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WASHINGTON — Responding to a string of mass shootings, a divided House passed a ban on assault weapons on Friday, moving over the near-unanimous opposition of Republicans to reinstate a prohibition that expired nearly two decades ago.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi described the measure, which passed 217 to 213, as a “crucial step in our ongoing fight against the deadly epidemic of gun violence in our nation.” Only two Republicans, Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Chris Jacobs of New York, joined Democrats in supporting the bill.

Five Democrats voted against the measure: Representatives Henry Cuellar of Texas, Jared Golden of Maine, Ron Kind of Wisconsin, Vicente Gonzalez of Texas and Kurt Schrader of Oregon.

The legislation would make it illegal to sell, manufacture, transfer, possess or import assault weapons and large-capacity ammunition feeding devices. It stands no chance of passing in the evenly divided Senate, where such a sweeping gun control measure would not be able to win over the 10 Republicans it would need to overcome a filibuster.

Still, the vote provided a way for Democrats to demonstrate to voters months before the midterm elections that they were trying to address the epidemic of gun violence in America. The action in the House came after a spate of mass shootings, including one in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman wielding an AR-15-style weapon killed 19 elementary school students and two teachers.

In a statement on Friday evening, President Biden applauded the House’s passage of the assault weapons ban.

“The majority of the American people agree with this common-sense action,” he said, adding that “there can be no greater responsibility than to do all we can to ensure the safety of our families, our children, our homes, our communities and our nation.”

The vote also gave Democrats another opportunity to draw a sharp distinction with Republicans. This month, the House passed legislation to ensure access to contraception nationwide, as well as major protections for abortion and same-sex marriage. While Democratic senators are hopeful that they will be able to pass the same-sex marriage legislation, almost all Republicans in Congress are united in opposition to the contraception and abortion bills.

The debate on assault weapons on Friday came about a month after the enactment of bipartisan gun safety legislation, a compromise measure to toughen background checks for prospective buyers younger than 21 that aimed to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people.

That measure omitted stricter gun controls that Democrats have long demanded and most Republicans have opposed as infringements on the right to bear arms.

“Weapons of war are designed for war,” Representative Lloyd Doggett, Democrat of Texas, said on Friday, lamenting that such firearms are “easier for a teenager to get than to buy a beer.”

He dismissed the recently enacted law as a “weak, modest measure.”

Republicans argued that AR-15-style weapons are popular sporting rifles that law-abiding citizens use for self-defense and hunting. And they dismissed the assault weapons bill as an attempt by liberals to trample on gun rights while doing nothing to address the root causes of crime.

“Let’s call this for what it is: It’s a gun grab, pure and simple,” said Representative Guy Reschenthaler, Republican of Pennsylvania. “This bill is not about public safety. Rather, this is the most severe restriction on the Second Amendment since the passage of the assault weapons ban of 1994.”

While the vote on Friday united Democrats, the assault weapons ban generated an intense internal debate that exposed divisions over the issue of law enforcement and crime, a theme that Republicans have signaled will be a major element of their campaign attacks on Democrats before the midterm elections.

Democrats had originally planned to pair the vote to ban assault weapons with legislation that would provide more funding to local police departments. Moderate Democrats from conservative-leaning districts argued that passing the police funding would blunt Republican accusations that Democrats are soft on crime and bent on defunding the police.

But the police legislation drew criticism from progressives and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who insisted that more police accountability measures should be included. With the House’s August recess set to begin this weekend, Democratic leaders decided to hold a vote only on the assault weapons bill.

Ms. Pelosi said on Friday that lawmakers would continue to work on the police legislation after returning to Washington later in the summer.

When the House passed the 1994 crime bill, which included the assault weapons ban, 46 Republicans supported the legislation and 64 Democrats opposed it. The ban expired in 2004 and has never been renewed; the Republican Party is united in opposition to such a measure.

“The American people are tired of living in fear,” said Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts. “They are tired of thoughts and prayers. They are tired of press releases offering sympathy but no solutions.”

“This is not a radical idea,” he added. “We are not in uncharted territory.”

Monkeypox, once a relatively obscure virus endemic to Africa, has bloomed into a global threat, infecting more than 20,000 people in 75 countries and forcing the World Health Organization to declare a worldwide health emergency.

On Thursday, New York State and San Francisco declared emergencies of their own. But even as the national tally nears 5,000 cases and experts warn that containment is slipping away, federal health officials have not followed suit.

One reason: This virus — unlike the coronavirus — is a known enemy, officials say. Doctors understand how it spreads, and there already are tests, vaccines and treatments.

But to scientists, the accumulating research presents a more complicated, and challenging, picture. The virus remains a mystery in some important ways, not exactly behaving in ways that researchers saw during sporadic outbreaks in African countries.

Scientists are racing to answer three questions in particular that will determine how quickly monkeypox can be stopped — if it can be stopped at all.

Exactly how is the virus spreading?

At the beginning of the outbreak, health officials asserted that the virus spread through respiratory droplets emitted when an infected person coughed or sneezed, and through close contact with pus-filled skin lesions or bedding and other contaminated materials.

All of that was true. But it may not be the whole picture.

More than 99 percent of the people infected so far are men who acquired the virus through intimate contact with other men, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Only 13 women and two young children had been diagnosed with monkeypox as of July 25.

Researchers have found the virus in saliva, urine, feces and semen. It is unclear whether those fluids can be infectious and, in particular, whether the virus can be transmitted during sex by means other than close skin-to-skin contact. But the pattern of spread so far, along sexual networks, has left researchers wondering.

It is clear, however, that monkeypox does not spread easily and has not yet spilled into the rest of the population. The average person is not at risk from store-bought clothes, for example, or from a fleeting interaction with an infected person, as some social media posts have suggested.

According to the C.D.C., people without symptoms cannot spread monkeypox. But at least one study has detected the virus in men who did not experience any symptoms. The pattern of symptoms has also diverged from that observed in previous outbreaks.

