President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine was losing popularity at home for months, seen by many as a thin-skinned leader who had concentrated power around him. Political opponents saw an opening to win a future election against him. His former top general in the war against Russia had a higher approval rating.

Enter President Trump. In recent weeks, he has echoed Moscow’s talking points on the war and called Mr. Zelensky a “dictator without elections” who “has done a terrible job.” Mr. Trump and his allies have demanded new presidential elections in Ukraine, despite the war, and humiliated Mr. Zelensky at a disastrous meeting in the White House.

But Mr. Trump’s actions appear to have helped the Ukrainian leader at home.

Mr. Zelensky’s approval ratings have risen, according to two recent polls, and his political opponents have said publicly that now is not the time for elections. Suggestions by political opponents and some analysts that Mr. Zelensky should share power and form a coalition government — a Ukrainian team of rivals — have not gained traction. And even if critics haven’t exactly rallied around the president, they haven’t outright attacked him.

“Some people expected me to criticize Zelensky,” Petro Poroshenko, Mr. Zelensky’s predecessor as Ukraine’s president and a frequent needler-in-chief, said after the explosive meeting between Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Trump. “But no, there will be no criticism, because that’s not what the country needs right now.”

Mr. Zelensky is still in a precarious position. He needs to somehow chart a path forward with a U.S. president who clearly wants to deal with a different Ukrainian leader.

Mr. Zelensky has offered to step down in exchange for peace or Ukraine’s membership in NATO. Political opponents have agreed that elections cannot be held while the country is at war, because frontline troops and Ukrainians outside the country cannot vote. But given that Ukraine was to hold an election in spring 2024, they will probably push for one if a cease-fire is reached — likely long before a final peace deal is inked. And opposition politicians seem to be biding their time, despite public calls for unity.

Mr. Trump has ratcheted up pressure on Mr. Zelensky ahead of a meeting planned for Tuesday in Saudi Arabia in which U.S. and Ukrainian officials are supposed to discuss steps that could lead to a peace deal with Russia. After a planned deal to share profits from Ukraine’s natural resources wasn’t signed amid the acrimony at the White House meeting on Feb. 28, Mr. Trump paused both U.S. military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine last week.

On Sunday, posts on X by Elon Musk, the billionaire ally of Mr. Trump, renewed fears in Ukraine that Musk might cut off his Starlink internet system, which he called the “backbone of the Ukrainian army.” He added: “Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.” However, he later said “no matter how much I disagree with the Ukraine policy, Starlink will never turn off its terminals.”

Analysts said the White House meeting was probably the biggest crisis that Mr. Zelensky had faced since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Several said there was probably nothing Mr. Zelensky could do because Mr. Trump had chosen to side with Russia. But others suggested several paths for Mr. Zelensky: appointing an official negotiator to deal with Mr. Trump, setting up a more inclusive coalition government or even using a translator.

Yevhen Mahda, a political scientist in Kyiv, said that if Mr. Zelensky built a “coalition of victory from separate parties that unite,” with professional appointees instead of political allies, it would show the world and the United States that Mr. Zelensky could adapt.

Dmytro Razumkov, a politician who left Mr. Zelensky’s party in 2021 and now leads an opposition group in Parliament, said such a coalition should have been formed when the war started, but the president didn’t want to work with his opponents.

“He is not listening to other points of view,” said Mr. Razumkov, who has announced plans to run for president but also opposed holding elections until a peace deal is reached. “He cannot hear them. He cannot work with other parties and other ideas.”

But members of Mr. Zelensky’s party and some analysts dismissed the idea of a coalition.

“Those opposition parties will not focus on Ukraine or on how to help the country,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, a leading political analyst here. “They will focus on future elections. And all those opposition politicians have a very big level of national distrust.”

There are signs that Mr. Zelensky is trying to allow different voices to be heard. For instance, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s top military commander for the first two years of the war, would probably be Mr. Zelensky’s strongest possible opponent in an election. He has rarely spoken publicly since being named ambassador to the United Kingdom last March, effectively sidelining him, even as polls have shown that he’s more popular than Mr. Zelensky.

