Hermann Goering, Hitler’s right-hand man, survived the cut. His bottles of wine — part of a collection seized by the Soviet army as a trophy at the end of World War II and deposited in a labyrinthine underground cellar in Moldova — are still on display.

A gift of 460 bottles given in 2013 to then Secretary of State John Kerry when he visited the former Soviet republic is also there, kept in his name in a cubbyhole in the vast system of tunnels. (The State Department reported their value as $8,339.50, which might explain why Mr. Kerry chose to leave them behind.)

But President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who twice visited the cellars operated by the state-owned Cricova Winery, has been banished. His wine bottles, along with his photograph, have been removed from view in the vast complex of underground tunnels that twist and turn over 75 miles under vineyards north of the Moldovan capital, Chisinau.

After Mr. Putin began a full-scale invasion of Moldova’s neighbor, Ukraine, in 2022, the winery “got lots of questions that we could not answer about why he was still here,” said Sorin Maslo, the director.

Mr. Putin’s wine collection, a gift to him from Moldova’s former communist president, has not been destroyed, Mr. Maslo said. The bottles, he added, had been moved to a dark, sealed-off corner of the cellar so that “nobody has to deal with him.”

For a country that takes viniculture very seriously, the banishment of Mr. Putin’s bottles sent a blunt divorce message in a long-strained relationship that Moldova recently declared doomed by irreconcilable differences.

It was part of a decisive rupture that in October led voters to endorse, albeit by a tiny majority, changing Moldova’s Constitution to lock in the country’s exit from Moscow’s sphere of influence and align more closely with Europe.

That course was first set in 2006 when Russia, previously Moldova’s biggest wine export market, imposed a two-year ban on imports from Cricova and other Moldovan wineries during an early tiff between Moscow and Chisinau.

The ban, Russia claimed at the time, was needed to protect consumers from impurities, but it was widely seen as retaliation for demands by Moldova that Russia stop supporting the breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria.

Russia lifted the ban on Moldovan wine the following year but reimposed it in 2013 after Moldova expressed a desire to forge closer ties with the European Union.

The 2006 embargo forced Moldova’s winemakers to look West for markets and convinced them that “the future for us is definitely not Russia,” said Stefan Iamandi, the director of the National Office for Vine and Wine in Chisinau. Russia, which once accounted for 80 percent of Moldovan wine sold abroad, today buys 2 percent, with more than 50 percent going to the European Union. That has meant moving away from sugary “semisweet” wines produced to suit Soviet palates, to high quality wines that regularly win international prizes.

Georgia, another former Soviet republic, was hit by a similar ban in 2006, prompting its winemakers, too, to start looking West.

Wine has for centuries played an outsize role in Moldova’s relationship with Russia, both lubricating and at times poisoning ties between what, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, were two parts of the same country.

Moldova has traces of grape cultivation stretching back thousands of years, and started exporting wine to Russia in large volumes in the 14th century. This trade expanded dramatically during the Soviet Union when vineyards in Moldova and Georgia provided much of the wine consumed in Russia.

Moldovan wine enjoyed a particularly good reputation. That became a curse when the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, identified alcoholism as one of the Soviet Union’s most serious problems in 1985 and overzealous Communist Party officials ordered that vineyards in Moldova, Georgia and Crimea be destroyed. Moldova ripped up some vines but left most intact, arguing that it needed grapes to make fruit juice.

Before that, Moscow and Moldova bonded over booze.

In 1966, when Yuri Gagarin, a Russian cosmonaut and the first man in space, visited what was then a Soviet republic called Moldavia, he spent two days at the Cricova Winery, where, like other visitors, he was offered wine tastings.

Legend has it that he tasted so much he had to be carried away in a stupor.

Mr. Maslo said that is not true, insisting “Gagarin was not drunk” and was just happy at the quality of the wine.

