war, the release of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia and humanitarian assistance.

When asked what was the American position on Ukraine’s request for security guarantees to help deter any future Russian assaults, Mr. Rubio simply said deterrence would be part of peace talks.

“There’s no way to have an enduring peace without the deterrence piece being a part of it,” he said, adding that any commercial minerals agreement between the United States and Ukraine would help enrich Ukraine, but was not a deterrent against Russian aggression.

Mr. Trump has insisted that the United States and Ukraine sign such an agreement, suggesting that investment by American companies in Ukraine would help stave off a hostile Russia.

Mr. Rubio said European promises to provide security to Ukraine would be part of peace talks as well. He said it was unclear when those nations would become more involved in negotiations, though European countries have insisted they would be central players in a settlement, if one were to happen.

“I would imagine that in any negotiation, if we get there hopefully with the Russians, that they will raise the European sanctions that have been imposed upon them,” Mr. Rubio said. “So I think that the issue of European sanctions are going to be on the table, not to mention what happens with the frozen assets and the like.”

The foreign ministers gathered in Quebec City expect to discuss the war, but Mr. Trump’s hostility to U.S. alliances, his alignment with Russia and his unpredictable tariff actions have created a host of issues that the diplomats intend to raise.

Mr. Rubio said Mr. Trump was imposing tariffs not to punish other nations but “to develop a domestic capability” for manufacturing, especially in defense industries.

Canadian officials, including the incoming prime minister, Mark Carney, are taking reciprocal actions on the tariffs and grappling with Mr. Trump’s other threats. Mr. Rubio said Mr. Trump’s statements on annexation were based on both economic and security concerns.

“What he said is they should become the 51st state from an economic standpoint,” Mr. Rubio said. “He says if they became the 51st state, we wouldn’t have to worry about the border and fentanyl coming across because now we would be able to manage that. He’s made an argument that it’s their interest to do so. Obviously, the Canadians don’t agree, apparently.”

Armed groups and foreign fighters linked to the government but not yet integrated into it were primarily responsible for sectarian massacres in Syria’s coastal region over the past week, a war monitoring group said in a new report.

The U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said on Wednesday that the U.S. would “watch the decisions made by the interim authorities” after hundreds of civilians were killed in just several days in areas dominated by the country’s Alawite religious minority. He added that Washington was concerned by “the recent deadly violence against minorities.”

The ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad was an Alawite and some members of his minority community enjoyed a privileged status under his rule.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights, which monitors the country’s civil war, said in a report released late on Tuesday that the violence in recent days “included extrajudicial killings, field executions, and systematic mass killings motivated by revenge and sectarianism.”

The clashes erupted almost a week ago in Latakia and Tartus Provinces — the Alawite heartland of Syria — between fighters aligned with the new government and Assad loyalists. The new government is led by Islamist former rebels who fought Mr. al-Assad in a 13-year civil war.

The violence was triggered when pro-Assad militants ambushed security forces last Thursday and killed more than a dozen of them. The government then poured security forces into the coastal region.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights monitor said armed groups and foreign Islamist fighters aligned with the government “but not organizationally integrated into it” were “primarily responsible” for the sectarian and revenge-driven mass killings. Thousands of foreign fighters poured into Syria amid the civil war, many of them joining Islamist rebel groups opposed to the Assad dictatorship.

The Syrian government did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report. (The New York Times could not independently corroborate the findings.)

Another war monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, has said that more than 1,300 people have been killed since Thursday, adding on Tuesday that more than 1,000 civilians were among the dead. Most of the killings took place in Latakia and Tartus Provinces.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights has not been providing tolls for the overall number of dead since the violence began. But the group said more than 800 people were killed from Thursday to Monday — both civilians and combatants — in “extrajudicial killings.”

The group also said in its report that the large number of groups involved in the conflict and the confusion over their exact roles during this transitional period makes it “extremely difficult to determine individual legal responsibility” for the violence.

The figures provided by both war monitors could not be independently verified and it was not immediately clear why there were discrepancies. But the situation has been murky and exact numbers of civilians and fighters killed have been hard to pin down during the chaos of recent days.

The U.N. Human Rights Office said on Tuesday that it had documented the killing of 111 civilians so far, but it was still verification the figures and the actual number is “believed to be significantly higher.”

The United Nations’ high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, urged the government on Tuesday to ensure that the investigations are “prompt, thorough, independent and impartial.”

Syria’s new government has ordered a complex web of armed groups across the fractured country to dissolve, and several prominent militias have agreed to work with the new authorities. However, the security situation has remained unstable and it appears that all the militias have yet to be fully integrated into a single national army.

The interim Syrian president, Ahmed al-Shara, said on Sunday that the government was forming a fact-finding committee to investigate the violence and to bring the perpetrators to justice. Syrian officials have blamed Assad loyalists for the unrest, and have not acknowledged any responsibility for the bloodshed.

A small number of gunmen have been arrested by government security forces in recent days after videos spread across social media showing civilians being killed.

Mr. al-Shara’s government is under intense pressure to bring stability to the country after more than a decade of civil war. But sectarian tensions are threatening to undermine his pledges to unite the nation and protect Syrians of all ethnic and religious backgrounds.