Charles Krauthammer, the longtime columnist for The Washington Post, said in a statement published on the newspaper’s website on Friday that he is battling cancer and has “only a few weeks left to live.”

Mr. Krauthammer has been absent from The Post, where he began writing columns in 1984, since August, when he had a cancerous tumor surgically removed.

Despite “a cascade of secondary complications,” Mr. Krauthammer, 68, was preparing to return to writing, but recent tests found that the cancer had aggressively returned, he said in the short statement.

“My doctors tell me their best estimate is that I have only a few weeks left to live,” Mr. Krauthammer wrote. “This is the final verdict. My fight is over.”