Unlike Mr. Putin, Mr. Gagarin has not been canceled and is still celebrated in Cricova’s underground cellar with a photograph and a plaque. Displayed proudly on the wall is the handwritten thank-you note he left at the end of his 1966 visit: “In these cellars is a great abundance of wonderful wine,” he wrote. “Even the most fastidious person will find here wine to their liking.”

There is certainly a lot to choose from. The vast wine cellar, housed in the shafts and meandering tunnels of a former limestone mine, holds 1.2 million bottles. The tunnels, lined with wine racks, barrels and large wooden casks, are part of a sprawling subterranean city. It has a wine shop for tourists, tens of thousands of whom visit each year, a movie theater and opulent tasting and banqueting halls for visiting dignitaries.

Tunnels dug for limestone miners have become streets, each one named after type of wine — Cabernet, Pinot Noir, Champagne and local varieties like Feteasca. There are street signs and traffic lights. Electric buggies transport winery workers and visitors around the labyrinth. The temperature is constant at around 55 degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity of the air is always the same.

Also unchanging is the tedious labor of a team of workers who spend each day deep underground methodically turning bottles of sparkling wine stored neck down in high racks. The motion ensures that sediment gathers at the neck and can be easily removed before final bottling. All the bottle-turners are women because men, Cricova’s management decided, get bored too easily and take too many breaks.

Lybov Zolotko, who trained for the job by twisting her wrists in a bucket of sand, said she turns at least 30,000 bottles a day. It is boring work, she conceded, “but you get used to it” — and it pays a steady salary in a country where stable jobs are hard to come by.

Another Moldovan winery, Milestii Mici, has even longer tunnels — they stretch 150 miles — but Cricova has had far more high-profile visitors, including Mr. Putin, who celebrated his 50th birthday in its cellars; President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine; and Angela Merkel, when she was still chancellor of Germany.

Tatiana Ursu, employed at Cricova for 30 years, has hosted a stream of dignitaries in the underground tasting rooms and banquet halls. Particularly warm, she said, was a 2002 visit by Mr. Putin, who was on excellent terms with Moldova’s president at the time, Vladimir Voronin, Europe’s first democratically elected Communist Party head of state after the collapse of communism.

The visit used to be a source of pride for the winery, Ms. Ursu added, but “not so much any more” given that the seemingly mild-mannered man she met in 2002 — who had only been in the Kremlin two years when he visited — has since turned against Moldova.

Mr. Voronin gave the Russian president a bottle of wine in the shape of a crocodile, she recalled.

Mr. Putin and others in the Russian delegation did not drink too much and left a good impression on their Moldovan hosts, Ms. Ursu recalled.

“They were all friends back then. It was a different time,” she said.

Iran’s top ranking general in Syria has contradicted the official line taken by Iran’s leaders on the sudden downfall of their ally Bashar al-Assad, saying in a remarkably candid speech last week that Iran had suffered a major defeat but would still try to operate in the country.

An audio recording of the speech, given last week by Brig. Gen. Behrouz Esbati at a mosque in Tehran, surfaced publicly on Monday in Iranian media, and was a stark contrast to the remarks of Iran’s president, foreign minister and other top leaders. They have for weeks downplayed the magnitude of Iran’s strategic loss in Syria last month, when rebels swept Mr. al-Assad out of power, and said Iran would respect any political outcome decided by Syria’s people.

“I don’t consider losing Syria something to be proud of,” said General Esbati according to the audio recording of his speech, which Abdi Media, a Geneva-based news site focused on Iran, published on Monday. “We were defeated, and defeated very badly, we took a very big blow and it’s been very difficult.”

General Esbati revealed that Iran’s relations with Mr. al-Assad had been strained for months leading to his ouster, saying that the Syrian leader had denied multiple requests for Iranian-backed militias to open a front against Israel from Syria, in the aftermath of the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023.

Iran had presented Mr. al-Assad with comprehensive military plans on how it could use Iran’s military resources in Syria to attack Israel, he said.

