Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, said negotiating with the United States was “unwise, unintelligent, and not honorable,” just days after President Trump said he was willing to revive negotiations with Tehran. But Mr. Khamenei stopped short of ordering Iran’s government, which for months has sent signals that it is interested in negotiations, not to…
The International Criminal Court on Friday condemned President Trump’s executive order imposing sanctions on it, saying that the action sought to harm the court’s “independent and impartial judicial work.” Mr. Trump’s order on Thursday said that his administration would “impose tangible and significant consequences” on people who work on investigations that threaten the national security…
The time had come to bend the knee — or at least bend to reality. A delegation of Russian diplomats arrived last Tuesday in a caravan of white SUVs for a summit in Damascus and an unenviable assignment: lay the groundwork for Russia to keep its military bases in Syria, less than two months after…
They have been circling each other carefully for seven days now — sending out invitations to talk, mixing a few jabs with ego-stroking, suggesting that the only way to end the Ukraine war is for the two of them to meet, presumably without the Ukrainians. President Trump and Vladimir V. Putin, whose relationship was always…
Europe’s longest-serving leader, President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, cruised to his seventh election victory in a row on Sunday in a contest that his exiled opponents dismissed as a sham, whose only purpose was to cement his autocratic grip on the former Soviet republic, Russia’s closest ally. “Don’t use the word election to describe…
When a 28-year-old volunteer named Nikolai stepped onto a sandy beach on Russia’s Black Sea coast in a hazmat suit just before New Year’s Eve, he was so overwhelmed by the amount of thick oil film that he almost broke down. He and other volunteers were tasked with shoveling away the oil-drenched sand, but “the…
President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran arrived in Moscow on Friday for high-profile talks with Vladimir V. Putin, his Russian counterpart, solidifying an alliance between two countries driven by a mutual desire to challenge the West. Iran and Russia have been subjected to a raft of sanctions by the West, and trade and finance are at…
Sudan’s military has used chemical weapons on at least two occasions against the paramilitary group it is battling for control of the country, four senior United States officials said on Thursday. The weapons were deployed recently in remote areas of Sudan, and targeted members of the Rapid Support Forces paramilitaries that the army has been…
Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida named by Donald J. Trump to be the next secretary of state, was warmly welcomed by senators from both parties at his confirmation hearing on Wednesday. He has served for years on the Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees in the Senate, and is known as a lawmaker devoted…