In Africa, some people became ill after touching infected animals, consuming bushmeat or using medicinal products made from the animals. They often developed fever and body aches, followed by a characteristic rash first on the face, palms and feet, and then over the whole body. Infants and pregnant women seemed at highest risk of severe symptoms.

In the outbreak outside Africa, many patients don’t have fever or respiratory symptoms at all, and the rash is often limited to a few lesions in the genital or rectal area, which can easily be mistaken for various sexually transmitted infections.

Britain has now modified its official description of monkeypox to include lesions in the mouth, and anal or rectal pain and bleeding. Some scientists have speculated that the presentation of the disease in Western countries may accurately reflect the virus’s natural course.

Is one dose of the vaccine sufficient?

Jynneos, the safer of two vaccines for monkeypox, is made by Bavarian Nordic, a small company in Denmark. Supplies have been severely constrained, and the Biden administration moved slowly to acquire additional doses as the virus spread.

Now, federal officials have ordered nearly seven million doses, which will arrive in batches over the next months. So far, the administration has shipped about 320,000 doses to states. The Food and Drug Administration said on Wednesday that it had approved another 800,000 doses, but it was unclear when they would be distributed.

Jynneos is supposed to be administered in two doses 28 days apart. But some cities, including Washington and New York City, are holding back second doses until more become available, emulating a strategy adopted by Britain and Canada.

Federal health officials have advised against deferring second doses. But in studies, a single shot of Jynneos appears to be protective for up to two years. If that finding holds true in the real world, then postponing additional shots may help officials contain the outbreak by immunizing more Americans.

Britain held back second doses of the Covid vaccine early in the pandemic, when supplies were low, noted Tinglong Dai, an expert in vaccine supply at Johns Hopkins University. “The benefit of prioritizing first doses outweighs the risk,” he said.

There may not be much choice as eligibility widens and more at-risk people seek shots. Some jurisdictions already have expanded the groups eligible for immunization to include sex workers, patients of sexual health clinics, and clinicians and other employees who may be exposed to the virus at work.

In Rhode Island, Emily Rogers, a 29-year-old medical anthropologist, said she was able to call the local health department and get an appointment “very, very quickly.”

Ms. Rogers qualified for the shot because she sometimes has sex with men at high risk for monkeypox infection. Nobody questioned her eligibility. “They weren’t weird about that at all — it was a very smooth process,” she said.

Because of the shortage, the vaccine is being offered only as a preventive measure, even though it can mitigate symptoms if given within days after exposure.

David Baldwin, 45, a music professor in New York, qualified for vaccination only because doctors didn’t believe he was already infected. (His initial symptom was rectal pain.) “As a result, I think, I never developed lesions on my body,” he said.

How well does drug treatment work?

In 2018, the F.D.A. approved a drug to treat smallpox called tecovirimat, or TPOXX, based on data from animal studies. There are only limited data on its use in people.

Supply is not an issue: The national stockpile holds about 1.7 million doses. Yet the drug has been difficult to acquire, and that has meant that ambiguities about how well and for whom the drug works have persisted even as case counts rise.

Because tecovirimat is not approved specifically to treat monkeypox, it can only be prescribed through a cumbersome “investigational drug protocol” that, until recently, required doctors to send the C.D.C. detailed reports, a journal maintained by the patients to record their progress and photographs of the lesions.

With so many hurdles, many clinics did not offer tecovirimat at all; even physicians at well-funded institutions were managing to treat only two or three patients per day.

Nephi Niven Stogner, 39, sought help for monkeypox symptoms on July 8. He was in excruciating pain and tried to get tecovirimat, but was told that others were sicker and needed it more.

While he waited for the drug in isolation, three new lesions popped up on his back. “It’s like your sentence is getting extended,” he said.

Mr. Stogner finally got his first dose on July 21. Within 24 hours, his “lesions went from swollen and red to flat, dark spots,” he said.

Such delays led the C.D.C. to ease the rules for access to tecovirimat. The agency now requires fewer patient visits, samples and forms, and allows doctors to assess patients virtually.

Wider use should mean that scientists and health officials will gain a better understanding of the drug’s efficacy. The new requirements will help the C.D.C. “determine if and how well this drug works for monkeypox patients,” noted Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the agency.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is planning a clinical trial of tecovirimat in adults with monkeypox infection, including people living with H.I.V., which may begin this fall. The agency is collaborating with Siga Technologies, which manufactures the drug, on another trial in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the virus is a longtime scourge, also expected to begin this fall.

The new Beyoncé album has officially arrived. In a rare breach of the pop queen’s carefully choreographed release plans, an unauthorized version of “Renaissance,” the singer’s seventh solo studio LP and the first part of a teased trilogy, leaked two days early online.

Beyoncé acknowledged the hitch in a statement upon the album’s wide release on streaming services at midnight on Friday. “So, the album leaked, and you all actually waited until the proper release time so you all can enjoy it together,” she wrote to her dedicated fans. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she added, thanking her followers “for your love and protection.”

The debut of “Renaissance” followed a marketing rollout that, for Beyoncé, was oddly conventional. After years of ripping up the standard playbook for releasing new music — eschewing early radio singles and interviews for surprise drops and elaborate multimedia spectacles — Beyoncé spent six weeks beating the promotional drum. She announced the album more than a month ahead of time, did an interview with British Vogue, put out the single “Break My Soul,” revealed a track list and finally began posting on TikTok.

Yet on Wednesday, about 36 hours before the appointed release time, high-quality copies of the album’s 16 tracks appeared online, spreading across social media even as Beyoncé’s most vigilant fans encouraged one another to hold out (and to tattletale on the bootleggers). “I appreciate you for calling out anyone that was trying to sneak into the club early,” Beyoncé wrote in her statement on social media as the album was released.

Sleuthing observers speculated that the tracks may have come from copies of the CD that were being sold in some European stores early. In a perverse way, the old-fashioned leak of a blockbuster album seemed to fit the throwback theme of “Renaissance,” which throbs with the sound of dance music from across the decades.

