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The country’s political focus will shift to the South on Tuesday with elections in Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas and Texas that will signal voters’ views on national issues and the strength of former President Donald J. Trump’s endorsement power.

In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp appears to be easily fending off a challenge from former Senator David Perdue in the Republican primary for governor, which would set up a rematch with Stacey Abrams, the presumptive Democratic nominee. Mr. Trump recruited Mr. Perdue to run after Mr. Kemp refused to help overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results. A Trump-backed challenger is also trying to oust the state’s Republican secretary of state.

In Alabama, a competitive Republican primary for Senate is unfolding after Representative Mo Brooks lost Mr. Trump’s endorsement in the race in March. The election could head to a runoff.

In Texas, voters will decide runoff races for attorney general and a House seat in the Rio Grande Valley. The congressional race will pit Representative Henry Cuellar, an anti-abortion Democrat who remains part of an F.B.I. investigation, against Jessica Cisneros, a progressive challenger.

And in Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mr. Trump’s former press secretary, is expected to win the Republican primary for governor.

Here are a few of the themes we’ll be following on Tuesday:

In Georgia, Trump’s ‘big lie’ will be tested.

Mr. Trump put Georgia at the center of his crusade against what he has falsely claimed was a “stolen” election. But his influence on the state’s politics has appeared to wane.

Mr. Perdue, a former Kemp ally, has made challenging the results of the 2020 election the focal point of his campaign. He opened all three debates against Mr. Kemp by falsely arguing that he and Mr. Trump were victims of fraud in Georgia’s presidential election and its Senate runoff races in early 2021.

Yet Georgia Republicans have gravitated toward issues beyond the last election, focusing on the state’s economy, education and rising crime rates in Georgia cities. Partly as a result, Mr. Kemp has outpaced Mr. Perdue by more than 30 percentage points in recent polling and has surpassed the former senator in fund-raising by nearly $10 million.

The only other race in which the 2020 election — and Mr. Trump’s influence — is as prominent is the contest for secretary of state. The Republican incumbent, Brad Raffensperger, is fending off a primary challenge from Representative Jody Hice, who has Mr. Trump’s backing. Polls indicate that neither candidate has garnered more than 30 percent of support from voters, which suggests that the race is likely to go to a runoff.

Still, there are signs of life among Georgia voters: Turnout during the state’s three-week early voting period topped 850,000, a large increase from the same time during the 2018 primary.

This week, Georgia will also kick off one of the country’s most important Senate elections, between Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat running for re-election, and Herschel Walker, a Republican backed by Mr. Trump who is widely expected to cruise to victory in his party’s primary.

How will an Alabama Senate candidate fare after being abandoned by Trump?

Representative Mo Brooks, a longtime ally of Mr. Trump’s who was involved in the effort to overturn the 2020 election results, is making a last-minute surge among conservative Alabamans that could lift him into a runoff.

But the race remains anyone’s to win. An Emerson College survey of Alabama voters conducted days before the primary showed Mr. Brooks trailing two rivals: Katie Britt, a businesswoman and the former chief of staff to Senator Richard Shelby, who is leading the pack, and Mike Durant, an Army veteran.

Mr. Brooks faces headwinds at home and in Washington. Mr. Trump’s move to withdraw his endorsement in March damaged the congressman’s reputation among the state’s Republican base.

The House committee investigating the 2021 Capitol riot has asked to interview Mr. Brooks regarding his comments about the former president’s request that he “rescind” the 2020 election results.

And the congressman has made an enemy out of Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, who has poured $2 million into a super PAC opposing his campaign. Mr. McConnell supports Ms. Britt for the seat.

Outside money is playing a big role in this race, with all three top-polling contenders being aided by groups that are spending millions to slam opposing candidates and label them as out of touch with Alabama voters. One group, the pro-Durant Alabama Patriots PAC, cut a television advertisement that goes after Mr. Brooks and Ms. Britt as “Trump-trashing, tax-raising insiders.” Another, the Britt-supporting Alabama Christian Conservatives group, has put forth a negative advertisement targeting Mr. Durant, saying he is lenient on immigration and gun ownership.