But on Thursday, Mr. Zaluzhny delivered a speech in London in which he blamed the United States for destroying the world order. Political analysts said Mr. Zaluzhny never would have given that speech if Mr. Zelensky had not agreed to it.

While some politicians and analysts described Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance as bullies at the White House meeting, some focused on Mr. Zelensky, suggesting that the Ukrainian president would have benefited from using an interpreter.

While he speaks English at a conversational level, an interpreter would have given him additional time to weigh his responses, Mr. Mahda said.

Mr. Razumkov, the politician who left Mr. Zelensky’s party, said he thought there might have been language misunderstandings between the two sides. “This whole conversation went wrong from the very beginning,” he said.

A date for a presidential election seems to be a moving target. If a cease-fire deal is reached, Mr. Trump will likely push for new elections even before hammering out a peace deal.

Were an election held today, Mr. Zaluzhny and Mr. Zelensky would likely be top contenders.

On Friday, the Kyiv International Institute for Sociology released a poll showing that between Feb. 14 and March 4 — when relations between Ukraine and the United States soured — the level of trust in Mr. Zelensky increased to 67 percent, from 57 percent in the first half of February. Another poll showed a similar jump, while two other recent polls showed similar approval ratings for Mr. Zelensky. (While approval and trust ratings aren’t the same as electoral ratings, they show how popular the country’s different leaders are.)

Mr. Zelensky’s ratings could have jumped because Ukrainians are rallying around the flag, and not because of the president himself. Mr. Zelensky also saw a huge bump in his approval rating after Russian’s full-scale invasion.

Both Mr. Poroshenko, who lost to Mr. Zelensky in 2019, and Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister, have indicated they would run in a future election. Both have met with Mr. Trump’s team. Ms. Tymoshenko traveled to Washington around the time of Mr. Trump’s January swearing-in, and attended some inaugural events. Mr. Zelensky did not attend the inauguration, but reportedly sent a close ally.

After Politico reported last week on meetings between Mr. Trump’s allies and the Ukrainian politicians or their representatives, Ms. Tymoshenko and Mr. Poroshenko denied they were trying to oust the president, and said they opposed elections while fighting continues. Ms. Tymoshenko said her team was “talking with all our allies who can help in securing a just peace as soon as possible.” Mr. Poroshenko said his team had talked with U.S. officials but opposed Mr. Trump’s demands for wartime elections.

The United States and Ukraine continue to negotiate, on both a possible natural resources deal and any peace pact. On Friday, Mr. Zelensky said “the most intensive work to date has been ongoing with President Trump’s team at various levels — with many phone calls.”

In at least one way, Mr. Zelensky is choosing to navigate the path ahead delicately. On Tuesday, senior members of his team are to have their first in-person meeting with U.S. officials since the White House meeting. They will meet in Saudi Arabia to discuss laying the groundwork for any peace deal.

Mr. Zelensky will travel to Saudi Arabia but is not expected to play any formal role in the talks with the Americans.

Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed reporting from Kyiv, and Kenneth P. Vogel from Washington.

Under President Trump’s plan, the United States would govern Gaza and expel its residents. Under the Arab plan, Gaza would be run by Palestinian technocrats within a wider Palestinian state. By one Israeli proposal, Israel would cede some control to Palestinians but block Palestinian statehood. By another, Israel would occupy the entire territory.

Since the opening weeks of the war in Gaza, politicians, diplomats and analysts have made scores of proposals for how it might end, and who should subsequently govern the territory. Those proposals grew in number and relevance after the sealing of a cease-fire in January, increasing the need for clear postwar plans. And when Mr. Trump proposed to forcibly transfer the population later that month, it fueled a push across the Middle East to find an alternative.

The problem? Each plan contains something unacceptable to either Israel or Hamas, or to the Arab countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia who some hope will fund and partially oversee Gaza’s future.

“The devil is in the details, and none of the details in these plans make any sense,” said Thomas R. Nides, a former United States ambassador to Israel. “Israel and Hamas have fundamentally opposed positions, while parts of the Arab plan are unacceptable to Israel, and vice versa. I’m all for people suggesting new ideas, but it is very hard for anyone to find common ground unless the dynamics change significantly.”