Referencing disco, funk, house, techno, bounce and more, the generally upbeat songs draw from a wide array of writers and producers, with some tracks crediting more than dozen people. In addition to reliable Beyoncé collaborators like The-Dream, Pharrell Williams, Hit-Boy and Drake, experimental songs like “Energy” and “All Up In Your Mind” also feature electronic producers including Skrillex, BloodPop and A.G. Cook of PC Music among their eclectic personnel.

The samples and interpolations run the gamut as well, from the regional and esoteric to the indelible: “America Has a Problem” pulls from the Atlanta bass pioneer Kilo, while “Summer Renaissance,” the closing song, includes an interpolation of Donna Summer’s 1977 electro-disco classic “I Feel Love.” On “Move,” a feature from the cultural chameleon Grace Jones is paired with the rising Afrobeats star Tems; elsewhere, Beyoncé links the sounds of traditional Black music genres like soul and R&B with subcultures like ballroom vogueing.

“I’m one of one/I’m number one/I’m the only one,” she intones on “Alien Superstar.” “Don’t even waste your time trying to compete with me/no one else in this world can think like me.”

In an explanatory statement posted to Instagram last month that Beyoncé expanded on her website on Thursday, she said “Renaissance” was part of a “three act project” she recorded during the pandemic. She called the album, which she refers to as “Act I,” “a place to dream and to find escape during a scary time for the world.”

Adding that she hoped the dance floor-focused tracks would inspire listeners to “release the wiggle,” she added: “My intention was to create a safe place, a place without judgment. A place to be free of perfectionism and overthinking. A place to scream, release, feel freedom.”

Beyoncé also cited her late “Uncle Jonny,” whose battle with H.I.V. the singer has spoken about before, as an influence for the music and its historical ties to the L.G.B.T.Q. community.

“He was my godmother and the first person to expose me to a lot of the music and culture that serve as an inspiration for this album,” she wrote. “Thank you to all of the pioneers who originate culture, to all of the fallen angels whose contributions have gone unrecognized for far too long.”

Since “Lemonade” (2016), her last solo studio LP and accompanying film, Beyoncé has tided fans over with a number of ambitious in-between projects.

In 2018, she performed as one of the headliners at the Coachella festival, where her show paid tribute to the marching band tradition of historically Black colleges and universities, and was widely hailed as triumph — one that “reoriented her music, sidelining its connections to pop and framing it squarely in a lineage of Southern Black musical traditions,” as The New York Times critic Jon Caramanica wrote. The performance was later turned into a Netflix special and an album, both titled “Homecoming.”

Also in 2018, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, her husband, released a joint album, “Everything Is Love,” credited to the Carters. And in June 2020, at the height of national protests in wake of George Floyd’s murder, she released a song, “Black Parade,” with lines like “Put your fist up in the air, show Black love.”

“Black Parade” took the Grammy Award the next year for best R&B performance, one of four prizes that night that brought Beyoncé’s career haul to 28 — more than any other woman. This year, Beyoncé was nominated at the Academy Awards for best original song for “Be Alive,” from the film “King Richard,” a biopic about the father of Venus and Serena Williams.

How the early leak will affect the commercial prospects of “Renaissance” remains unclear. Years ago, the unauthorized release of music in advance could have devastating consequences for an album. But that danger has been mitigated by the shift to streaming.

And Beyoncé, like most other artists today, took advance orders for physical copies of her album, which will count on the charts as soon as they are shipped — usually the week of release. On Beyoncé’s website, the four boxed sets of “Renaissance” and its limited-edition vinyl version are sold out.

LONDON — It began as an Instagram-related quarrel between the spouses of two British soccer stars and grew into a libel trial that provided a welcome distraction for a nation in turmoil.

The High Court on Friday brought an end to the long-running legal feud by ruling against the plaintiff, Rebekah Vardy, saying that she had not been defamed by her former friend Coleen Rooney.

In the verdict, Justice Karen Steyn ruled that the reputational damage suffered by Ms. Vardy did not meet what she described as “the sting of libel.” For that reason, she stated in a written decision published on Friday, “the case is dismissed.”

The court also chastised Ms. Vardy, who filed the suit against Ms. Rooney in June 2020, saying that Ms. Vardy had regularly passed information about her onetime friend to the press, adding that “significant parts of her evidence were not credible.”

“There were many occasions when the Claimant’s evidence was manifestly inconsistent with the contemporaneous documentary evidence, evasive or implausible,” Ms. Steyn wrote in the decision.

With its combination of low stakes and high melodrama, the dispute between Ms. Vardy and Ms. Rooney did not amount to the trial of the century. But the case attracted months of overheated tabloid coverage at a time when Britain was navigating a stubborn pandemic and a struggling economy while its prime minister was on the ropes.

The legal dispute was between Ms. Vardy, the wife of the Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy, and Ms. Rooney, who is married to the former Manchester United star Wayne Rooney. The women belong to a group known as WAGs, a common, if sexist, tabloid acronym for the “wives and girlfriends” of professional athletes, particularly Premier League footballers.

In 2019, Ms. Rooney suspected that a follower of her private Instagram account was selling information about her, gleaned from her posts, to The Sun, a Rupert Murdoch-owned London tabloid known for its pungent celebrity coverage. To suss out the supposed leaker, Ms. Rooney set a trap: She made her Instagram Stories visible only to Ms. Vardy and used the account to plant false information about herself. Then she waited to see if it ended up in the press.

At the end of her monthslong sting operation, Ms. Rooney claimed that Ms. Vardy was the culprit. She leveled that accusation in a social media statement in the fall of 2019 that was widely shared. Because of her sleuthing tactics, Ms. Rooney became known as “Wagatha Christie,” a mash-up of WAG and Agatha Christie, the 20th-century mystery writer.

Ms. Vardy issued a swift denial that she was the leaker. She then said that she had hired forensic computer experts to determine whether anyone else had access to her Instagram account. After failed mediation, Ms. Vardy filed a defamation lawsuit against Ms. Rooney in High Court, which oversees high-profile civil cases in Britain.

