World

With Russia mired in a long war in Ukraine and increasingly dependent on China for supplies, Beijing is moving quickly to expand its sway in Central Asia, a region that was once in the Kremlin’s sphere of influence.

Russia, for its part, is pushing back hard.

As the leaders of Central Asian countries meet with the presidents of China and Russia this week in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, China’s rising presence is visible in the region. New rail lines and other infrastructure are being built, while trade and investment are rising.

Flag-waving Kazakh children who sang in Chinese greeted Xi Jinping, China’s leader, upon his arrival in Astana on Tuesday. He praised ties with Kazakhstan as a friendship that has “endured for generations.”

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia arrived on Wednesday for the start of the gathering in Astana, an annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and he met with Mr. Xi, according to Xinhua, the state-run news agency.

The forum was for years focused largely on security issues. Beijing has come to dominate the group, and as it has expanded its membership, China and Russia have used it as a platform to showcase their ambitions of reshaping a global order dominated by the United States.

The group, which was established by China and Russia in 2001 with the Central Asian countries Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, has expanded in recent years to include Pakistan, India and Iran.

Even as China has expanded its economic influence across Central Asia, it still faces challenges to its diplomacy, as Russia seeks to tilt the balance of members in the Shanghai forum in its favor.

The leader of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko, is expected to attend the summit this year. He is Mr. Putin’s closest foreign ally, who relies heavily on Russia’s economic and political support to stay in power. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of Russia has said that Belarus would be named a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization at this year’s summit. That would be a minor diplomatic victory for the Kremlin.

A bigger setback for Beijing is that Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India is skipping the summit this year. Mr. Modi plans to visit Moscow next week to hold his own discussions with Mr. Putin and is instead sending his minister of external affairs, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, to the summit in Astana.

Coming after Mr. Putin’s recent trip to two of China’s other neighbors, North Korea and Vietnam, that upcoming trip by Mr. Modi to Moscow indicates that Mr. Putin is still able to weave his own diplomatic relationships separate from Beijing, said Theresa Fallon, the director of the Center for Russia Europe Asia Studies in Brussels.

“He’s saying, ‘I’ve got other options,’” Ms. Fallon said.

India had joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization at Russia’s behest in 2017, when Pakistan also joined at the encouragement of China. But India’s relations with China have become chilly since then, after border skirmishes between their troops in 2020 and 2022.

While Mr. Modi had favored closer relations when he took office a decade ago, the two countries no longer even allow nonstop commercial flights between them.

India is becoming more concerned about the region’s geopolitical balance of power as China’s clout rises and Russia’s wanes, said Harsh V. Pant, a professor of international relations at King’s College London. China and Russia have also forged increasingly friendly relations with the Taliban government of Afghanistan, which has run the country since the departure of American forces in 2021 and has long sided with Pakistan against India.

“So far as Russia was the dominant player, India was fine with it,” Mr. Pant said. “But as China becomes more important economically and more potent in Central Asia, and Russia becomes the junior partner, India’s concerns would be rising.”

In broader terms, however, Russia’s participation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is largely a rear-guard action to counterbalance the region’s seemingly inexorable shift toward China. Mr. Putin relies heavily on China to keep his economy and military production afloat amid Western sanctions, and over the years his government has come to accept Beijing’s growing ties to Central Asia’s former Soviet Republics. The massive gap between Russia’s and Beijing’s economic muscle makes direct competition in Central Asia futile for the Kremlin.

Instead, the Kremlin has sought to maintain a measure of leverage in its former satellites on issues that remain vital to its national interests, including by attending largely symbolic events like the Astana summit. On Wednesday, Mr. Putin will hold six separate meetings with Asian heads of state in Astana, according to Russian state media.

Russia wants to maintain access to Central Asian markets to circumvent Western sanctions. Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has obtained billions of dollars’ worth of Western goods by using Central Asian intermediaries. These include consumer goods like luxury cars, as well as electronic components that have been used in military production.

Russia also relies heavily on millions of Central Asian migrants to prop up its economy, as well as to rebuild the occupied parts of Ukraine.

Finally, Russia wants to cooperate with the governments of the largely Muslim nations of Central Asia on security, and the threat of terrorism in particular. These threats were laid bare earlier this year, when a group of Tajik citizens killed 145 people at a Moscow concert hall in the deadliest terror attack in Russia in more than a decade. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.

Russia and China do not just compete in Central Asia. They often cooperate, because they perceive a shared interest in having stable regimes in the region that have little or no coordination with Western militaries, said Alexander Gabuev, the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, a research group.

“They see regional stability anchored in authoritarian regimes that are secular, non-Muslim and, to a degree, repressive at home,” he said.