The central challenge is that Israel wants a Hamas-free Gaza whereas the group still seeks to retain its military wing, which led the October 2023 attack on Israel that ignited the war.

Mr. Trump’s plan would satisfy many Israelis, but it is unacceptable both to Hamas and to the Arab partners of the United States, who want to avoid a process that international lawyers say would amount to a war crime.

The Arab alternative — which was announced last week in Egypt — would allow Palestinians to stay in Gaza, while transferring power to a technocratic Palestinian government. But it was hazy about how exactly Hamas would be removed from power, and it was conditional on the creation of a Palestinian state, which a majority of Israelis oppose.

The upshot is that, despite the flurry of proposals since January, Israelis and Palestinians are no closer to an agreement about Gaza’s future than they were at the start of the year.

In turn, that raises the risks of renewed war.

The cease-fire agreed to in January was technically meant to last just six weeks, a period that elapsed at the start of March. For now, both sides are maintaining an informal truce while they continue negotiations — mediated by Egypt, Qatar and the United States — for a formal extension.

But that goal seems distant because Hamas wants Israel to accept a postwar plan before releasing more hostages, whereas Israel wants more hostages released without an agreement over Gaza’s future. While some Israelis could accept any deal that secures the return of 59 hostages still held in Gaza, of which 24 are said to be alive, key members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government would not.

For now, all sides are projecting a sense of momentum.

A Hamas delegation visited Egypt over the weekend to discuss Gaza’s future. An Israeli delegation was set to arrive in Qatar on Monday for further mediation. And on Sunday night, Israeli networks broadcast interviews with Adam Boehler, an American envoy, in which he reported “some progress” from a “baby-steps perspective.”

Mr. Boehler, who has broken with years of U.S. policy to negotiate directly with Hamas, said some of the group’s demands were “relatively reasonable” and that he had “some hope about where this could go.” Mr. Boehler also conceded that any breakthrough was still weeks away.

A senior Hamas official, Mousa Abu Marzouq, said in a recent interview with The New York Times that he was personally open to negotiations about Hamas’s disarmament, a move that would increase the chances of a compromise. But the Hamas movement quickly distanced itself from his remarks and said they had been taken out of context.

The longer the impasse lasts without any hostages being released, the likelier it is that Israel will return to battle, according to Israeli analysts.

Absent a breakthrough, Israel would either have to accept Hamas’s long-term presence — an outcome that is unacceptable to many ministers in the Israeli government — or return to war to force Hamas’s hand, said Ofer Shelah, a former lawmaker and a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, a research group in Tel Aviv.

“Given the current situation, we are on a path leading to an Israeli occupation of Gaza, making Israel responsible for the fate of two million people,” Mr. Shelah said. That would have lasting consequences not only for the Palestinians in Gaza, he said, but also for Israel itself, which would probably get bogged down in a costly war of attrition in order to maintain its control of the territory.

Lia Lapidot contributed reporting from Tel Aviv.

Iran has signaled that it is open to talks about its nuclear program with the United States if they are restricted to military concerns, a day after the country’s supreme leader had appeared to reject an overture from President Trump to hold discussions.

“If the objective of negotiations is to address concerns vis-à-vis any potential militarization of Iran’s nuclear program, such discussions may be subject to consideration,” Iran’s mission to the United Nations said in a social media post on Sunday.

It was unclear if the comments represented a shift in policy after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader who has ultimate authority in such matters, issued an angry statement following Mr. Trump’s offer last week to restart talks.

In a social media post on Saturday, Mr. Khamenei decried “bullying governments” that seek to impose restrictions on Iran. The remarks did not refer directly to Mr. Trump or his offer. The president had warned that Tehran would have to choose between curbing its nuclear program or risk losing it in a military attack

Experts say Iran is at the threshold of being able to enrich enough uranium to produce a nuclear weapon. The Islamic republic says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

Iran’s U.N. mission said that “negotiations will never take place” if their aim is to dismantle Tehran’s “peaceful nuclear program.”

The apparently conflicting remarks may reflect a split among Iranian officials about whether to re-enter talks after Mr. Trump, during his first term as president, withdrew the United States from the nuclear deal struck with Tehran by his predecessor, Barack Obama.