The general also accused Russia, considered a top ally, of misleading Iran by telling it that Russian jets were bombing Syrian rebels when they were actually dropping bombs on open fields. He also said that in the past year, as Israel struck Iranian targets in Syria, Russia had “turned off radars,” in effect facilitating these attacks.

For over a decade, Iran backed Mr. al-Assad by sending commanders and troops to help it fight against opposition rebels and the Islamic State terrorist group.

Under Mr. al-Assad, Syria was Iran’s regional command center from which it supplied weapons and money to its network of regional militias, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Palestinian militants in the West Bank. Iran also controlled airports, warehouses and operated missile and drone manufacturing bases in Syria.

The rebel coalition has now taken over much of Syria and is trying to form a government. General Esbati said in his speech that Iran would look for ways to recruit insurgents in whatever shape the new Syria takes.

“We can activate all the networks we have worked with over the years,” he said. “We can activate the social layers that our guys lived among for years; we can be active in social media and we can form resistance cells.”

He added, “Now we can operate there as we do in other international arenas, and we have already started.”

The general’s comments have stunned Iranians, for both their unfiltered content and the speaker’s stature. He is a top commander of Iran’s Armed Forces, the umbrella that includes the military and the Revolutionary Guards Corps, with a record of prominent roles including commander in chief of the Armed Forces’ cyber division.

In Syria, he supervised Iran’s military operations and coordinated closely with Syrian ministers and defense officials and with Russian generals — outranking even the commander in chief of the Quds Forces, Gen. Ismail Ghaani, who oversees the network of regional militias backed by Iran.

Mehdi Rahmati, a prominent analyst in Tehran and expert on Syria, said in a telephone interview that General Esbati’s speech was significant because it showed that some senior officials were parting from government propaganda and leveling with the public.

“Everyone is talking about the speech in meetings and wondering why he said these things, especially at a public forum,” Mr. Rahmati said. “He very clearly laid out what happened to Iran and where it stands now. In a way it can be a warning for domestic politics.”

General Esbati said the fall of the Assad regime was inevitable given the rampant corruption, political oppression and economic hardship that people faced, from lack of power to fuel to livable incomes. He said Mr. al-Assad had ignored the warnings to reform. Mr. Rahmati, the analyst, said that the comparison to Iran’s current situation was hard to miss.

Despite the general’s assertions about activating networks, it remains unclear what Iran can realistically do in Syria, given the public and political opposition it has faced in the country and the challenges of land and air access. Israel has warned that it would decimate any Iranian efforts it detects on the ground in Syria.

And while Iran has the experience of operating in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003 — including sowing unrest — the geography and political landscape of Syria differ greatly, presenting more challenges.

An Iranian member of the Revolutionary Guards who spent years in Iraq as a military strategist alongside senior commanders said in a telephone interview that General Esbati’s comments about Iran recruiting insurgents might be more aspirational than practical at this stage. He said that while General Esbati had admitted a serious defeat, he had also sought to boost morale and pacify conservatives demanding that Iran act more forcefully.

The Guards official, who asked that his name not be used because he was discussing sensitive issues, said Iran’s policy had not yet been finalized but that a consensus had emerged in meetings he had attended where strategy was debated. He said Iran would benefit if Syria descended into chaos because Iran knew how to thrive and secure its interests in a turbulent landscape.

In Iran, the Revolutionary Guards have the authority to set regional policy and overrule the foreign ministry.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the last word on key state matters, has said in at least two speeches since Mr. al-Assad’s fall that resistance was not dead in Syria, adding that Syria’s youth would reclaim their country from the ruling rebels, whom he called stooges of Israel and the United States. President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi have been more conciliatory, saying they favor stability in Syria and diplomatic ties with the new government.

The tensions surrounding these competing views on Syria preoccupied officials enough that they embarked on a campaign of damage control with the public last week. Senior military commanders and pundits close to the government gave speeches and held question-and-answer sessions with audiences in mosques and community centers in several cities.

General Esbati’s speech, on Dec. 31 at the Valiasr mosque in central Tehran, addressed rank and file of the military and constituents of the mosque, according to a public notice of the event, titled, “Answering questions about Syria’s collapse.”