“Vote Katie Britt,” the narrator says. “She’s one of us.”

In a Texas House primary, could the abortion issue prove decisive?

Mr. Cuellar is the last anti-abortion Democrat in the House of Representatives. The leak of a draft opinion signaling that the Supreme Court is likely to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion ruling, this summer could make the second time the charm for Jessica Cisneros in her bid to unseat him.

The renewed fight for abortion access has underlined internal Democratic tensions as progressives line up behind Ms. Cisneros and a handful of moderates come to Mr. Cuellar’s defense. On Thursday, Representative Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, endorsed Ms. Cisneros. National abortion rights groups like Emily’s List have also thrown financial support behind her bid, booking television advertisements that are critical of Mr. Cuellar.

Ms. Cisneros has the backing of several other high-profile progressives in Congress, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who have made full-throated fund-raising pitches on her behalf.

Ms. Cisneros fell short by 3.6 percentage points in her 2020 challenge to Mr. Cuellar, whom she once interned for. This time around, his campaign must contend with not only his record on abortion but also an F.B.I. raid of his home and campaign office in February. Mr. Cuellar has promised he did nothing wrong, and his lawyer has said that while he was cooperating with the investigation, he was not the target of it.

Texas’ Democratic primary for attorney general has also placed abortion at its center, as both candidates pitch themselves as would-be defenders of abortion access against their Republican opponents, who are likely to be overwhelming favorites in November.

Rochelle Garza, a civil rights lawyer, is the front-runner in the race, having garnered more of the vote share in the primary than the other Democrat in the running, former Mayor Joe Jaworski of Galveston. Ms. Garza called the office a “last stand” in protecting Texans from strict abortion laws.

Will Texas’ scandal-trailed attorney general prevail?

Mr. Cuellar is not the only candidate in Texas’ runoff elections on Tuesday who has been the subject of law enforcement scrutiny for the use of his office.

Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, was indicted and arrested in 2015 on still-pending charges of securities fraud. Former aides have said he violated state law by using the influence of his office to help a donor.

But he has maintained his viability in the Republican primary by pursuing a laundry list of conservative priorities, including defending an abortion law passed by the state last year and joining the push to criminalize transition care for transgender youths.

With the backing of Mr. Trump and relatively strong support from Texas Republicans, Mr. Paxton garnered a larger share of the vote in the March primary election than his second-round opponent, George P. Bush, the state’s land commissioner.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders is on track to become Arkansas’s governor. What’s next?

Ms. Sanders, a White House press secretary under Mr. Trump, is also political royalty in Arkansas, as the daughter of former Gov. Mike Huckabee.

Her status has put her on a glide path to the Republican nomination for governor in what is a deep-red state. It also could position her for higher political office, beyond the governor’s mansion.

Carissa Beard was helping her daughter pack up her dorm room on Sunday night when she got the text from her husband, the lead pastor of First Baptist Church of Thurmont in Maryland. The nearly 300-page report on sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention had dropped online. “It is every bit as bad as I expected it to be,” she said.

When Philip Meade, pastor at Graefenburg Baptist Church in Kentucky, read the details, he began reworking his plans for the church’s worship service next Sunday. He will now devote a portion of the service to “a lament for the mishandling of sexual abuse claims and for the survivors who have suffered so much,” he said.

Michael Howard, the head pastor of Seaford Baptist Church on the coast of Virginia, paused a family vacation to spend hours reading the report on Sunday afternoon. “It makes you ill,” Mr. Howard said. “I know as the word gets out, the people in our church will be asking: What is our response?”

Revelations in a sprawling report covering 20 years of sexual abuse accusations are coursing through every level of Southern Baptist society. The report, made public by the denomination on Sunday, claims that top church leaders suppressed and mishandled abuse claims, resisted reforms and belittled victims and their families.

The investigation, conducted by a third party at the insistence of church members, has thrust the nation’s largest Protestant denomination into turmoil at a particularly fraught moment. The Southern Baptist Convention is already grappling with declining membership, sharp divisions over politics and culture, and a high-stakes leadership change that is weeks away.