Some moderate and reformist Iranian leaders, including President Masoud Pezeshkian, who took office last year, have said they want to begin discussions. Mr. Khamenei, however, has the final say and has said that Iran cannot trust the United States.

Mr. Trump’s offer comes as the strategic environment for Iran has deteriorated substantially.

Israel has severely weakened Tehran’s regional proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, and destroyed almost all the air defenses protecting Iran’s nuclear facilities. In December, a rebel coalition toppled Syria’s former authoritarian ruler, Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Tehran.

Some senior Israeli officials have argued that there will never be a better moment to strike at Iran’s major nuclear facilities.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, working to repair his strained relationship with the United States and secure a favorable deal to end his country’s war with Russia, was scheduled to meet on Monday with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia.

The meeting between Mr. Zelensky and Prince Mohammed, the de facto Saudi leader, who has sought to take a central role on the world’s diplomatic stage, comes ahead of talks planned for Tuesday between Ukrainian and U.S. officials in the oil-rich Gulf state.

The crown prince, once shunned internationally because of accusations of human rights abuses that he has denied, has positioned his country as a middleman in efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war. Last year, Saudi Arabia played a pivotal role in a complex U.S.-Russia prisoner swap, and President Trump has suggested it could be the site of a possible meeting between him and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Last month, Mr. Zelensky postponed a trip to Saudi Arabia after it hosted an extraordinary meeting of the U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, in which the two sides sought to reset their relationship and discussed the war in Ukraine, without Mr. Zelensky.

But on Saturday, Mr. Zelensky said on social media that he would visit Saudi Arabia, declaring that he was “determined to do everything to end this war with a just and lasting peace.”

“Ukraine has been seeking peace from the very first second of this war,” he wrote of the full-scale conflict, which began with Russia’s invasion three years ago. “Realistic proposals are on the table. The key is to move quickly and effectively.”

Mr. Zelensky added that he would not attend the talks with U.S. officials, but the Ukrainian delegation would include the country’s foreign and defense ministers, a top military official and the president’s chief of staff.

Mr. Zelensky is under intense pressure from the Trump administration to agree to a peace deal, and he has appeared to recalibrate his message after Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance angrily assailed him 10 days ago in the Oval Office over what they described as a lack of gratitude for U.S. support.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly said that Mr. Zelensky does not “have the cards” given Russia’s military strength, and has all but demanded that Ukraine accept diplomatic terms set by the United States for a resolution of the war. Still, there are signs that Ukraine’s position on the battlefield is improving: Ukrainian troops have in recent months stalled a Russian offensive and in some places won back small patches of land.

Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration’s special envoy to the Middle East, has said that Mr. Zelensky’s deferential posture after the blowup in the White House has improved Ukraine’s standing with American officials. Nonetheless, the U.S. has paused military support for Ukraine.

Mr. Zelensky wrote on Saturday that he was “fully committed to constructive dialogue” and that he hoped to “discuss and agree on the necessary decisions and steps” during his visit to Saudi Arabia. Mr. Rubio will be in the seaside Saudi city of Jeddah for talks with Ukrainian officials from Monday through Wednesday, according to the U.S. State Department, and was expected to meet with Prince Mohammed after arriving on Monday evening.

Mr. Trump’s position on Russia and Ukraine has sometimes been hard to pin down. On Friday, he said on social media that he was considering significant sanctions on Russia to help force a peace deal on Ukraine. He demanded that the two countries “get to the table right now, before it is too late.”

Hours later, he told reporters at the White House that he felt talks with Russia were going well and that he was “finding it more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine.”

We asked 19 photographers to revisit their most enduring images of the coronavirus pandemic, five years after the virus became a global threat. Their photographs transport us to that bewildering period in an uncanny sort of time travel.

The journalists who captured these scenes were not just covering the Covid-19 story but living through it. To bear witness at a time of lockdowns and isolation, they had to be in the world, navigating fear and uncertainty.

The images evoke how we felt and what we lost, as well as human resilience and connection at a time of crisis.

— Meaghan Looram

One night in January 2020, the Food and Health Bureau of Hong Kong announced that a male traveler from Wuhan, China, had a fever and was suspected of being infected with the novel coronavirus.