The session started with General Esbati telling the crowd he left Syria on the last military plane to Tehran the night before Damascus fell to rebels. It ended with him answering questions from audience members. He offered his most sobering assessment on Iran’s military capability in fighting Israel and the United States.

Asked whether Iran would retaliate for Israel killing Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, he replied that Iran already did, referring to a missile barrage last fall. Asked whether Iran planned to carry out a third round of direct strikes on Israel, he said that “the situation” couldn’t realistically handle another attack on Israel right now.

Asked why Iran would not fire missiles at U.S. military bases in the region, he said that would invite bigger retaliatory attacks on Iran and its allies by the United States, adding that Iran’s regular missiles — not its advanced ones — could not penetrate advanced U.S. defense systems.

Despite those assessments, General Esbati said that he wanted to assure everyone not to worry: Iran and its allies, he said, still had the upper hand on the ground in the region.

President-elect Donald J. Trump said Tuesday that he planned to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” one of several foreign policy proposals that left world leaders reeling.

“It has a beautiful ring,” he said of the proposed name change for the body of water that borders several U.S. and Mexican states.

Mr. Trump’s proposal was met with derision in Mexico and glee by late-night comedians, although supporters such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, vowed to make it a reality.

Who named the Gulf of Mexico?

The gulf’s name first appeared on maps used by Spanish explorers in the 16th century, well before the founding of the United States.

On Wednesday, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico displayed a map from 1607 that included the Gulf of Mexico. It also labeled North America as “Mexican America.”

“Why don’t we call it Mexican America? It sounds pretty, no?” Ms. Sheinbaum said.

Can Trump rename the Gulf?

Mr. Trump, as president, could press for changes to geographical names as they are used in the United States.

There is a precedent: In 2015, President Obama used his executive powers to change the name of an Alaska mountain from “McKinley” to “Denali.” Mr. Trump has vowed to reverse that decision.

But whether other countries would honor any change is a different story.

“Today, there is no formal international agreement or protocol in place for naming maritime areas,” said John Nyberg, the director of the International Hydrographic Organization, which works to standardize and chart marine boundaries, in an email.

The national geographic naming authority of the U.S. is the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, he added.

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names, part of the United States Geological Survey, says on its website that it only considers name changes for “compelling” reasons. “Generally,” it adds, “the most important policy regarding names is local use and acceptance.”

What other bodies of water have disputed names?

The body of water that separates Iran from Saudi Arabia has long been a source of tension. Iran wants it called the “Persian Gulf,” while Saudi Arabia prefers “Arabian Gulf.”

The U.S. Navy has used the term “Arabian Gulf,” to avoid friction with an important ally, but the U.S. Board on Geographic Names has mandated use of the “Persian Gulf” for official business.

Contention also exists around the name of the sea that is bordered by Japan, North Korea, South Korea and Russia. Japan refers to it as the Sea of Japan while South Korea maintains that it has been called the East Sea for centuries.

The body of water that borders Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam — commonly known as the South China Sea in the English-speaking world — is also disputed. Different countries have proposed their own names for the sea to highlight their own territorial claims to certain islands.

Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed reporting.

When President-elect Donald J. Trump called Hussain Sajwani to the lectern at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday to promise a $20 billion investment in the United States, it was a moment for the Dubai developer to savor. For more than a decade, his company, DAMAC Properties, has helped generate millions for the Trump Organization through a partnership in the Middle East.

Those ties appear to have helped open a broad opportunity for Mr. Sajwani as he moves to diversify his empire into the multibillion-dollar market of building data centers needed to meet fast-growing demands for cloud computing and artificial intelligence.

“For the last four years, we’ve been waiting for this moment,” Mr. Sajwani said on the stage. “We’re very, very excited now with his leadership and his open strategy and policy to encourage businesses to come to the U.S.”

