Andrii Pobihai wore his army uniform to the funeral in Bucha, even though he’s retired. He was one of about 40 people to brave the freezing temperatures and air-raid sirens on Wednesday to say goodbye to his friend, who had died of a heart attack at the age of 48 after serving more than 10 years in the military.

Mr. Pobihai, who held a red carnation in his weathered hand, said he was disgusted by what President Trump had said only hours earlier: that this war with Russia was somehow Ukraine’s fault. He wondered what those comments portended, after a day of negotiations on ending the war that included high-level representatives from the United States and Russia, but none from the country the Russians invaded.

“I’m very, very angry,” said Mr. Pobihai, 66, who retired as a commander in the rifle company of the 11th Separate Motorized Infantry Battalion in 2019, three years before Russia launched its full-scale invasion. He had led 54 men near Mariupol, but since then, he said, the Russians have killed all those Ukrainian soldiers — the last just four days earlier.

“The best guys are dying,” Mr. Pobihai said. “How can you talk to these jackals?”

Bucha, a suburb of 37,000 about 20 miles northwest of the capital, Kyiv, has become a notorious symbol of Russian brutality. The Russians took it over within days of invading in February 2022, and in the month that followed, they killed more than 400 civilians, Ukrainian officials say, leading to global accusations of war crimes.

Images from that time ricocheted around the world: The priest left dead in a garage, his mouth open. The church choir singer and his family, their limbs cut off, their bodies burned. The woman shot dead pushing her bicycle home on Yablunska Street.

On Wednesday, many in Bucha seemed to be struggling to take in Mr. Trump’s comments. When the Biden administration was in power, the United States was Ukraine’s most powerful ally. Now they had many questions: Was Mr. Trump just speaking off the cuff? Was the United States really siding with Russia, a pariah on the world stage?

“Now he’s going to help the Russians?” asked Alla Kriuchkova, 40, waiting outside a military recruitment center in Bucha for her husband, who had just been called in. “They destroyed everything here, and now we’re supposed to give up? How does that work?”

Then she answered her own question: “If America leaves us, we are screwed.”

The ghosts of the massacre are still everywhere in Bucha. In the Bucha municipal cemetery on Memory Street, the body of Oleksiy Onyshchenko, Mr. Pobihai’s friend, rested maybe 50 yards from where scores of bodies in black plastic bags were once stacked.

On the corner of Yablunska and Vokzalna Streets — ground zero of the destruction in Bucha — Iryna Abramova lives in a boxy new house built to replace the home that was burned down almost three years ago. Whenever Ms. Abramova leaves for work, she has to walk past the spot where Russian soldiers shot her husband, Oleh, point-blank in front of her.

Then there’s the pink four-story building constructed during Soviet times, where Russian soldiers set up camp after invading. After Bucha was liberated in April 2022, trash as high as one’s knees was found in the building. A slick of blood had dried on the floor.

Now a man wearing thick-lensed glasses worked on a computer in the front window. Behind the building, eight young pine trees were tagged with the names of the men who were shot dead there in the early days of the war. “Anatolii,” read one. “Andriy,” read another. A few trees still had Christmas decorations, tinsel in the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag, balls of red and green.

Ms. Abramova, 50, who now works at a dry cleaner, said she had unsuccessfully tried therapy and medication. She said investigators told her recently that they had identified the Russians who had killed her husband.

“Now I am afraid that the court will do nothing, because of what’s happening politically,” Ms. Abramova said. “They will say that the Russians are fine. The thing I’m most afraid of is that they will say we are guilty ourselves. That we are guilty of killing ourselves.”

The Rev. Andriy Halavin, an Orthodox priest at the Church of St. Andrew, Bucha’s largest church, carries his city’s memories with him, flipping through photos on his phone.

There is one of a smiling Myron Zvarychuk, the priest who founded their church community in the 1990s, and then one of him dead. Other photos show the burned bodies of the singer and several men, bent over, their hands tied, found shot dead in the cellar of a children’s camp. Still another portrays the bodies of the eight men memorialized by the trees near the onetime Russian encampment. (A ninth escaped alive, because the Russians didn’t notice he was still breathing.)

Father Halavin also showed a new satirical cartoon by a Ukrainian artist which depicts Mr. Trump pointing at the feet of Jesus on the cross. “I tried to find a very telling picture,” said Father Halavin, a wry smile on his face. “It’s Trump saying to Jesus, ‘This wouldn’t have happened if I were president.’”

A memorial outside the church identified those who were killed — from Timur Kozyrev, only 18 months old, to Iryna Rudenko, killed 18 days shy of her 99th birthday — mere feet away from where a mass grave once held 116 bodies.