This May, it went to court. The proceeding, formally called Vardy v. Rooney, became known as the Wagatha Christie Trial. The term was so common that it appeared in crawls on Sky News right next to “War in Ukraine.”

Tabloid photographers and cable news correspondents flocked to the steps outside London’s Royal Courts of Justice for the nine-day event, which proved to be a fashion spectacle as much as whodunit.

Ms. Vardy, 40, arrived in an assortment of finery, including a buttery yellow tweed suit by Alessandra Rich and an Alexander McQueen blazer. On her left foot, Ms. Rooney, 36, wore a medical boot, an ungainly plastic device that she paired with a Chanel loafer, a Gucci loafer and a Gucci mule. She had sustained a fracture in a fall at her house.

Ms. Vardy testified for three days. “I didn’t give any information to a newspaper,” she said under questioning early in her testimony. “I’ve been called a leak, and it’s not nice.”

The trial had plenty of TV-worthy plot twists. It was revealed in court that laptops were lost and that WhatsApp messages between Ms. Vardy and her agent, Caroline Watt — which apparently disparaged Ms. Rooney — had mysteriously disappeared. Ms. Vardy’s lawyer added that Ms. Watt had “regrettably” dropped an iPhone containing WhatsApp messages into the North Sea. Ms. Rooney’s lawyer, David Sherborne, replied that the mishap seemed to have resulted in the concealment of evidence.

“The story is fishy indeed, no pun intended,” he said.

Ms. Vardy told the court she could “neither confirm nor deny” what exactly had happened to her missing digital data. At another moment, she began a response with the phrase “if I’m honest,” causing Ms. Rooney’s barrister to snap: “I would hope you’re honest, because you’re sitting in a witness box.”

The case drew so much media attention because WAGs — like the players on the “Real Housewives” franchise in the United States — loom large in the British cultural imagination. They are photographed constantly. They star in reality shows and have their own fast-fashion lines and false-eyelash businesses. A TV series inspired by their shopping habits, feuds and love lives, “Footballers Wives,” was a hit in the early 2000s.

WAGs had a breakthrough moment in 2006, when a group of them enlivened the staid resort town Baden-Baden during that year’s World Cup, which took place in stadiums across Germany. The ringleader was Victoria Beckham, who had risen to fame as Posh Spice in the Spice Girls before marrying the great midfielder David Beckham. Also on the trip: the 20-year-old Coleen McLoughlin, who was dating Mr. Beckham’s teammate, Mr. Rooney, and would later marry him.

The tabloids ate it up. Reports from Baden-Baden told of WAGs singing “We Are the Champions” from a hotel balcony, dancing on tabletops and chugging Champagne, vodka and Red Bull into the wee hours. In the daytime, the women went on epic shopping sprees and sunbathed as the paparazzi snapped away.

When England lost in the quarterfinals to Portugal, some sports pundits unfairly blamed the WAGs for the defeat. Predictably, the tabloids that had made them into celebrities tried to tear them down. “The Empty World of the WAGs” was the headline of a finger-wagging piece in The Daily Mail.

Years later, Wayne Rooney and Jamie Vardy played together for England, which added to the delicious awkwardness of the recent court proceedings.

The trial fit snugly into a culture that sometimes revels in images of how foolish it can be — see also the popular TV show “Love Island.” It also touched on betrayal and lies, which were defining themes in Britain as Prime Minister Boris Johnson incurred fines for breaking lockdown rules, then announced that he would step down after his party pushed him out over other deceptions.

The trial also presented the complexities of the British class system. Online jokes from those following the case homed in on Oxford-educated lawyers reading aloud text messages filled with profane terms from women who are often dismissed as shallow or “chavvy,” to borrow a word Ms. Vardy used in reference to a cousin of Mr. Rooney’s.

Unlike this year’s other high-profile celebrity court battle, Depp v. Heard, these proceedings were not streamed live, which added to the appeal. Old-school courtroom sketches made the parties look like a potato, the moon and, according to one commentator, “Norman Bates’s mother.”

KYIV, Ukraine — Russia, apparently, is ready for a cease-fire. The door to negotiations, the Kremlin’s spokesman said last week, has never been closed.

No one should be fooled. Whatever its officials may say, Russia remains focused on war and aims to ruin Ukraine and shatter the West. The sight of Odesa, hit by Russian missiles just hours after a deal was reached to allow grain exports from southern ports, should dispel any lingering naïveté. For Vladimir Putin, a cease-fire now would simply allow his depleted invasion forces to take a break before returning for further aggression.

The truth is simple: Mr. Putin will not stop until he is stopped. That’s why calls for a cease-fire, audible across Europe and America, are badly misplaced. This is not the time to accept unfavorable cease-fire proposals or peace deals. The task instead is to defeat Russia and limit its ability to attack anyone again in the foreseeable future. With sustained and timely assistance, Ukraine is ready and able to do so.

No one wanted this war other than Russia, and no country in the world craves peace more than Ukraine. But a lasting, durable peace — rather than the time bomb of a frozen conflict — is possible only after Russia suffers a major battleground defeat. That’s why Ukraine must win. Only then will Mr. Putin seek peace, not war.

It’s not as if the Russians are setting out a concrete path to a cease-fire. One day, Russia’s foreign minister claims the country is ready to expand its war aims. Next, he says Moscow is prepared to negotiate with Kyiv “on a wider range of issues.” In late June, Mr. Putin’s spokesman suggested Ukraine should accept Russia’s ultimatums and lay down arms to end the war. Last week, he said Russia is ready to resume talks but that the ball is in Ukraine’s court. It’s hard to know what to think — other than that Russia is not serious about ending the conflict.

Ukraine, the United States and our European allies need to speak to Mr. Putin in his language: the language of force. Practically, this means strengthening Ukraine militarily, by speeding up deliveries of advanced artillery pieces and armored vehicles, and economically with additional financial assistance. Sanctions should be increased, too, targeting Russian exports, banning its banks and restricting its access to maritime trade. Some might cavil at the price of such support. But the alternative, of an emboldened Mr. Putin, is much worse.