In some quarters, pastors and church members are openly frustrated at what they see as years of inaction on a crisis that has publicly persisted since 2019, when an investigation by The Houston Chronicle and The San Antonio Express-News revealed that nearly 400 Southern Baptist leaders, from youth pastors to top ministers, had pleaded guilty or been convicted of sex crimes against more than 700 victims since 1998.

The report quickly proved to be another dividing line within the denomination, with some pastors and members seeing it as a call to action for deep cultural and structural changes on abuse, as well as a range of issues around politics and the treatment of women.

The denomination’s former policy head, Russell Moore, who left last year, called it an “apocalypse” that revealed “a reality far more evil and systemic than I imagined it could be.” Its current president, Ed Litton, said the report was “far worse” than he had anticipated.

More than 24 hours after the report was published online, leaders of the ultraconservative wing of the denomination remained largely silent. The Conservative Baptist Network, an influential group founded in 2020, said in a brief statement on Monday evening that while it disagreed “with certain aspects of the report,” Southern Baptists should study its recommendations.

Mr. Litton’s successor, to be chosen at the denomination’s annual meeting in June, will determine the convention’s direction.

Bart Barber, a Texas pastor who is a candidate favored by many of Mr. Litton’s supporters, said in a statement that the convention needed leadership that “breaks decisively” from the patterns described in the report. “Discovery is no substitute for action,” he said.

Another candidate, Tom Ascol, a Florida pastor who has said the denomination needs a “change of direction” from what he describes as a leftward drift, said in a statement late Monday that the report’s revelations should prompt Southern Baptists to “uphold God’s standards of holiness and purity in all things, especially in caring for those who are most vulnerable among us.” He urged prayer and study of the task force’s recommendations.

Leaders of the convention’s executive committee said they would meet on Tuesday to discuss the report.

In pews across the country, the report’s impact was just beginning to be felt. The denomination includes almost 14 million members in more than 47,000 congregations. In small towns and cities, pastors and churchgoers grappled with what the report said about their denomination, and what should happen next.

“Our people, I don’t think they have the bandwidth to get into all the details,” said Griffin Gulledge, the pastor of Madison Baptist Church in Georgia. “But what all my pastor friends are hearing is we better get this right, and we better fix this.” He is planning to discuss the report with attendees at the church’s weekly Bible study on Wednesday night.

For some victims and family members, the report did not go far enough. When a friend texted Christi Bragg that the report was online, she quickly tapped the Command and F keys to search for any references to the Village Church in Texas. Nothing popped up.

Four years ago she reported to the church’s leaders that her daughter, at about age 11, had been sexually abused at the church’s summer camp for children. A trial in her daughter’s lawsuit against the church is set to begin in October.

“The report ignores active legal litigation our daughter is navigating against one of the biggest churches in the S.B.C.,” Ms. Bragg said on Monday. “It continues to make you see the place she stands is such a difficult place; there is a lack of accountability and there is a lack of acknowledgment.”

The denomination has been roiled in debates over misogyny, racism and the handling of abuse cases in recent years. Critics say some pastors have focused more on fighting women in leadership and critical race theory than they have on rooting out abuse and the power structure that keeps it under wraps.

Three years ago, as the abuse crisis exploded in public view, a faction of ultraconservative pastors attacked Beth Moore, one of the most prominent white evangelical women in the United States, when she spoke at a church on Mother’s Day. She publicly renounced “the sexism & misogyny that is rampant in segments of the SBC,” and has since left the denomination.

“If you still refuse to believe facts stacked Himalayan high before your eyes and insist the independent group hired to conduct the investigation is part of a (liberal!) human conspiracy or demonic attack, you’re not just deceived,” Ms. Moore said in a tweet on Monday responding to the report. “You are part of the deception.”

The report shows how some leaders used the convention’s decentralized structure as a reason for avoiding mandatory accountability regarding sexual abuse in local churches. National entities have significantly less control over individual congregations than they do in institutions like the Roman Catholic Church.