I rushed by high-speed rail to the hospital where the patient was. It was crowded with journalists. By a back door, paramedics were in full protective gear. Eventually, he was wheeled out on a stretcher. We were so close that I could see his sweat. He was transferred to an isolation hospital, where he later tested positive.

— Lam Yik Fei

São Paulo, Brazil. March 2020

Locked Down and Isolated

I had returned on the fourth lockdown day to Brazil from Argentina, where I had been working on a story about jaguars, barely making it before the airport closed. After a day in search of images, I visited my old neighborhood to photograph an empty barbershop. A friend tipped me off to an apartment with a privileged view of the emblematic Copan building, where thousands live in São Paulo.

I arrived on the terrace late that afternoon. I waited for nightfall and the lights in the dozens of studios gradually came on. Everyone was in their cubicles, living through the pandemic alone, like me.

— Victor Moriyama

Officially, Beijing had recorded a few hundred Covid cases and less than a handful of deaths in mid-February. But what did we know? A month earlier, health authorities had insisted there was no proven human-to-human transmission, only to reverse themselves.

The city felt empty. A robotic voice playing on a loop on loudspeakers recommended to wash hands and avoid crowds.

I headed to Houhai, a neighborhood popular with locals and tourists. That evening, the place was dark and deserted except for one bar, where under a spotlight, a man sat surrounded by empty velvety couches, eating dinner out of plastic boxes. I placed my lens against the window.

— Gilles Sabrié

Cenate Sotto, Italy. March 2020

The Home Visit

Italy was the first Western country to see its squares empty, its shops close and fear creep in. While taking precautions and following protocols, I followed the Red Cross, entering hospitals and going into private homes and even funerals. I saw fear in the eyes of victims, despair in those left behind and immense exhaustion in doctors and nurses.

The photo of Claudio Travelli is a real-life tableau of pain but also the fight for survival and the resilience of the families involved. Mr. Travelli survived, though he has not shaken off the specter of the virus, as he confided a year later when I returned to Cenate Sotto, a town in the province of Bergamo.

“Since I got sick,” he said, “I’ve never been the same. It feels like I’ve lost 10 years of my life.”

— Fabio Bucciarelli

Paris. March 2020

The City of Quiet

This was Place de la Concorde, at 8 a.m. on Tuesday, March 17, 2020. Normally, that would have been rush hour for one of the busiest roads in Paris, but the lockdown announcement the day before changed everything. The taxi dropped me off at Place de la Madeleine, a short walk away.

The city was immersed in an eerie silence, like that of a lunar atmosphere. As a child, I would often come here with my father for walks, and he would tell me it was one of the liveliest places in the world. This photograph was born from a silent shock, having my breath taken away.

— Andrea Mantovani

Tampa, Fla. October 2020

Getting Tested

My family and I had just relocated to Central Florida about eight months after leaving New York City when I found this picture in October 2020. At a drive-through Covid testing site in Tampa, Fla., a woman’s face mirrored the anxiety of those days when people feared that an encounter with another person could potentially be lethal.

It may have been the anticipation of the test itself or the results that terrified her, but the look on her face reminded me of the height of the AIDS epidemic when simply taking a test was an acknowledgment of our own mortality.

— Damon Winter

Paterson, N.J. March 2020

Checking In

Firefighters and emergency medical technicians steeled themselves to overcome their fear and help those who needed it the most as they made home visits at the outset of the pandemic in Paterson, N.J.

It was the moment of holding a hand through the darkness.

— Chang W. Lee

Houston, Texas. July 2020

The Treatment

I spent about three weeks with colleagues at Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas in the summer of 2020. The hospital was opening one intensive-care unit after another to tend to the most critically ill, and we were given permission by patients and their families to follow their care.

I was sweating through plastic face shields while wearing gowns, gloves, bootees and head coverings, and cleaning my cameras with wipes used to sanitize medical equipment. This photo froze a moment when doctors and nurses came together to turn Edwin Garcia, 31, on his back. He was on a ventilator.

Until then, I did not know how much effort it took to keep a hospital running.