William Fierman, a professor emeritus of Central Asian studies at Indiana University, said that Beijing also faces deep-seated public concern in Central Asia that China may use its huge population and migration to overwhelm the sparsely populated region. Soviet authorities fanned those suspicions for decades, and even a younger generation that did not grow up under Soviet rule now appears to share these concerns, he said.

In Astana, the elephant in the room is likely to be the war in Ukraine. Few experts expect much public discussion of the war at a forum dominated by Beijing, given its indirect support for the Russian war effort.

Mr. Xi will also use his visit to push his vision of building better transportation links across the region, said Wu Xinbo, the dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. After the summit, Mr. Xi is scheduled to make a state visit to Tajikistan, where the U.S. State Department recently estimated that over 99 percent of foreign investment comes from China.

Many of China’s investments in Central Asia are in infrastructure. China concluded an agreement with Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan last month to build a new rail line across both countries. The rail line will give China a shortcut for overland trade with Iran, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, and beyond them to the Mideast and Europe. China has tried for the past 12 years to expand rail traffic across Russia to carry its exports to Europe, but now wants to add a southerly route.

“From a long-term, strategic perspective, this railway is very important,” said Niva Yau, a nonresident fellow specializing in China’s relations with Central Asia at the Atlantic Council, a Washington research group.

Suhasini Raj and Li You contributed reporting and research.

Israeli forces killed a senior Hezbollah commander on Wednesday in a drone strike in southern Lebanon, prompting the Lebanese militia to retaliate with a heavy rocket barrage across the border.

The flare-up came as Western diplomats worked to avoid a full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah, a danger that appears to have grown in recent weeks. Cross-border exchanges of fire have intensified, and Israeli officials have publicly spoken of shifting their military focus from Hamas in the Gaza Strip to Hezbollah, a far more advanced and potent threat.

Amos Hochstein, a senior White House adviser who has become the de facto U.S. envoy in tamping down the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, conferred on Wednesday with French officials in Paris to discuss how to defuse the rising tensions. Jean-Yves Le Drian, President Emmanuel Macron’s special envoy to Lebanon, was among the people with whom he met, according to a person close to the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.

The Israeli military said its drone strike had killed Mohammad Naameh Nasser, also known as Abu Naameh, who was among the highest-ranking Hezbollah fighters to die in nearly nine months of conflict, according to a senior Lebanese intelligence official, who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue. He said Mr. Nasser had led Hezbollah’s Aziz unit, one of the group’s main fighting forces along the Lebanese border.

Hezbollah confirmed his death, and though it did not explicitly say how he had died, the group said it had fired 100 rockets at military targets over the border as part of an “initial response,” setting off sirens in communities across northern Israel. The Israeli military said that most of that barrage had fallen in open areas, but Hezbollah continued to claim retaliatory attacks into the evening.

In solidarity with Hamas, Hezbollah, which is closely tied to Iran, has greatly increased the pace of its periodic attacks on northern Israel since the war in Gaza began in October. Israel has retaliated with strikes in Lebanon.

The killing of Mr. Naameh in a drone strike in the Tyre area on the western coast was the latest in a string of Israeli assassinations of Hezbollah commanders in Lebanon. One last month led to an escalation in the fighting that the Biden administration has since struggled to contain. With tensions already high, analysts and Western diplomats have warned that the tit-for-tat strikes could lead to further escalation.

Amal Saad, a lecturer at Cardiff University who researches Hezbollah, said that the powerful militia would not allow itself to be dragged into an all-out war over the killing, but that recent threats by Israeli officials would not deter Hezbollah from responding with strength.

“I don’t think Hezbollah will downplay this,” Ms. Saad said, adding that the rocket barrage was only “a small teaser of what is to come.”

The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah has so far remained fairly contained, but the fighting has already displaced more than 150,000 people on both sides of the border. If a full-scale war were to break out, analysts said, it would very likely prove catastrophic, leaving swaths of Lebanon in ruins, prompting Hezbollah to unleash its arsenal of precision-guided missiles on cities across Israel, and potentially setting off a wider regional war involving Iran. Israel’s military leadership is seeking a cease-fire with Hamas in case a larger war breaks out in Lebanon, according to Israeli security officials.

U.S. officials have worked for months to prevent a war between Israel and Hezbollah. On Monday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said that Israel “has effectively lost sovereignty” near the border with Lebanon because Hezbollah attacks launched from across the border had driven much of the population from their homes. Some 60,000 Israelis have fled the area, many of whom have been living in Tel Aviv hotels for the past nine months.

In his remarks on Monday, Mr. Blinken noted that Hezbollah had said that if a cease-fire were reached in Gaza, it would stop firing into Israel. That “underscores why a cease-fire in Gaza is so critical,” he said.

The cease-fire talks have been deadlocked since June, but officials said Wednesday that mediators were working to revive them, focusing on terms based on a proposal backed by the United Nations and the United States.