Critics have said that the Southern Baptist Convention is comfortable drawing hard lines from the top down when it chooses. After one of the denomination’s largest congregations, Saddleback Church in Southern California, announced it had ordained three women pastors in supporting roles last year, high-profile pastors and leaders criticized the church sharply, and a committee was assigned to examine whether the denomination should break with the church.

Last year, the Southern Baptist Convention’s executive committee expelled two churches over their decisions to accept gay couples as members and church policies that the denomination deemed accepting of homosexuality.

For Ms. Beard, the Maryland pastor’s wife, the crisis remains personal. She is finishing a graduate degree in professional counseling, focused on trauma, to help people like her who have survived sexual and spiritual abuse in churches. While there are some people in the denomination who really want to do the right thing, she said, others are content with the status quo.

Last year she and her husband went to Nashville for the denomination’s convention and voted in favor of commissioning the report. They plan to go to next month’s convention in Anaheim, she said, “to make sure the S.B.C. follows through” on reforms.

“If we don’t have enough people that are willing to stand with the survivors, then, I’m going to call it the good ol’ boys network, is going to be successful at just brushing this aside,” she said.

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has revised rules governing the use of force by law enforcement agencies overseen by the Justice Department, requiring federal agents to intervene when they see officials using excessive force or mistreating people in custody.

The rule change was circulated on Friday and posted on the department’s website on Monday — two days before the second anniversary of the death of George Floyd, who died beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer as other officers looked on.

“It is the policy of the Department of Justice to value and preserve human life,” Mr. Garland wrote in the four-page memo. “Officers may use only the force that is objectively reasonable to effectively gain control of an incident, while protecting the safety of the officer and others.”

The changes represent the first revision of the department’s use-of-force policy in 18 years. It now requires officers to “recognize and act upon the affirmative duty to intervene to prevent or stop, as appropriate, any officer from engaging in excessive force or any other use of force that violates the Constitution, other federal laws or department policies on the reasonable use of force.”

The existence of the memo was reported earlier by The Washington Post.

The new rules will apply to the Justice Department’s entire work force, including agents and officers with the F.B.I., the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The department does not have the authority to impose the requirements on local police forces or sheriff’s departments, though the Biden administration intends for the document to be used as a template for localities.

The use-of-force rules, rewritten in consultation with civil rights groups after the Floyd killing, also draw heavily from the National Consensus Policy on Use of Force, which was drafted by 11 major law enforcement groups representing federal, state and local law enforcement officers.

Other provisions include prohibitions against firing a weapon at a moving vehicle with the sole purpose of stopping it, and discharging a warning shot “outside of the prison context.”

The new memo is far more explicit and prescriptive than prior guidelines on the rights and physical well-being of people pursued in connection with crimes or taken into federal custody.

Federal officers not only have a responsibility to stop acts of police brutality, but also now have “the affirmative duty to request and/or render medical aid, as appropriate, where needed,” according to the guidelines.

The Department of Homeland Security, which is not governed by the Justice Department, enacted a similar rule in 2018, advising its employees to seek medical attention “as soon as practicable following a use of force and the end of any perceived public safety threat.”

The Justice Department memo is one in a series of actions taken by the Biden administration in the wake of the death of Mr. Floyd and several other episodes of police brutality.

In April 2021, Mr. Garland announced a wide-ranging investigation into the patterns, practices and culture of the Minneapolis Police Department after the former officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering Mr. Floyd.

“Nothing can fill the void the loved ones of George Floyd have felt since his death,” Mr. Garland said at the time. “My heart goes out to them and to all those who have experienced similar loss.”

POKROVSK, Ukraine — Camouflaged in a heap of branches cut from nearby trees, the weapon that Ukraine hopes will make a critical difference in its war with Russia is all but invisible from more than a few feet away.

Soon, a single round shoots out with a boom and a howling, metallic shriek as it sails toward Russian positions.

It is the American-made M777 howitzer. It shoots farther, moves faster and is hidden more easily, and it’s what the Ukrainian military has been waiting for.

Three months into the war in Ukraine, the first M777s — the most lethal weapons the West has provided so far — are now deployed in combat in Ukraine’s east. Their arrival has buoyed Ukraine’s hopes of achieving artillery superiority at least in some frontline areas, a key step toward military victories in a war now fought mostly on flat, open steppe at long ranges.