Father Halavin pointed out a red home just beyond it where a mother and her two young sons once lived. They had fled Donbas, in the east, in 2014, shortly after the Russians seized Crimea and Russian-backed separatists occupied parts of eastern Ukraine.

“They moved here to escape, and then they were killed,” he said.

At the Bucha municipal cemetery, 52 graves were marked only with numbers, like 230 and 318. These bodies have not been identified.

In the military section of the cemetery, Ukrainian flags flew over every headstone. “Slaves are not allowed into heaven,” one grave marker proclaimed. Another bore a photo of a sergeant with the call sign Hedgehog; he was critically wounded in Bakhmut and died in a Kyiv hospital on June 12. “Infinite pain,” the epitaph said. “You’re not here, but you’re everywhere, forever with us.”

Other soldiers from Bucha had call signs like Viking, Lover and even Bucha, who died April 13 fighting in the east.

Mr. Onyshchenko, the soldier who was being buried on Wednesday, had collapsed Saturday at his post in Mykolaiv. A heart attack, his family and friends said. Mr. Pobihai said they had served together in the 11th Battalion in Mariupol and Popasna in 2014 and 2015. The Russians now control both areas.

“If not us, then who?” Mr. Onyshchenko had asked after enlisting, according to an obituary posted on Facebook by the mayor of Bucha.

After Mr. Onyshchenko’s coffin was placed into a freshly dug grave, Mr. Pobihai walked through the military cemetery, looking at the headstones. He figured there was a good chance that Mr. Trump would eventually change his mind.

“When Russia captures Ukraine and mobilizes the best Ukrainian fighters into the Russian Army, then goes against NATO and Europe, maybe then,” he said with a shrug.

Oleksandr Chubko contributed reporting.

When Vice President JD Vance criticized his German hosts last week for sidelining far-right parties, he did not mention by name the Alternative for Germany, known as the AfD.

But soon after his speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which he stunned the room by comparing democracy in today’s Europe to Soviet-era totalitarianism, Mr. Vance met with Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD.

A former investment analyst who is raising two sons with her Sri Lankan-born wife in Switzerland, Ms. Weidel, 46, has become the unlikely face of the AfD. Her nationalist party campaigns on a platform that is anti-immigrant and defines family as a father and a mother raising children.

A favorite of the new American administration — receiving an endorsement from Elon Musk — she has been essential to AfD’s effort to break into the mainstream, helping to vault the party into a comfortable second place ahead of Sunday’s national election.

Ms. Weidel, whose turtleneck sweaters or open-collared shirts and pearl necklaces have become signatures, has lent a more cosmopolitan image to a party that has been linked to neo-Nazis and plots to overthrow the state.

But her AfD is no less extreme. “With Alice Weidel at the helm, the AfD has steadily become more radical,” said Ann-Katrin Müller, an expert on the AfD who reports for Der Spiegel, one of Germany’s most prominent news outlets.

The AfD is polling well ahead of the center-left Social Democrats of the incumbent chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and behind the conservative Christian Democrats of Friedrich Merz, the front-runner to be the next chancellor.

Those parties insist that they would never partner with Ms. Weidel’s party to form a government. But Ms. Weidel’s latest success in presenting the AfD as just another party came on Sunday, when she joined a televised debate with her mainstream rivals, who also included Robert Habeck, running for the Greens.

Ms. Weidel’s performance was widely judged to be uneven, but she left the event a winner nonetheless — it was the first time that AfD had been invited to such a debate, watched by millions of voters. At one point in the campaign, polls ranked her as the most popular chancellor candidate, across all parties.

But if Ms. Weidel’s professorial air and personal story suggest a softening of the party line, her language does not. She has promised to tear down wind turbines and to dismiss gender-studies professors. She has spoken about “remigration,” a term used by the far right that is widely interpreted as code for deportations.

“Make it absolutely clear to the whole world: German borders are closed,” she told a cheering crowd when the AfD officially nominated her as its candidate last month.

Ms. Weidel declined to speak to The New York Times for this article. In interviews with the German news media, she has been alternately charming and biting.

She has consistently refused to distance herself from her party’s most extreme members, some of whom have minimized the Holocaust and Germany’s Nazi past.

“She and the people behind her now dominate the party — and they are ideologically very close to Björn Höcke,” Ms. Müller said, referring to an AfD state leader who has been fined by a court for using Nazi language.

On Sunday Ms. Weidel told Bild, Germany’s largest tabloid, that she would put Mr. Höcke into her cabinet if she were to become chancellor.

Ms. Weidel grew up in a middle-class Catholic family in Harsewinkel, a town in North Rhine-Westphalia, in the country’s west, with two siblings and a dachshund. Her father was a salesman and her mother was a homemaker.