For months, Israel and Hamas, which do not talk directly with each other, have negotiated through mediators, including Qatar and Egypt, over a potential deal for a three-stage truce in Gaza and the release of the remaining 120 living and dead hostages held there. However, wide gaps remained on key issues.

Last Tuesday, Qatar sent Hamas new potential amendments to the proposed deal in an effort to win over its support, according to two senior officials from different countries involved in the negotiations, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive talks.

The main stumbling blocks remain: Hamas, which controlled Gaza before the conflict, wants an end to the war and a full withdrawal of Israeli forces, while Israel has vowed to keep fighting until Hamas is destroyed and seeks control over postwar security in Gaza.

Current and former security officials in Israel say the country’s top generals want to start a cease-fire in Gaza even if it keeps Hamas in power for the time being. Israel’s generals see their forces being stretched thin, in both soldiers and munitions, as the war drags on. They believe the military needs time to recuperate in case a ground war with Hezbollah breaks out, the officials said.

Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said on Wednesday that Israeli forces were prepared to take any action necessary against Hezbollah, but that they preferred a diplomatic settlement.

“We are striking Hezbollah very hard every day and we will also reach a state of full readiness to take any action required in Lebanon, or to reach an arrangement from a position of strength,” said Mr. Gallant, according to a statement from his office.

“We prefer an arrangement, but if reality forces us we will know how to fight,” he added.

Michael Crowley, Ronen Bergman, Aaron Boxerman, Patrick Kingsley and Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.

Hurricane Beryl battered Jamaica on Wednesday and was moving across the Cayman Islands on Thursday after leaving a trail of destruction through the Caribbean, resulting in at least seven deaths, houses destroyed and trees snapped in half.

The storm first hit Carriacou, a small island that is part of Grenada, on Monday morning where it flattened the island in just half an hour, while also causing extreme damage to neighboring Petite Martinique.

Carriacou is known for its coral reefs and diving spots, while people on Petite Martinique are mostly involved in fishing and boat building. The two islands have a combined population of at least 9,000 people.

The storm was an anomaly in what has already been an unusually busy storm season, which extends until the end of November. When it developed into a Category 4 storm on Sunday, it was the third major hurricane ever in the Atlantic Ocean in June — and the first time a Category 4 materialized this early there in the season.

The storm continued to set records, becoming the first ever Atlantic storm to grow into a Category 5 this early in the season, according to Philip Klotzbach, a Colorado State University meteorologist who specializes in tropical cyclones.

The storm’s rapid strengthening was a direct result of above-average sea surface temperatures, as well as a harbinger of what might be coming this hurricane season. A hurricane that intensifies faster can be more dangerous because it gives people in areas projected to be affected less time to prepare and evacuate.

Thursday

At least 18 people were killed and dozens of others were injured in a series of suicide bombings, all carried out by women, on Saturday afternoon in northeastern Nigeria.They included one explosion that went off at the wedding of a young couple and another at a funeral, according to local officials.

Barkindo Saidu, the director general of Borno State’s emergency management agency, said that three female attackers had struck distinct locations in Gwoza, a bustling city in Borno State that has been the center of an insurgency by the militant group Boko Haram over the last 15 years.

The victims included children and pregnant women, Mr. Saidu said. Some Nigerian news outlets reported that at least 30 people had been killed.

As of Sunday afternoon, no group had claimed responsibility for the bombings. The blasts resembled attacks carried out by Boko Haram, whose fighters have killed tens of thousands in Nigeria and whose aggression in the region has led to the displacement of more than two million people.

The number of suicide bombings has decreased in recent years, but Saturday’s multiple blasts were a reminder that terrorism remains a vivid threat in northeastern Nigeria.

The first attacker on Saturday detonated a bomb that she was wearing at a wedding celebration, Mr. Saidu said in a preliminary report seen by The New York Times. Seven people died in that explosion, including the attacker and a baby she had with her, according to Kenneth Daso, a public relations officer with the police in Borno.

Two other attackers struck later near a hospital and at the funeral services for a victim of the earlier blast, Mr. Saidu said. Authorities did not say how many devices were detonated, how many people were killed in the two other bombings or whether the suicide bombers in those attacks were killed. But Mr. Saidu said that “so far,” at least 18 people were known to have been killed in the series of attacks.

Among the people killed at the wedding were three men, including a high school teacher, an entrepreneur and a bicycle seller, said Baba Shehu Saidu, a friend of theirs and of the groom who said that he had planned to attend the wedding but had to cancel at the last minute. The bride and the groom survived the attack. It was not immediately clear if they were injured.

The victims “were kind, smart people who had white-collar jobs and were giving back to their community,” said Mr. Saidu, 30, a lecturer in mathematics at Borno State University in the city of Maiduguri, who is not related to the emergency services director of the same name.