The American howitzers are chunky machines of steel and titanium swathed in hydraulic hoses and perched on four braces that fold up and down. They have already fired hundreds of rounds since arriving around May 8, destroying armored vehicles and killing Russian soldiers, Ukrainian commanders say.

“This weapon brings us closer to victory,” Col. Roman Kachur, commander of the 55th Artillery Brigade, whose unit was the first unit to deploy the weapon, said in an interview. Mixing confidence with an implicit plea for more weapons, he added: “With every modern weapon, every precise weapon, we get closer to victory.”

How close remains unclear, Western military analysts say. The arrival of the new weapons is no guarantee of success, as the Russians continue to engage in fierce fighting in the eastern Donbas region. Much depends on numbers.

“Artillery is very much the business of quantity,” Michael Kofman, the director of Russian studies at C.N.A., a research institute in Arlington, Va., said in a telephone interview. “The Russians are one of the largest artillery armies you can face.”

The United States said weeks ago it would provide the howitzers, but their use in combat has so far been mostly hinted at in online videos posted, mostly anonymously, by soldiers. On Sunday, the military provided The New York Times a tour of a gun line in eastern Ukraine, the first independent confirmation by international media that the guns are in use.

Military analysts say the full effect won’t be felt for at least another two weeks, because Ukraine has yet to train enough soldiers to fire all 90 such howitzers pledged by the United States and other allies. Only about a dozen guns are now at the front.

Arming Ukraine with more powerful weapons is a politically sensitive issue. The United States, France, Slovakia and other Western nations have been rushing in artillery and support systems — such as drones, counter-battery radar and armored vehicles for towing guns — even as Russia accuses the West of fighting a proxy war in Ukraine, and threatens unspecified consequences if weapons shipments continue.

Disagreements over how aggressively to confront Russia have cropped up in the Western coalition. France, Italy and Germany have suggested that Ukraine use the leverage of more powerful weapons to push for a cease-fire that might lead to a negotiated withdrawal of Russian forces.

Ukrainian officials have pushed back. They insist that momentum is on their side and that talks should come only after battlefield wins and recapturing territory — once an almost inconceivable idea that became more tenable after Ukraine’s military inflicted multiple setbacks on Russia even before the arrival of Western heavy weaponry.

President Volodymyr Zelensky, in an interview on Ukrainian television over the weekend, said a diplomatic solution would come only after additional military victories for Ukraine, along with an influx of weapons. The Ukrainian military has repelled Russian troops from Kyiv and from positions near the country’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, but is under intense pressure now in a more limited battle for control of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.

“It’s like an automobile, not a gas-powered, or electric, but a hybrid,” he said of ending the war with a mix of military gains and talks. “And that is how war is: complicated.”

“Victory will be bloody,” Mr. Zelensky said.

In any case, diplomatic talks halted about a week ago, both sides said, throwing the outcome back to the battlefields. And not all has gone Ukraine’s way. Russian forces are now close to surrounding the city of Sievierodonetsk, threatening an encirclement of Ukrainian troops.

“I’m surprised people believe Ukrainian forces can absorb this level of losses and then be ready to go on the offensive right afterward,” Mr. Kofman, the analyst, said.

Still, the new, longer-ranged Western artillery are the most powerful and destructive of the many types now being provided by NATO countries. They fire three miles farther than the most common artillery system used by the Russian army in the Ukraine war, the Msta-S self-propelled howitzer — and 10 miles farther if shooting a precision, GPS-guided projectile.

Out on the open plains of the east, a long drive over potholed roads and dirt tracks ends with jeeps pivoting quickly into a tree line.

Secrecy is paramount in the cat-and-mouse artillery duels that have defined the war in recent weeks. Soldiers waste no time piling fresh-cut branches onto the vehicles, as camouflage against enemy drones.

In the artillery duels, soldiers value not just range but the ability to quickly hide and move guns and supporting vehicles.