I am deeply grateful to the United States, and personally to my friend and counterpart Secretary of State Antony Blinken, for all the security and other assistance the country has provided. I am equally grateful to all our partners in Europe and around the world who are standing with Ukraine in this difficult time.

Yet I want to be clear: Military assistance to Ukraine is not charity. It is a necessary investment in Europe’s long-term security. The Ukrainian Army will emerge out of this conflict — Europe’s largest land war since 1945 — as one of the continent’s most capable military forces. After repelling Russia’s invasion, the Ukrainian military will devote itself to safeguarding the security and stability of Europe, protecting democracy from any authoritarian encroachment.

For all the skepticism about sanctions, the fact is that they work. Russia’s persistent attempts to lift them, such as proposals to relinquish its naval blockade of Ukrainian ports in exchange for the removal of sanctions, are the best testimony of their effectiveness. In his efforts to hurt the well-being of Europeans and North Americans, Mr. Putin is weaponizing energy and food, deliberately driving up global prices. Strengthening sanctions, which limit Russia’s ability to continue with the war, is the best way to bring such behavior to an end.

With global support, Ukraine has already stabilized the front line and is preparing to regain control over territories currently occupied by Russia, first and foremost in the strategically important south. It’s true that we lost some ground in the Luhansk region, because of Russia’s overwhelming advantage in artillery. But we are now slowly but steadily closing the gap, thanks to heavy weaponry supplied by the United States and others. In recent weeks, Russia has failed to make any significant gains. We are determined to turn the tide in our favor and push Russian forces out of our land.

In that spirit, we in Ukraine call on our partners to increase their support and reject Russia’s fake peace proposals. Nor should they pay any attention to the narrative, amplified by Russian propaganda, of so-called war fatigue. Every war is tiresome, but we need to endure. The price of losing — a crushed Ukraine, a shattered West and a resurgent Russia — is too high to countenance anything else.

Dmytro Kuleba (@DmytroKuleba) is the foreign minister of Ukraine.

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WASHINGTON — Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, and Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, were both nursing resentments when they met secretly in a windowless room in the basement of the Capitol last Monday to try to salvage a climate package that was a key piece of their party’s agenda.

Mr. Schumer was discouraged that Mr. Manchin had said he wasn’t ready to do the deal this summer, and might never be. Mr. Manchin was frustrated that Democrats had spent days publicly vilifying him for single-handedly torpedoing their agenda.

“You still upset?” Mr. Manchin asked Mr. Schumer as their aides scoured the hallways outside to ensure the attempt at a truce would not be detected by other senators or reporters.

It was the start of a frenzied and improbable effort by a tiny group of Democrats, carried out over 10 days and entirely in secret, that succeeded this week in reviving the centerpiece of President Biden’s domestic policy plan — and held out the prospect of a major victory for his party months before the midterm congressional elections.

The talks were driven by major concessions made to Mr. Manchin — who demanded fewer tax increases, more fossil fuel development and benefits for his home state. They also featured appeals to his pride by fellow Democrats, reassurance by a former Treasury Secretary that the package would not add to inflation, and many Zoom calls between Mr. Schumer, who had just recovered from a case of the coronavirus, and Mr. Manchin, who tested positive as the negotiations unfolded.

Now, Mr. Manchin and Mr. Schumer are working to rally their party around their compromise, put forth in a surprise announcement on Wednesday. It would set aside $369 billion for climate and energy programs, as well as raise taxes on corporations and high earners, while lowering the cost of prescription drugs, extending health subsidies and reducing the deficit.

The abrupt announcement of a deal suggested a potential reversal of fortune for Mr. Biden and the Democrats, who had resigned themselves to the demise of the climate, energy and tax package. They had been preparing to push forward with a scaled-back pairing of the prescription drug pricing measure with an extension of expanded health care subsidies.

“This thing could very well, could not have happened at all,” Mr. Manchin declared on Thursday morning in an interview with Hoppy Kercheval, a West Virginia radio host. “It could have absolutely gone sideways, so I had to see if we can make this work.”

Should it pass both chambers in the coming weeks, the measure would fulfill longstanding Democratic promises to address soaring health care costs and tax the rich, as well as provide the largest investment toward fighting climate change in American history.

“The work of the government can be slow and frustrating and sometimes even infuriating,” Mr. Biden said at the White House, where he cheered the deal. “Then, the hard work of hours and days and months from people who refuse to give up pays off. History is made. Lives are changed.”

As members called Mr. Schumer on Thursday to congratulate him on the agreement, the New York Democrat quoted his father, who passed away last year: “As my late father said: you need to persist, God will reward you.”

But the success of the package was not assured.

In a private caucus meeting with Democrats on Thursday morning, Mr. Schumer began laying the groundwork for what promises to be an arduous process of steering the compromise through the evenly divided Senate. The task is made more difficult by the chamber’s arcane rules, the Democrats’ bare-minimum majority and a coronavirus surge among senators.

Democrats planned to advance the bill using a fast-track process known as reconciliation that shields certain spending and tax measures from a filibuster, skirting solid Republican opposition. But they will still need unanimous support from members of their party, which was not yet guaranteed.

Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who has also been a holdout on her party’s domestic policy package, skipped the meeting with Mr. Schumer on Thursday and would not comment on the bill or indicate whether she planned to support it. She dispatched a spokeswoman to say she was reviewing the text and waiting to hear if it complied with Senate rules.

Even if it can win passage in the Senate, the measure would also need to pass the House, where Democrats can spare only a few votes given likely unanimous Republican opposition.

Republicans were furious over news of the deal. In the Senate, they suggested that Democrats had hoodwinked them into backing a major industrial policy bill designed to shore up American competitiveness with China. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, said his party would not support the bill as long as Democrats continued to press a reconciliation bill.

The deal was announced just hours after that bill passed, and House Republican leaders instructed their rank-and-file to oppose it as payback.

Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, charged that Mr. Manchin had done an “Olympic-worthy flip-flop” on the reconciliation package.

