World

Guatemala, Central America’s largest nation, is voting on Sunday in presidential elections that are casting scrutiny on the erosion of the rule of law in a country that has become a major source of migration to the United States.Guatemala’s nascent democracy — which emerged after the end of a civil war nearly four decades ago that left hundreds of thousands dead or missing, one of the bloodiest in recent Latin American history — has frayed in recent years under an increasingly authoritarian government.The judiciary has been weaponized and has forced into exile dozens of prosecutors and judges focused on battling corruption. Press freedom has also come under attack, and this month, the publisher of a leading newspaper that exposed many episodes of graft was sentenced to six years in prison...

Senior American national security officials had indications as early as Wednesday that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group, was preparing to take military action against senior Russian defense officials, according to officials briefed on the intelligence.The information suggests that the United States had at least some warning of impending unrest in Russia, just as it warned in late 2021 that Vladimir V. Putin was planning to invade Ukraine.In this case, the information was considered both solid and alarming because of the possibility that a major nuclear-armed rival of the United States could descend into chaos.While it is not clear exactly when the United States first learned of the plot, intelligence officials conducted briefings on Wednesday with the administration and d...

A knock on the large unmarked wooden door opposite Lviv’s city hall. A man in a military uniform holding a German-made rifle answers. Password, he demands.“Slava Ukrayini.” Glory to Ukraine.“Heroy am slava,” glory for the heroes, he responds, and opens a passageway hidden behind a wall of books.The man in the uniform is not a guard. He is the maître d at Kryivka, a popular theme restaurant that evokes Ukraine’s armed fight for independence against Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany during World War II.The cavernous restaurant — decorated as a memorabilia-filled underground bunker — has been around for more than 15 years. And the atmosphere remains festive and playful despite the brutal and bloody history that serves as a backdrop. Patrons still order multicolored vodka shots by the row, and t...

The Zaprorizhzia Nuclear Power Plant on the banks of the receded Dnipro river. President Volodymyr Zelensky’s warnings about potential nuclear sabotage by Russian forces has caused some Ukrainians to prepare for the worst.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York TimesKYIV, Ukraine — A day after President Volodymyr Zelensky warned of the potential for Russian sabotage at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, government agencies were laying out steps that residents could take to prepare for a nuclear disaster.Though officials urged people to remain calm, at one pharmacy in the capital there was already a sharp uptick of people looking for potassium iodide pills.“We are completely sold out,” said a worker at the Wholesale Prices Pharmacy, Denys Yakymenko, adding th...

Schools give patriotic lessons and teach students how to assemble rifles, while textbooks have been rewritten to favor Russia’s view of history. Factories produce uniforms for soldiers fighting Ukraine. Summer camps run by state-owned conglomerates host children from occupied Ukrainian territory.These by-now familiar scenes would hardly bear mention in wartime Russia, except that these were drawn recently from Belarus, an autocratic country of 9.4 million neighboring Russia, Ukraine and the NATO members Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. Long uneasily in the orbit of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Belarus is increasingly doing his bidding, socially, militarily and economically.The most recent manifestation of Belarus’s fealty to Moscow — and the threat it poses to the West — is its pro...