Mr. Garcia would suffer physical and neurological impairments after his time in the hospital — including losing the use of his left arm and hand, and requiring a cane to walk — that continue to affect him nearly five years later.

— Erin Schaff

Los Angeles. March 2021

‘I Love You’ Twice

Dianne Gutierrez held up a family photo through glass for her father, Dr. David Gutierrez, who was in intensive care for six months. She was trying to prompt him to say the names of those in the photograph.

“Who is this?” she asked, after she peeled one photo after another from a stack and held each up to the window.

He stared with eyes wide open and said nothing.

He was a family medicine doctor serving patients in California in December 2020 when he started to develop Covid symptoms, which quickly escalated. He was transferred to Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif., and placed on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation as a last-resort therapy.

Dr. Gutierrez was struggling to speak after months of intubation. But during this visit, with the help of a speech therapist, he uttered “I love you” to both his wife and daughter.

I held onto Dr. Gutierrez’s story as a symbol of hope. He was one of the few patients I shadowed in intensive care who survived in 2021.

— Isadora Kosofsky

Manacapuru, Brazil. June 2020

The Boat Ambulance

On March 13, 2020, a 39-year-old woman returned to Brazil from England and became the first confirmed case of Covid in the state of Amazonas. Mostly a tropical jungle, the region turned into the scene of one of the world’s worst-hit and fastest-growing epidemics, leaving its hospitals unprepared and cemeteries overwhelmed.

I visited the remote settlements on the Amazon River to document how the virus had spread through people traveling on boats from the state capital, Manaus, to these distant communities, many of which had no hospitals, doctors or even phone service.

While waiting at a small river landing in Manacapuru, a boat used as an ambulance arrived with the sick from Codajás, a community 100 miles farther upriver. After their long journey, now nearly dark and with little sound, they drifted into the glow of the headlights of a vehicle, waiting to transport patients to a hospital.

— Tyler Hicks

Los Angeles. February 2021

A Devastating Toll

When this photo was taken, sunlight was entering the chapel lobby of the Continental Funeral Home in East Los Angeles through a skylight and illuminating Brianna Hernandez, an apprentice embalmer. She was working alongside other funeral home employees as they attempted to absorb the staggering influx of bodies at the height of the pandemic in Southern California.

I watched as the funeral home director and her staff adapted to the unimaginable. Church pews were replaced by rows of coffins; the cafeteria was converted into a makeshift morgue; and back-to-back funerals were held daily in the parking lot.

As I photographed Ms. Hernandez and the other workers carefully moving bodies draped in white sheets onto industrial shelving racks, I was confronted with the sobering reality of the pandemic’s devastating toll.

— Alex Welsh

I was in New Delhi during a second Covid wave when I heard that hospitals were experiencing a colossal oxygen supply crisis. I was going everywhere, to hospitals and makeshift hospitals. I was seeing people in line, seeking oxygen cylinders, and patients in ambulances waiting to be admitted at government hospitals. Some were gasping for air. I saw people die for lack of oxygen when I was in the outskirts of Delhi.

This made me wonder what it was like in the cremation grounds. I went to one in the outskirts of Delhi where even the parking lot had been converted to accommodate the many bodies brought there. It was all overwhelming but I felt I needed to convey the truth to the world through my images of the Hindu rituals, which are seen as a way to free the soul from the body.

I got myself to high ground and saw ambulances lined up. I waited for the light to fade. I photographed the flames emitting light, as if the funeral pyres were revealing the truth of what was happening in India.

— Atul Loke

Los Angeles, February 2021

The Embrace

I met María Salinas Cruz on Jan. 28, 2021, minutes before a respiratory therapist disconnected the ventilator that kept her husband alive at a Los Angeles County hospital.

“Don’t be afraid, Felipe,” his wife wailed in Spanish through the thick glass door that separated them. “Be brave, my love, brave until the last moment.”

Three weeks later, the Cruz family invited me to their home. I learned that Mr. Cruz cleaned and repaired heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems. His family is convinced he became infected with Covid while at work. It became so difficult for him to breathe that they took him to the emergency room on Jan. 1, 2021, which was his birthday.