On Thursday, Democrats were still sorting through the details of the bill.

The critical concessions that ultimately won Mr. Manchin’s support included jettisoning billions of dollars’ worth of tax increases he opposed. He also won a commitment from Mr. Biden and Democratic leaders to enact legislation to streamline the permitting process for energy infrastructure. That could ease the way for a shale gas pipeline project in West Virginia in which Mr. Manchin has taken a personal interest.

While its climate goals are ambitious, the package also has benefits for the fossil fuel industry, including new oil and gas drilling lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Cook Inlet. It ties federal renewable energy development to fossil fuels, forcing the Interior Department to hold sales of oil leases if it wants to hold wind or solar auctions. That clashes directly with Mr. Biden’s campaign goal of ending new drilling leases on federal lands and waters.

There is also a proposal that permanently extends a tax designed to help provide benefits for coal miners coping with black lung disease and their beneficiaries, a major issue for West Virginia, one of the nation’s top coal-producing states.

It includes a proposal to change a preferential tax treatment for income earned by venture capitalists, though Ms. Sinema has expressed opposition to that provision in the past.

The agreement came together exactly one year after Mr. Manchin inked a secret deal with Mr. Schumer laying out what he would need in exchange for backing any spending and tax plan.

For more than a year, Mr. Manchin has been at the center of his party’s efforts to muscle through sweeping domestic policy legislation while they still control Washington, wielding his influence as a conservative Democrat in an evenly divided Senate. It is a place where his party can rarely spare a defection.

He refused for months to embrace his party’s landmark domestic policy bill, and in December rejected a $2.2 trillion version altogether, leaving many lawmakers and aides wary as talks quietly picked up again this spring.

When Mr. Manchin suggested to Mr. Schumer this month that even a more tailored package with new climate spending and tax proposals would have to wait until new inflation numbers were released in early August, many Democrats publicly excoriated Mr. Manchin for upending their best remaining chance to enact their plan.

But a few centrist allies, including Senators Mark Warner of Virginia, Chris Coons of Delaware and John Hickenlooper of Colorado, tried a different approach.

They refrained from openly criticizing Mr. Manchin, instead appealing to his sense of history and his zeal for playing a leading role in forging a high-stakes legislative deal.

They encouraged Mr. Manchin to remain at the table, telling him, Mr. Coons said in an interview, that “he had a chance to prove all his critics wrong, and that he had a chance to genuinely shape our history in a way that secures energy independence and a transition to a cleaner energy economy.”

“He really was getting pummeled, and there was a risk that he would walk away altogether — he didn’t,” Mr. Coons said. “Credit for his persistence and engagement goes to him and him alone.”

In recent days, Mr. Manchin also spoke with outside experts, including Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary, as he sought to ensure that the bill would not add to inflation.

Democrats appeared ebullient about the bill, even with some of their priorities jettisoned or severely curtailed. Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, said there was “a sense of joy that we’re really doing the most significant bill on climate change in the history of our country,” and joked that he rarely saw senators enthusiastic about the prospect of weekend work.

Democratic leaders aimed to hold votes on the legislation in the Senate as early as next week, before the chamber is scheduled to leave for a summer recess. But they will have to navigate the legislation through a series of parliamentary and procedural challenges, including a set of rapid-fire, politically fraught amendments Republicans can force before a final vote.

And with Republicans expected to unanimously oppose the measure, Democrats will need all 50 senators who caucus with them to be present and to back the package for it to pass the Senate, along with the tiebreaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris.

Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat, said on Thursday that he had tested positive for the coronavirus, becoming the latest senator forced to isolate this month.

Catie Edmondson, Lisa Friedman and Stephanie Lai contributed reporting.

WASHINGTON — President Biden and President Xi Jinping of China confronted each other over Taiwan during a marathon phone call on Thursday, but neither side reported any concrete progress on that longstanding dispute or any of the other issues that have flared between the two powers in recent months.

In their first direct conversation in four months, Mr. Xi sharply warned the United States against intervening in the conflict with Taiwan while Mr. Biden sought to reassure his counterpart that his administration was not seeking to upset the current situation between the two sides and cautioned that neither should either of them.

“President Biden underscored that the United States policy has not changed and that the United States strongly opposes anyone who will change the status quo or undermine peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters after the call, which lasted two hours and 17 minutes.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called it a productive conversation but pushed back against what it considers American provocations without directly mentioning a prospective trip to Taiwan by Speaker Nancy Pelosi that has riled Beijing in recent days.

“Playing with fire will set yourself on fire,” the ministry said in a statement, repeating a metaphor it used in November as well. It said that Mr. Xi told Mr. Biden that China “firmly” opposed “interference by external forces” on Taiwan’s status and that China would “never leave any space for Taiwan independence forces in any form.”

“Public opinion cannot be violated,” the statement added, a reference to China’s position that Taiwan belonged to the government in Beijing. “I hope the U.S. side can see this clearly.”

The call took place as Ms. Pelosi’s possible trip to Taiwan has raised hackles in Beijing, which has made ominous threats of retaliation if she goes through with it. No trip has been officially announced, but Ms. Pelosi has asked other members of Congress to join her next month for what would be the first visit by a House speaker in 25 years to the self-governing island.

The White House has been concerned that the trip would unnecessarily provoke China even as the United States and Europe are consumed with helping Ukraine fight off Russian invaders. Mr. Biden publicly said that the military thought it would be a bad time for Ms. Pelosi to go. And while officially White House officials say it is up to the speaker to decide her own schedule, the unspoken message interpreted on Capitol Hill has been pressure on her to postpone or cancel.

Tensions have been high in the region for months as China has refused to join the American-led effort to isolate Russia, made assertive claims of control over the Taiwan Strait and engaged in several close midair encounters with American, Canadian and Australian aircraft. The war in Ukraine is being watched carefully for implications for Taiwan, another small neighbor coveted by a large and aggressive power.