Conflicting reports were given on Sunday by the police and the emergency services. Mr. Daso, from the Borno police, said that there had been only two explosions. But in a telephone interview, Mr. Saidu from the emergency services said that he and his team had witnessed three, including one near a hospital where a female teenager detonated a device. Fatima Musa, a civil servant on Gwoza’s local government council, also said that three bombings had taken place in Gwoza.

President Bola Tinubu of Nigeria called the attacks “desperate acts of terror” and an “isolated episode.”

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, has been battling multiple security crises for years, including mass kidnappings of people of all ages and classes.

Boko Haram insurgents have abducted thousands of teenage girls and coerced them into forced marriages. They have also forced many to carry out suicide attacks at schools, markets, religious buildings and large gatherings.

In 2014, Boko Haram fighters kidnapped 276 schoolgirls in the village of Chibok. The Chibok Girls, as they came to be known, received global attention after condemnation by Michelle Obama and because of activism by campaigners who popularized the slogan “Bring Back Our Girls.”

A decade later, dozens are still missing.

Also in 2014, Boko Haram’s leader at the time, Abubakar Shekau, declared a caliphate in Gwoza after his fighters seized the city. The Nigerian Army retook control in 2015, and Mr. Shekau was killed in 2021.

At least 30 people injured in the bombings were taken to a larger hospital in Maiduguri, about 130 miles north of Gwoza, on Sunday, Ms. Musa, the local civil servant, told a Times journalist present at the hospital.

One of them was Mohammed Ali, a wedding attendant who was lying on a hospital bed and shouting in pain. He said that he was sharing pictures with a friend at the wedding reception when a woman approached, saying that she was hungry. Then Mr. Ali heard a loud sound. Several of his friends were killed instantly, he said in tears.

He was scheduled to undergo surgery on his injured shoulder later on Sunday.

Keir Starmer and the Labour Party may have won Britain’s general election, but another politician was also looking happy on Friday.

Nigel Farage, Britain’s veteran political disrupter and Brexit campaigner, saw his new anti-immigration Reform U.K. party secure five seats in Parliament and it could have been more. Reform won more than four million votes nationwide — around 14 percent — making it Britain’s third most successful party by that measure.

It was the latest successful result in Europe by populist, right-wing parties, and it instantly drew comparisons to the National Rally, which is seeking to become France’s biggest party in that country’s parliament in a final round of voting on Sunday. In his campaign, Mr. Farage said immigration had “diminished” the quality of life in Britain and that “the time has come to stand up and say ‘enough is enough.’” He has called for a “freeze” on nonessential immigration, blaming it for putting pressure on health services and housing.

Britain’s electoral system of first-past-the-post tends to work against smaller parties, meaning that Reform collected far fewer seats in the 650-member House of Commons than its vote share might have indicated. Still, Mr. Farage sounded triumphant on Friday.

“There is a massive gap on the center right of British politics, and my job is to fill it,” he told jubilant supporters after it was announced that he had won a parliamentary seat in Clacton, an economically distressed seaside region, by a big margin. It was his first successful run after seven failed races for Parliament.

He said his party would also “now be targeting Labour votes,” building on its second-place finish in the popular vote to become the dominant center-left party in several seats in northern England.

But the Conservatives may be most worried for now by Reform’s sudden rise. For years, Mr. Farage has tormented them, pushing the party to the right. Pressure from the U.K. Independence Party, which he once led, prompted the Tories to offer the Brexit referendum in 2016 that led to Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union.

Ahead of the general election, Mr. Farage suggested he could mount a takeover of the Conservatives if they suffered a cataclysmic defeat. A meltdown on that scale was averted. But with his three fellow lawmakers, Mr. Farage now has a bridgehead in Parliament, resources to build up his fledgling party and a platform from which to harass the Conservatives — as well as target voters in some traditionally Labour areas.

Success could bring greater scrutiny. During the election campaign, Mr. Farage endured a wave of criticism after Channel 4 News aired an exposé in which an undercover investigator secretly filmed Reform campaigners in Clacton making racist and homophobic statements, including using a racial slur to describe the incumbent prime minister, Rishi Sunak.

Mr. Farage is no stranger to controversy. A strong supporter of Donald J. Trump — he had initially said he wouldn’t run for Parliament so he could campaign for Mr. Trump in the United States — he has also argued that the West had provoked Russia into invading Ukraine.

His love of the limelight and his reluctance to delegate could hamper his ability to build his new party into the force he claims it will become. But he has nevertheless been able to force his way back onto the political stage.

With Mr. Sunak saying on Friday that he would step down as party leader, the Conservatives must decide on a new leadership and direction, and whether to build back by appealing to centrist voters or those on the hard right.

In the general election, the Tories lost dozens of seats to the centrist Liberal Democrats, so some moderates see that as a reason for their party to tack to the center. But others are worried that Mr. Farage’s noisy but often effective voice will push the party farther to the right.