Since their deployment two weeks ago, the dozen or so howitzers operating in two artillery batteries had by Sunday fired 1,876 rounds, according to Ukrainian officers.

With a mix of airburst, anti-personnel fragmentation rounds and other types of projectiles, the Ukrainian gunners have destroyed at least three Russian armored vehicles, and by Colonel Kachur’s estimate killed at least several dozen Russian soldiers.

At the firing line in the trees, empty ammunition boxes and spent cartridges were scattered amid foxholes. Kalashnikov rifles leaned against tree trunks.

The officers didn’t say what they were targeting.

The purpose of the guns will be to grind down Russian positions and military infrastructure, such as ammunition depots and command posts, he said. Ukrainian soldiers say the howitzers will also save civilian lives by striking Russian artillery firing on their towns.

The types of Western artillery flowing into Ukraine now have several advantages over Soviet legacy systems, Ukrainian artillery officers said. Among the most important is their compatibility with NATO caliber shells, easing fears that Ukraine might soon run out of Soviet-standard ammunition now made mostly in Russia.

In addition to the weapons the United States is sending, the French have promised Caesar truck-mounted howitzers, which are capable of quickly driving away after firing in a maneuver known as “shoot and scoot.” Slovakia has also pledged howitzers.

But the American M777, known as the triple seven, is likely to have the greatest effect for the quantity of guns provided, providing accurate, long-range fire when sufficient crews are trained to use them, military analysts say.

The bottleneck is training. The United States has so far trained about 200 Ukrainian soldiers in six-day courses at bases in Germany. The Ukrainian military divided this group roughly in half, sending some to the front and others to train more Ukrainians. Training soldiers for all 90 guns — the amount that are scheduled to arrive — could take another several weeks, said Mykhailo Zhirokhov, the author of a book on artillery in Ukraine’s war with Russian-backed separatists, “Gods of Hybrid War.’’

Smaller numbers of the computer-controlled, self-propelled Caesar guns from France will also help, Mr. Zhirokhov said, but learning to use them takes months. “Even the French think they are too complicated,” he said.

After the soldiers fired the M777, the gun was horizontal again, its barrel covered in camouflaging branches. “Move faster!” an officer yelled. The crew then ran, in case the Russians had fixed their location.

GENEVA — A diplomat in Russia’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva quit his post on Monday, expressing shame over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and describing it as a crime against both countries.

Boris Bondarev, a counselor in the Russian mission since 2019 who described himself as a 20-year veteran of Russia’s Foreign Ministry, announced his resignation in an email sent to diplomats in Geneva on Monday. His resignation is the most high-profile gesture of protest so far made by a Russian diplomat over the war in Ukraine.

“For 20 years of my diplomatic career I have seen different turns of our foreign policy but never have I been so ashamed of my country as on Feb. 24 of this year,” Mr. Bondarev said, referring to the date that President Vladimir V. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine.

“The aggressive war unleashed by Putin against Ukraine and in fact against the entire Western world is not only a crime against the Ukrainian people but also, perhaps, the most serious crime against the people of Russia,” he added.

Diplomats in Geneva confirmed that they had received the email. Mr. Bondarev, reached by phone after responding to a message on his LinkedIn account, confirmed sending it to several dozen colleagues at other missions and said he had tendered his resignation Monday morning.

Mr. Bondarev, 41, is listed as a counselor in the Russian mission on the website of the United Nations; he sent The New York Times a copy of his diplomatic passport to confirm his identity.

Russia’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva said that its spokesperson was not immediately available, but that it would soon issue a statement.

Mr. Bondarev, who dealt with disarmament issues and was described by Western officials in Geneva as a mid-ranking diplomat, delivered a bitter denunciation of Russia’s leadership.

“Those who conceived this war want only one thing — to remain in power for ever, live in pompous tasteless palaces, sail on yachts comparable in tonnage and cost to the entire Russian navy, enjoying unlimited power and complete impunity,” he said in a statement attached to his email to diplomats. “To achieve that they are willing to sacrifice as many lives as it takes.”

He added: “It’s been already three months since my government launched a bloody assault on Ukraine and it’s been very hard to keep my mind more or less sane when all about were losing theirs.”