The announcement deepens Mr. Trump’s ties with Mr. Sajwani. But it also highlights what critics say are conflicts of interest as Mr. Trump continues to hold on to his real estate business as he prepares for a second term in the White House.

What does DAMAC do?

DAMAC Properties is part of the DAMAC Group, one of the biggest developers in Dubai, a city in the United Arab Emirates known for its larger-than-life real estate projects, like a palm-tree-shaped island and the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest skyscraper.

Mr. Sajwani, who is sometimes called the Donald of Dubai, leveraged his company into a major player in the Middle East’s luxury real estate market with acquisitions and projects starting in the mid-1990s, when Dubai began allowing foreigners to buy property there.

In 2002, he founded DAMAC Properties to build luxury towers along Dubai’s waterfront that quickly sold out. Mr. Sajwani sealed branding deals with Versace, Fendi and other fashion houses for his properties.

But the company also faced lawsuits in 2010, including one by a German investor who claimed that certain properties had not been delivered on time. That suit was rejected by a Dubai court. In 2011, DAMAC settled three disputes with Egypt over investments there, including one in which a Cairo court had sentenced Mr. Sajwani to jail in absentia.

On its website, the company promotes luxury villas, apartments and hotels from Saudi Arabia to London. During his remarks at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, Mr. Sajwani said DAMAC had delivered 47,000 homes and had 33,000 more in the pipeline.

DAMAC said in a news release Tuesday that it was also planning a condo project in Miami valued at an estimated $1 billion, and that it “continues to look for strategic real estate opportunities in the U.S.”

What is DAMAC’s link to Mr. Trump?

In 2013, Mr. Sajwani teamed up with the Trump family to build the first Trump-branded golf course in the Middle East. Mr. Trump agreed to manage a golf course as part of a DAMAC development.

Under the deals, the Trump Organization licenses the Trump name to DAMAC, which paid Mr. Trump $2 million to $10 million even before the golf courses were built, according to financial disclosure forms filed in May 2016. In 2017, Mr. Trump earned $141,433 in management fees from the deals, according to his financial disclosure from that year.

The Trump International Golf Club opened in 2017, during Mr. Trump’s first term, and is the centerpiece of DAMAC Hills, a gated complex of luxury homes selling for up to $4 million each.

A second Trump-affiliated golf course that DAMAC intended to build inside a resort has been delayed. The project drew scrutiny in 2018 when DAMAC tapped a company controlled by the Chinese government to build part of it.

Mr. Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric attended the wedding of Mr. Sajwani’s daughter in 2018, and during Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Sajwani was a familiar face at Mar-a-Lago. Last week, he attended a New Year’s Eve celebration, posting a picture on X of himself next to Mr. Trump and Elon Musk.

Why is DAMAC investing in U.S. data centers?

If Mr. Trump has profited greatly from his dealings with DAMAC, Mr. Sajwani is set to benefit from his yearslong investment in the president-elect.

In 2021, Mr. Sajwani set up a digital unit, Edgnex Data Centres, a subsidiary of DAMAC, to meet surging global demand for data centers.

Edgnex has sought to expand rapidly across the Middle East, Asia and Europe, and has operations in 10 countries, including Saudi Arabia, which has trained its sights on becoming a dominant player in A.I.

North America has been a blank spot in Edgnex’s portfolio — until Mr. Trump’s announcement that Mr. Sajwani would pour “at least” $20 billion into the United States.

Edgnex said it would develop data centers in eight states, including Texas and Indiana, and is aiming to create data processing capacity that could eclipse projects built by Microsoft and Amazon.

Mr. Trump said he would use the government’s powers once in office to grant DAMAC “expedited reviews” of any federal environmental questions that might emerge, a benefit that Mr. Trump added would be offered to any company planning to invest $1 billion in the United States.

After 12 years leading the Liberal Party of Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday said he was stepping down. His resignation sets off a succession battle in which some of the party’s most prominent faces will vie to replace him.