Her grandfather was a Nazi party member and was named a military judge in occupied Warsaw, Die Welt, a conservative daily, reported. Ms. Weidel responded that she did not know her grandfather, who died when she was 6, and that the Nazi past was never a topic of discussion in her family.

While finishing a Ph.D. in economics in Bavaria, she spent time in China. By her own account, she learned Mandarin. She later worked at Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs as an analyst. In interviews with the German news media, she has spoken about her love of feng shui, and of swimming and tennis when she was a girl.

Officially she divides her time between her home in a small town in central Switzerland and a house in her voting district on Lake Constance, in southern Germany. But Ms. Weidel admitted that she does not spend much time at the German address.

She says it is because of safety concerns. Despite her party’s gains, she remains a lightning rod of public outrage in a country where a majority of Germans believe the AfD should be shunned.

Her absence from Germany has become something of a sore subject for the leader of a nationalist party. She walked out of an interview aired this week with a public broadcaster when she was asked how many nights she had slept at her German address. In the same interview, she admitted she did not know how many people lived in the district she represents as a member of Parliament.

In November, Ms. Weidel told a group of business leaders in Zurich that her security situation had grown so difficult that it was hard even to spontaneously go out dancing or to dinner with her spouse, Sarah Bossard, a filmmaker.

“I am incredibly grateful to my wife for putting up with it,” she said.

Despite having been asked many times, Ms. Weidel refuses to explain how she reconciles the apparent contradiction between her personal life and the vision of society her party represents.

“I am not queer,” Ms. Weidel told an interviewer this summer, using the English word, “but I am married to a woman I have known for 20 years,” she said.

Experts say the fact that Ms. Weidel’s personal life defies party orthodoxy actually enhances her claim to carry the AfD banner and makes the party appear more mainstream.

“Ms. Weidel has become the face of the party because of her biography and her background, and also because of her ability to speak clearly — even if it is without much empathy,” said Werner Patzelt, a political scientist who has long studied the AfD.

Ms. Weidel joined the AfD in 2013, when it was virtually a single-issue party built on opposition to the common European currency, before working her way up to become its chancellor candidate — the party’s first.

Partially owing to the fact that no one will work with her party, she’s never held any government post before. She was elected to Parliament for the first time in 2017.

Even before her prominent new role, she was a fixture on political debate shows on German television. She argues that her party is libertarian, not right-wing nationalist, a position that puts her at odds with some of the AfD’s more fervent members.

Her fluent English has helped her build a relationship with Mr. Musk, President Donald J. Trump’s billionaire adviser, who interviewed Ms. Weidel on his social media platform X.

Mr. Musk surprised the party in December when he was beamed onto a big screen, at a campaign event in Halle, where he endorsed the AfD and told assembled members that Germans had “too much of a focus on past guilt.”

Mr. Musk himself stirred controversy by giving what was widely interpreted as a Nazi salute to a rally of supporters after Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

Throughout the X interview, Mr. Musk portrayed Ms. Weidel as “a very reasonable person” and distanced her and the AfD from the Nazis.

Despite efforts to downplay associations with the Nazi past, some party faithful seem to have missed the message.

As Ms. Weidel took the stage in Halle, the crowd started a chant that was a not-too-subtle play on a Nazi slogan, “Everything for Germany,” a phrase once carved on the knives of Nazi storm troopers. It is banned in Germany.

The crowd tweaked it ever so slightly. “Alice for Germany!” they cried.

Jim Tankersley contributed reporting.

Hamas fighters were expected on Thursday to hand over the bodies of four Israelis who had been abducted during the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack, including a woman and her two young children, in exchange for Palestinians jailed by Israel.

Large crowds gathered in the southern Gazan city of Khan Younis to observe the exchange, amid triumphant music. Palestinian gunmen were deployed around a stage on which four coffins had been placed.

Miles away, Israelis watched in horror. The four dead hostages were named as Shiri Bibas, 32, and her redheaded young children Ariel, 4, and Kfir, nine months old, as well as Oded Lifshitz, 84.

All four were abducted during the Oct. 7 attack in which roughly 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage, according to Israel. For many Israelis, the deliberate abduction of Ms. Bibas and her children epitomized the viciousness of the attackers.

It was not immediately clear how they had died, although Hamas has said they were killed in Israeli airstrikes. Israeli officials have yet to confirm the cause of death.

Israel’s relentless campaign against Hamas in Gaza quickly followed, killing tens of thousands of Palestinians and leaving much of the enclave in ruins.