My visit to their home lasted five hours. We listened to his favorite music, ate his favorite dinner, looked at lots of photos and they told many stories. The last thing we did was gather around the kitchen table to drink a special hot chocolate from his hometown, Oaxaca, Mexico.

After finishing her last sip, Ms. Cruz broke down weeping. Her daughter Maritza embraced her, and I took just one photo, this photo, and then hugged them, too.

— Meridith Kohut

Wait times for crematories stretched for days and were only getting worse in Iztapalapa, the most densely populated borough of Mexico City, in the late spring of 2020.

At the San Lorenzo Tezonco cemetery, gravediggers stood by on May 14, waiting for the hearses and grieving families to arrive. At the height of the crisis, many risked illness or even death because they could not afford to stay home.

We tried speaking with the family at this burial but they declined. At that time, gatherings were not allowed, and there was still a sense of shame around the virus.

— Daniel Berehulak

Moscow. December 2020

A Shot in the Arm

In December 2020, Russia was the first country to approve a coronavirus vaccine, an achievement that was promoted with pride on state television. Outside the hospital walls, skepticism ran deep, with surveys finding that 59 percent of Russians refused to take it.

Lyudmila Soboleva, a 38-year-old medic, knew firsthand from working in a hospital that Covid left patients struggling to breathe. A warm, late-afternoon light cut through the room, casting long shadows on the tiled walls when she exposed her arm to take the shot.

The government launched a mass vaccination effort, setting up mobile clinics in shopping malls, sports halls and even in the heart of Moscow, at Red Square. Some lined up for their jabs seeking protection or to regain a feeling of normal life. Others refused, as their distrust of the government was stronger than fear of the virus.

— Sergey Ponomarev

Stuttgart, Germany. May 2020

Reconnecting Through Music

When I arrived in Stuttgart, Germany, in the spring of 2020, it was a warm, sunny day in which many people would normally have been outside. Yet, it all felt surprisingly empty. I drove up a hill covered with vineyards to reach a location where two orchestras had created a unique way for people to reconnect with live music through intimate, one-on-one outdoor concerts.

In those sessions, a single musician played for one listener, often sparking deep emotions after months of isolation. Without words, tickets or applause, the concerts aimed to restore human connection at unexpected places.

— Laetitia Vancon

Queens, New York. July 2020

A Surreal Season Opener

The New York Mets held their season opener against the Atlanta Braves in July 2020 in a Citi Field devoid of fans. Cutouts of people were placed on the empty seats, creating a surreal backdrop for the game. Few photographers were allowed to cover the game and we couldn’t wander far from our cordoned-off sections.

I recall feeling a flood of emotion at one point, but I can’t quite pinpoint why. Perhaps it was taking stock of all I had seen during the pandemic. Like most journalists, I was living the story we were covering, juggling the incongruities of being a parent while witnessing the devastating effects the virus had on our city.

There was a glimpse of optimism, but the reopening seemed distorted, like a new version of a recent past.

— Todd Heisler

Children wearing face coverings were meditating at a morning assembly on their first day at school after Bangkok ended a second lockdown caused by a spike in Covid infections in early 2021.

I lived in Thailand through the pandemic. There were very few cases early on and the government quickly closed the borders and put in place strict social-distancing and mask-wearing rules. I remember feeling guilty, fearful and helpless as I watched the devastation that the pandemic caused for my friends and family in England and the United States while I was leading a relatively normal life.

Looking back, I can’t help wondering how these children remember this strange time and how the lockdowns and isolation affected them.

— Adam Dean

old bridge, n.j. March 2021

Reunion

Dan Fabrizio had not seen his 95-year-old mother, Marie Fabrizio, in person for more than a year when they had this encounter in March 2021. She was staying in an assisted-living home in suburban New Jersey, and at that time, many retirement homes were experiencing deaths from the disease at a horrifying rate. Some lost dozens of residents from the virus in a few weeks.

I’ll never forget how happy she was to see her son and how relieved he was just to hug her. As soon as Mr. Fabrizio walked into the room, he completely broke down.

“Hearing my mom’s voice in person — it just felt like, it wasn’t a recording,” he said. “It wasn’t the telephone. It wasn’t a Zoom. It was live. She got through this. I sat in my car and I cried.”

—Bryan Anselm