Mr. Biden vowed in May to use force to defend Taiwan if it is attacked as Ukraine was, the third time he has said so during his brief presidency, even though he and aides later insisted that he was not changing the longstanding American policy of “strategic ambiguity” over how it would respond in such a circumstance. The president’s language at the time heartened Taiwan and American hawks even as it drew condemnation in Beijing. His language on Thursday seemed aimed at diminishing the impression that he was taking a more assertive stand than past presidents.

China’s aggressive behavior internationally comes as Mr. Xi faces significant troubles at home before a critical November party congress in which he is expected to be confirmed for a third term. China’s “zero Covid” lockdown policies have been deeply unpopular, and the economy has slowed considerably, as youth unemployment is on the rise and mortgage and debt crises are afflicting some regions. Analysts said he wants to show that he can stand up to the United States heading into the congress.

In the lead-up to the Thursday call, Beijing issued louder than usual statements about Ms. Pelosi’s planned trip, implying that China might use military force if the speaker went ahead with her plans. The United States would “bear the consequences” if Ms. Pelosi traveled to Taiwan, a spokesman at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Zhao Lijian, said this week.

The strong rhetoric was intended to dissuade Ms. Pelosi from making the trip, but it did not mean China would use force, said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing. “The Chinese have made clear they want Pelosi’s visit canceled, but Beijing surely does not want military conflict right now,” he said.

But the atmosphere was “remarkably worse” than in March, when the two leaders last spoke on a call, he added.

In the region, the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan carrier group left Singapore on Tuesday and headed north into the South China Sea, in the direction of the Taiwan Strait, which could increase pressure between the two nations.

A spokeswoman for the Seventh Fleet, Cmdr. Hayley Sims, described the movement as the carrier’s “continuing normal, scheduled operations as part of her routine patrol in support of a free and open Indo-Pacific.” She declined to say if or when the carrier would reach the vicinity of Taiwan.

China has supported Russia’s war in Ukraine, buying large amounts of Russian oil and blaming the conflict on NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe. The Chinese statement issued after Thursday’s call said the leaders “exchanged views” on Ukraine, referring to the war there as a “crisis,” a nod to China’s basic support of Russia that Mr. Biden has often criticized.

American officials said the two presidents also discussed American tariffs imposed on China by former President Donald J. Trump and that Mr. Biden is considering lifting them, but no agreement was reached during the call.

China seemed sensitive to the industrial bill passed by Congress on Thursday to boost the American semiconductor industry and reduce reliance on China and other foreign manufacturers. “Attempts at decoupling or severing supply chains in defiance of underlying laws would not help boost the U.S. economy,” the Chinese statement said. “They would only make the world economy more vulnerable.”

Ms. Pelosi’s possible visit to Taiwan in early August comes at a particularly sensitive time for the Chinese military. The Communist leader, Mao Zedong, founded the People’s Liberation Army on Aug. 1, 1927, a date that is one of the most important in the army’s calendar.

An integral part of China’s military training is how to stage a future takeover of Taiwan, an island of 23 million people that China claims as its own and has vowed to conquer if necessary.

Ms. Pelosi would travel on a military plane if she makes the trip, as is traditional. One question raised by her planned visit was whether the Chinese air force would attempt to escort Ms. Pelosi’s aircraft, or interfere with it in any way, as it approached Taiwan.

The mood and outcome of the call could influence whether Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi meet in person later in the year in what would be their first in-person encounter since Mr. Biden became president, said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington.

The two men have known each other since 2011, when they were both vice presidents, and met in China on a “getting to know you” trip by Mr. Biden. They are both likely to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, known as APEC, in Bangkok in November.

Peter Baker reported from Washington, and Jane Perlez from Seoul. Li You contributed research from Shanghai.

As the Justice Department investigation into the attack on the Capitol grinds ever closer to former President Donald J. Trump, it has prompted persistent — and cautionary — reminders of the backlash caused by inquiries into Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland is intent on avoiding even the slightest errors, which could taint the current investigation, provide Mr. Trump’s defenders with reasons to claim the inquiry was driven by animus, or undo his effort to rehabilitate the department’s reputation after the political warfare of the Trump years.

Mr. Garland never seriously considered focusing on Mr. Trump from the outset, as investigators had done earlier with Mr. Trump and with Mrs. Clinton during her email investigation, people close to him say. As a result, his investigators have taken a more methodical approach, carefully climbing up the chain of personnel behind the 2020 plan to name fake slates of Trump electors in battleground states that had been won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.

As prosecutors delve deeper into Mr. Trump’s orbit, the former president and his allies in Congress will almost certainly accuse the Justice Department and F.B.I. of a politically motivated witch hunt. The template for those attacks, as Mr. Garland and the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, well know, was “Crossfire Hurricane,” the investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia, which Mr. Trump continues to dismiss as a partisan hoax.

The mistakes and decisions from that period, in part, led to increased layers of oversight, including a major policy change at the Justice Department. If a decision were made to open a criminal investigation into Mr. Trump after he announced his intention to run in the 2024 election, as he suggests he might do, the department’s leaders would have to sign off on any inquiry under an internal rule established by Attorney General William P. Barr and endorsed by Mr. Garland.

“Attorney General Garland and those investigating the high-level efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election are acutely aware of how any misstep, whether by the F.B.I. or prosecutors, will be amplified and used for political purposes,” said Mary B. McCord, a top Justice Department official during the Obama administration. “I expect there are added layers of review and scrutiny of every investigative step.”

Mr. Wray appears to be proceeding with the same level of caution, in hopes of armoring the bureau against future attacks by making sure his agents operate by the book and keeping Justice Department leadership informed. That means following the F.B.I.’s stringent rules and “not just doing the right thing, but doing it in the right way,” Mr. Wray has often said. It also means Mr. Wray would not go it alone, as his predecessor, James B. Comey, famously did.

The typically aggressive bureau, which used every investigative tool in its arsenal during the Russia investigation, had not even opened a case targeting fake electors by early fall 2021, months after details of the wide-ranging scheme were known publicly, two former federal law enforcement officials said.