In late January, Israel and Hamas reached an agreement to stop the fighting for at least six weeks. Hamas agreed to turn over 25 living Israeli hostages and the bodies of eight others in exchange for more than 1,500 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

Since then, Israelis and Palestinians have witnessed emotional homecomings — hostages reuniting with their families after a terrifying year in Hamas’s underground tunnel network — as returning Palestinian prisoners have embraced loved ones outside of prison for the first time in decades.

Hamas has used the hostage releases to hold elaborate ceremonies demonstrating its dominance in Gaza, deploying dozens of well-organized gunmen and occasionally forcing hostages being freed to give speeches from makeshift stages.

Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting from Haifa, Israel.

Chinese government workers have a lot to worry about these days. Cash-strapped local governments are struggling to pay their salaries. Political controls are tightening in the name of national security. A yearslong anti-corruption purge shows no sign of ending.

Now, the workers also have to make sure not to get slapped with a “Snail Award” — a designation that more localities are rolling out to shame their lowest-performing employees.

“Through this sarcastic ‘encouragement,’ the awardees can blush and sweat and refresh their minds,” read one commentary on a Communist Party-affiliated website, noting that they had hurt the party and the government’s credibility by just “getting by.”

Perhaps now more than ever, the Chinese government cannot afford to have its officials slacking off. As economic growth slows, it needs leaders to introduce new projects, attract investors and inspire ordinary people — in essence, unleash the dynamism that powered China’s rise.

But many officials seem unmotivated, if not outright afraid to act. Under China’s hard-line leader, Xi Jinping, the state has cracked down on various sectors, from internet companies to private-tutoring firms to finance. It has become impossible to guess what might be next in line. Any policy that deviates from the central government’s could be seen as politically disloyal.

Whereas officials once competed to claim flashy infrastructure projects, officials have more recently been punished for raising money or pushing forward construction projects without authorization. The safest route, it seems, is to do nothing.

Until it’s not. Amid the flurry of calls for officials to step up, at least three cities have been giving out snail awards, according to People’s Daily, the party’s official mouthpiece. Video clips on Chinese social media, taken from a state-run television show in Sichuan Province, show stony-faced men in suits being handed framed certificates.

That is one of the gentler punishments. An urban district in Guangdong Province said that it had set up a database to track officials it said were “lying flat” — Chinese slang for slacking off. Other places have boasted of reassigning or firing employees.

The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the party’s internal anti-corruption body, said last month that it punished 138,000 officials in 2024 for offenses including “irresponsibility,” “inaction” or “pretending to work.” That was more than double the number the year before, and by far the category with the most people punished. The second-most-common offense, improperly giving or receiving gifts, had half as many culprits.

“Taking tough measures to deal with ‘lying flat cadres’ is actually to protect the enthusiasm and initiative of those who are doing things and being enterprising,” the anti-graft body said in a recent article.

Trying to frighten already scared officials into action, of course, may not be a recipe for success. So the central authorities have also tried to strike a more reassuring tone. On Monday, Mr. Xi met with some of the country’s top entrepreneurs, which many observers saw as a signal of a renewed embrace of the private sector. That could nudge local governments to be more willing to collaborate with them.

In December, two top commissions that oversee state-owned companies’ investments pledged to “reasonably tolerate normal investment risks.” If a project failed to meet expectations, the people responsible could be exempted from punishment, the commissions said.

Officials have also suggested that party members can be given a second chance. An official in Sichuan Province who directed unauthorized funds toward a public toilet construction project was let off with just a warning, the local disciplinary committee there said, because he had not been seeking personal gain.

But local officials are unlikely to be convinced, because the overall trend toward tighter political controls is clear, said Dongshu Liu, a professor of Chinese politics at City University of Hong Kong. Even if Beijing is encouraging officials to be proactive now, the space for doing so is limited. “They want you to work hard, but they want you to work hard on following central orders,” Professor Liu said.

Indeed, speaking to the disciplinary commission last month, Mr. Xi doubled down on his calls for political purges, urging officials to “not give a single step” in cracking down on corruption and other bad behavior.

Even if Beijing can convince lower-level officials that it is politically safe to take risks again, those officials may have other reasons not to do so. Some local governments have reportedly been unable to pay their workers. The most low-level officials must also contend with growing workloads, often involving frequent in-person checks on residents and businesses, as Mr. Xi pushes for the state to increase its presence in daily life.

And yet, record numbers of young Chinese are still competing for civil service positions. That might seem surprising, given the pressures of the job. But the underlying reason may be the same as why the government is so eager to kick officials back into action: the weak economy. For all their downsides, civil service jobs are seen as stable.

“Yes, being a civil servant is not as good as it was 10 years ago,” Professor Liu said. “But other choices are even worse.”

Siyi Zhao contributed research.