In Canada’s political system, the leader of the Liberal Party, as the head of the largest party in the House of Commons, is also prime minister; when Mr. Trudeau’s replacement as party leader is chosen, they will assume the position as well.

That politician will take the party to general elections to face the Conservatives and their leader, Pierre Poilievre, who are dominating public opinion polls. Elections must be held no later than October, but the government, under its new prime minister, is expected to fall long before then through a vote in the House of Commons.

Mr. Trudeau said the Liberal Party would choose his successor through a vote by its members, a relatively small portion of Canada’s population. While no one has yet announced their candidacy to succeed Mr. Trudeau, here are some possible contenders.

Chrystia Freeland

The resignation last month of Chrystia Freeland, the former deputy prime minister and finance minister, incited widespread speculation that she would start her own bid to run the Liberal Party.

Ms. Freeland had a successful career in Canada as a senior editor at The Globe and Mail in Toronto and as an international journalist working as a correspondent and newsroom leader for the Financial Times and Reuters. Ms. Freeland, who was born and raised in Alberta, returned to Canada to join Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals in 2013. She is married to a reporter on the Culture desk of The New York Times.

After the Liberals subsequently came to power, she played important roles in resolving several major issues for Mr. Trudeau, in particular negotiating the successor to the North American Free Trade Agreement during the first Trump administration.

On Monday, Mr. Trudeau had kind words for Ms. Freeland, although he declined to share what transpired between them. People familiar with the events surrounding her departure said that Mr. Trudeau had attempted to fire her over a video call and offered her a minister-without-portfolio position, which she declined.

Mélanie Joly

Mélanie Joly has been Canada’s top diplomat since 2021. Mr. Trudeau encouraged her to take the next step in her political career by accepting the foreign affairs role despite her own hesitations: Ms. Joly was concerned about how the job might affect her fertility treatments.

Ms. Joly has brought her own brand of pragmatic diplomacy to the role, reinforcing the importance of Canada working with leaders who have opposing views on foreign policy.

“There’s that movement — which I am profoundly against — which is if you don’t engage with countries, you’re sending a message that you’re strong,” she told The Times. “I think that to be strong is to be able to have the tough conversations.”

Ms. Joly has led Canada’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, but has also confronted challenges. She expelled six Indian diplomats from Canada, and contended with Chinese and Indian foreign interference allegations.

Mark Carney

Mr. Trudeau’s team had privately been pursuing Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of Canada who also led the Bank of England, to take over for Ms. Freeland as finance minister. Mr. Carney and Ms. Freeland are longtime friends, and he is the godfather of one of her children.

Those efforts to pursue Mr. Carney unraveled after Ms. Freeland’s public rift with Mr. Trudeau and her resignation from cabinet. Since then, Canadian news outlets reported, Mr. Carney has been calling Liberal members of parliament to ask for their support and advice if he were to make a leadership run.

During his time as governor of the Bank of England, Mr. Carney earned a reputation for sermonic talks that veered into the political, including his views on the financial dangers of climate change. In his recent book, “Values,” Mr. Carney offered a withering critique of capitalism and a proposition that markets ought to serve citizens.

Christy Clark

Christy Clark was until 2017 the leader of the British Columbia Liberal Party, a smaller party not directly affiliated with the national Liberal Party and which is considered to be politically further to the right.

Ms. Clark served as premier of British Columbia from 2011 to 2017. She left politics that year after her minority government lost a confidence vote.

Ms. Clark, a former radio show host and vocal critic of Mr. Trudeau, has said she would be interested in leading the national Liberals but has not yet confirmed her candidacy.

Who’s out?

Dominic LeBlanc, a longtime friend of Mr. Trudeau who became finance minister when Ms. Freeland resigned, was viewed as a front-runner in the leadership race. But he put rumors of a campaign to a rest two days after Mr. Trudeau’s resignation, announcing that he would not seek the nomination. Instead, Mr. LeBlanc said that he intends to run as a member of Parliament under the new Liberal leader in the next federal election.

Mr. LeBlanc was first elected to Parliament in 2000.