In 2015, amid the outcry over Mrs. Clinton’s use of a personal email account, senior F.B.I. officials — without consulting with top department officials, including Mr. Comey — opened a criminal investigation into whether she had mishandled classified information.

In May 2017, the F.B.I. opened an obstruction investigation into Mr. Trump on its own, catching the leadership of the Justice Department off guard and setting off a political firestorm. The decision also fueled the suspicions of Mr. Trump and his supporters that the so-called deep state wanted to undermine his presidency.

In the aftermath of Mr. Trump’s stunning election victory, Mrs. Clinton and her supporters blamed Mr. Comey, contending that his unusual public statements about the status of the investigation into her emails had inadvertently shaped the outcome of the race. The new president would soon find fault with the director, too.

Mr. Trump’s willingness to attack the Justice Department was front of mind for officials in the department and the bureau as they scrambled to respond to the Jan. 6 attack, and other efforts to reverse Mr. Trump’s loss, current and former officials said.

The lawyers running the department at the time, including the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, and the acting deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, had managed to stop Mr. Trump from usurping their power so he could remain in office illegally. They had no illusions about his willingness to undermine any investigations.

They also knew that many of their decisions would someday be made public. That fortified their inclination not to make any bold moves before President Biden’s team took over, in the event that their actions were publicly scrutinized in oversight hearings — especially if Republicans regained control of Congress.

The afternoon that rioters stormed the Capitol, Mr. Garland was finishing a speech on the rule of law. He watched on television as Congress turned into a crime scene that he would soon need to investigate.

Everyone who witnessed the attack “understands, if they did not understand before, the rule of law is not just some lawyer’s turn of phrase,” Mr. Garland said at a ceremony the next day. “Failure to make clear by words and deed that our law is not the instrument of partisan purpose” would imperil the country, he added.

Mr. Garland had been mulling the Justice Department’s role in democracy since the 1970s, when he worked for Attorney General Benjamin R. Civiletti to help codify changes that addressed Watergate-era presidential abuses of power.

In late March, when Mr. Garland took over the department, he embraced the bottom-up tactics already being used by the Trump-appointed acting U.S. attorney in Washington: round up and apprehend the assailants, and then perhaps their communications and interviews would yield information that would lead them to more powerful targets.

That approach — summed up by the mantra of investigating “crimes, not people” — sometimes led to tensions between top officials and the federal prosecutors in Washington who run the investigation day to day.

From the start, Mr. Garland and his top deputy, Lisa O. Monaco — a former senior official at the F.B.I. and a detail-oriented former federal prosecutor — set the bar high. But they did not constrain prosecutors from pursuing avenues they saw as supported by evidence: Ms. Monaco urged prosecutors to devote additional resources to investigating the funding of rioters, and potential links to foreign governments, according to a former department official.

The department did not appear to immediately seize on public revelations made in the fall of 2021 that a top Trump lawyer, John Eastman, had been pushing the fake electors scheme.

Yet gradually, mostly hidden from public view, they began to pursue that lead, and others that eventually led them to more directly question Mr. Trump’s involvement.

At the time, Christopher R. Kavanaugh, who had gained extensive domestic terrorism experience as a prosecutor in Charlottesville, Va., after the deadly far-right rally there in 2017, was assigned to manage the sprawling Jan. 6 investigation. The inquiry touched on nearly every state in the country and included hundreds of suspects.

When Mr. Kavanaugh left the office after hundreds of arrests in early October to become the U.S. attorney in Charlottesville, he was replaced by Thomas P. Windom, an aggressive if little-known federal prosecutor from Maryland who had also handled high-profile domestic terrorism cases.

Mr. Windom expanded the electors investigation, according to people with knowledge of the situation. He also kept a close eye on a separate inquiry by the department’s inspector general into Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who had been central to Mr. Trump’s unsuccessful effort in late 2020 to strong-arm the nation’s top prosecutors into supporting his claims of election fraud.

Both of those investigations were already gathering steam as the House committee examining Jan. 6 accelerated its far more public inquiry — one meant to pressure Mr. Garland into moving more quickly to pursue Mr. Trump.

By April, prosecutors had retrieved emails from senior officials in the Trump White House.

In June, the inspector general obtained warrants for the electronic devices belonging to Mr. Clark, Mr. Eastman and Ken Klukowski, another former Justice Department official. A lawyer for Mr. Klukowski did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

And on Wednesday, after news broke that two top aides to former Vice President Mike Pence had appeared before a grand jury, Mr. Windom filed a notice with U.S. District Court in New Mexico. It disclosed that a federal agent had obtained a second search warrant earlier this month for the phone of Mr. Eastman — the first time Mr. Windom’s name has appeared on a public case filing in a Trump-related matter.

In the wake of those search warrants, the Justice Department set up a so-called filter team to deal with any potentially privileged information gleaned from those warrants, according to the filing.

Previously, it had only been known that the department’s inspector general had obtained a search warrant for Mr. Eastman for a narrower internal department inquiry that had begun after the Jan. 6 riot.

In his public statements, Mr. Garland has exhibited an awareness of the extraordinary perils his department, and the country at large, face as investigators close in on a once and perhaps future presidential candidate whose popularity is firmly tied to his claim that he is being persecuted by the Washington establishment.

Last week, Mr. Garland sat in his conference room at the Justice Department, flanked by oil portraits of two predecessors he admires — Robert F. Kennedy and Edward H. Levi — to declare that no one, not even Mr. Trump, was “above the law.”

That statement, which he has made in public before, was widely disseminated on social media.

But just before that, Mr. Garland said something that, in some ways, better reflects his cautious approach to an investigation that he has characterized as both the biggest and most important in the department’s 152-year history.

“We have to hold accountable every person who is criminally responsible for trying to overturn a legitimate election, and we must do it in a way filled with integrity and professionalism, the way the Justice Department conducts investigations,” he said.

“Both of these are necessary in order to achieve justice and to protect our democracy.”

Michael S. Schmidt and Alan Feuer contributed reporting.