He should have resigned three months ago, he said, when Russia invaded, but he had delayed because he had unfinished family business and “had to gather my resolve.”

Mr. Bondarev went on to deliver a stinging critique of Russia’s foreign service and its chief diplomat, Sergey V. Lavrov. The ministry had been his home, he said, but over the last 20 years the lies and unprofessionalism had reached levels that he described as “simply catastrophic.”

“Today the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not about diplomacy. It is all about warmongering, lies and hatred,” he wrote, and was contributing to Russia’s isolation.

Mr. Lavrov was “a good illustration of the degradation of this system,” Mr. Bondarev said. In 18 years, the Russian foreign minister had gone from being a professional and educated intellectual esteemed by colleagues to threatening the world with nuclear weapons.

“I simply cannot any longer share in this bloody, witless and absolutely needless ignominy,” Mr. Bondarev wrote.

Three months after the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, judges in Kyiv on Monday handed down the first guilty verdict for a Russian soldier tried for war crimes.

Sgt. Vadim Shishimarin, 21, was convicted of shooting a 62-year-old civilian, Oleksandr Shelipov, in the northern region of Sumy in the first days of the war. Sergeant Shishimarin, who had pleaded guilty at the start of the trial last week, was sentenced to life in prison.

Judge Serhiy Ahafonov pronounced Sergeant Shishimarin guilty of violating the laws and customs of war and of committing premeditated murder. The verdict can be appealed.

“The defendant admitted his guilt in part, arguing that he had no intention of killing Mr. Shelipov,” said Judge Ahafonov. “The court cannot recognize the sincerity of repentance.”

The defendant sat in a glass cage, wearing the same blue-and-gray hoodie he has worn for every trial appearance, his head bowed as an interpreter whispered to him in Russian through an opening in the glass. After the verdict, as the court emptied of the hundreds of local and foreign journalists who gathered to hear the sentencing, the sergeant paced back and forth in the cell.

Sergeant Shishimarin was part of a 40-mile long convoy of armored vehicles snaking from the Russian border toward Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, which Moscow initially expected it could take within days.

According to prosecutors, Sergeant Shishimarin was commanding a tank division from the Moscow region. When his convoy came under attack by Ukrainian forces on Feb. 28, the Russians dispersed. Sergeant Shishimarin met four other men, who stole a car and tried to drive away.

From the car, in the village of Chupahivka, they spied Mr. Shelipov, who was talking on the phone as he rode his bicycle. Believing that Mr. Shelipov would report their location to Ukrainian forces nearby, another soldier — who was not Sergeant Shishimarin’s superior — told him to shoot, prosecutors said.

Sergeant Shishimarin fired three or four shots from his Kalashnikov.

When his trial began last week, Sergeant Shishimarin accepted his guilt. At a subsequent hearing, he apologized to Mr. Shelipov’s widow after she gave emotional testimony, asking him: “Did you come to defend us? From whom? Did you come to defend me from my husband that you killed?”

The verdict represents a milestone in Ukraine’s attempts to hold Russia and its soldiers accountable for atrocities committed in the war.

“Investigation of all war crimes and accountability is our main agenda now,” Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Irina Venediktova wrote on Facebook last week. She announced that two other cases had begun in the Poltava region against soldiers who had shelled the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.

Experts said the trial was one of the swiftest in Ukraine’s recent history.

“At present, the trial of Shishimarin looks as we have dreamed of,” said Olha Reshetylova, a coordinator for a media initiative for human rights organizations.

It was conducted, she said, “without undue delays and artificial procrastination by the parties to the case and the court, with the possibility of access to the court hearing for all, with online broadcasting and media and public attention.”

Ms. Reshetylova lamented that it had taken “a full-scale Russian invasion for the Ukrainian judiciary to understand that transparency and accessibility in warfare is not only a matter of justice, but also an element of justice to satisfy the victims.”

The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, acknowledged the trial in a call with journalists on Monday.

“Of course we are concerned about the fate of our citizen,” he said. “But we do not have many opportunities to protect his interests on the spot.”

Maria Varenikova contributed reporting.