CNN
 — 

Warsaw’s liberal mayor and his insurgent populist challenger are locked in a dead heat as they fight for the presidency of Poland, exit polls projected after Sunday’s head-to-head vote, leaving the country tilting between two wildly different political futures.

Exit polls showed Rafał Trzaskowski and Karol Nawrocki essentially tied, with Trzaskowski ahead by less than one percentage point after Sunday’s run-off election.

Should Trzaskowski prevail, he would end the Law and Justice (PiS) party’s 10-year occupancy of the presidential palace – the last political stronghold of the populist bloc that once ruled Poland with near-total authority – and see the mayor claim nationwide power at the second attempt.

But the margins were close enough to throw both candidates – and the country’s 38 million residents – into a nervous night of counting, with a final result likely to be announced in the coming hours.

The result carries huge significance for Prime Minister Donald Tusk, whose pledge to erase PiS’ fingerprints from Poland’s embattled institutions saw him clash repeatedly with Andrzej Duda, the outgoing president who defeated Trzaskowski in 2020. Nawrocki, like Duda before him, was backed by PiS.

A Nawrocki presidency could torpedo the centrist government’s efforts to unspool the legacy of authoritarianism in the country; the 42-year-old historian would be able to yield the hugely powerful presidential veto, which Duda used frequently to thwart Tusk’s agenda.

Trzaskowski, by contrast, would be expected to essentially give Tusk an open road to press ahead with his ambitious aim of undoing the effects of PiS’ transformation of Poland, an effort that has been bogged down in recent months.

The PiS candidate is a vocal supporter of US President Donald Trump, whom he visited in the campaign’s final weeks, and received a late flurry of support from attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which held its first-ever gathering in Poland earlier this week, cementing a years-long convergence between the populist right movements in Poland and the US.

Trzaskowski, the worldly son of a celebrated Polish jazz musician, was viewed as the favorite in the election campaign, until the first round of voting two weeks ago showed him only narrowly ahead of Nawrocki and revealed greater levels of support than expected for a smattering of far-right and extreme-right figures, some of whom subsequently said they would vote for Nawrocki.

Nawrocki is a first-time politician who has led two influential cultural bodies in Poland – the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk, and then the Institute of National Remembrance, a state-funded research facility whose purpose became increasingly politicized as PiS took a nationalistic approach to the telling of Polish history. On the campaign trail, he emphasized his Catholic faith, pledged to reduce migration, and was relentlessly critical of Brussels and of Tusk.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

CNN
 — 

Since last sitting down with Ukraine to talk peace, Russia has launched four of its five largest drone attacks against the country, killed more than 340 of its civilians and continued to peddle its false narrative about the unprovoked war it has been waging for more than a decade.

Now, Moscow wants to talk. Again.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the next round of talks between Russia and Ukraine would take place in Turkey on Monday. On Sunday, Kyiv confirmed that it would be sending a delegation to the meeting, as Russian state media reported that a Russian delegation was flying to Istanbul for the talks.

Kyiv says that Russia and Ukraine agreed to exchange their requirements for a ceasefire during their previous meeting in Istanbul last month. But while Kyiv said it presented its plan last week, Russia has not.

The Kremlin has so far ignored the call by Ukraine to present the plan. In a post on Telegram on Wednesday, Lavrov said the Russian delegation would present its memorandum to Ukraine at the meeting on June 2.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the Kremlin’s failure to hand over its plan was “another Russian deception” and accused Moscow of not wanting to end the war.

“For a meeting to be meaningful, its agenda must be clear, and the negotiations must be properly prepared,” Zelensky wrote on X on Friday, after hosting Turkey’s foreign minister for talks in Kyiv.

Zelensky said he’d also discussed the potential second round of peace talks with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday, writing on Telegram: “We discussed a possible next meeting in Istanbul and under what conditions Ukraine is ready to take part in it. We share the view that this meeting cannot and should not be empty.”

In a post on X on Sunday, the Ukrainian leader said that he had requested “preparation of the (Istanbul) meeting at the highest level” in order to “establish a reliable and lasting peace and ensure security.” Zelensky added that Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov would lead the delegation again.

But even though Russian and Ukrainian officials have agreed to meet on Monday, their summit is unlikely to yield any immediate results.

Statements made by Russian officials in recent days make it clear that Moscow is sticking to its maximalist demands.

Speaking after a phone call with US President Donald Trump on May 19, Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated his demand that the “root causes” of the conflict must be eliminated.

The “root causes” include long-held Russian grievances that include the existence of Ukraine as a sovereign state, and NATO’s eastward expansion since the end of the Cold War.

Kyiv has dismissed these demands, as accepting them would effectively amount to capitulation.

The talks on Monday may be designed mostly to appease Trump, who has repeatedly told both Ukraine and Russia that there will be consequences if they don’t engage in his peace process.

Trump has been pressuring Kyiv to talk to Moscow, threatening to walk away from the talks and cut US aid if he concludes that Ukraine isn’t cooperating.

And while he has threatened “massive sanctions” against Russia if it doesn’t agree with his 30-day ceasefire proposal, he has also voiced concern that potential new sanctions on Russia could jeopardize a deal.

On Friday, a bipartisan pair of US senators met with Zelensky in Kyiv. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut are co-sponsoring a bill to impose more sanctions on Russia – including a 500% tariff on goods imported from countries that buy Russian oil, gas, uranium and other products. It must pass both chambers of Congress and be approved by Trump to become law.

Asked by reporters on Friday if he would support the bill, Trump responded: “I don’t know, I’ll have to see it. I’ll take a look at it.”

Putin has not explicitly rejected the ceasefire proposals, choosing instead to delay and distract.

Russia’s insistence on having the talks and presenting its ceasefire proposal only once the two sides meet is just the latest example of this tactic.

Putin initially proposed the first round of the talks in response to the ceasefire-or-sanctions ultimatum given to Moscow by Ukraine’s European allies.

The Russian president ignored the ultimatum, proposing instead “direct talks” between Moscow and Kyiv. This prompted Trump, who initially backed the ultimatum, to change his tune and call on Zelensky to “take the meeting.”

Moscow’s conduct since the talks last month suggests no desire to end the war with a ceasefire.

Russian forces have intensified airborne attacks against Ukraine in recent weeks, are stepping up ground attacks in many areas along the front line, and Moscow is building up its forces elsewhere.

At the same time, Putin ordered one of the largest expansions of the Russian military in recent years.

Meanwhile, over the weekend, Ukraine carried out its most ambitious simultaneous strikes on Russian airbases since the war began, using drones to destroy multiple Russian combat planes on Sunday, according to a source in the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU).

The Russian Ministry of Defense confirmed Ukraine had targeted Russian airfields across five regions, calling the drone strikes “terrorist attacks.”

The day before, two bridges in western regions of Russia collapsed, killing at least seven people and injuring dozens. It was not clear on Sunday morning whether the two incidents — which both involved trains — in neighboring Bryansk and Kursk were related, or what exactly caused the separate collapses. Investigators from Russia’s Investigative Committee were working at the scenes to establish the circumstances of what happened.

Expectations were running high ahead of the talks last month, the first direct meeting between Ukraine and Russia since the early days of the full-scale war. This was mostly because of speculation that Putin himself might show up, after being challenged to travel to Turkey by Zelensky.

When the Russian leader sent a low-level delegation in his place, it became clear no breakthrough was in sight. Although the two sides agreed to hold the largest ever prisoner exchange during the meeting, there was no sign of a ceasefire agreement being any closer.

As for the latest meeting, while it’s obvious that neither Moscow nor Kyiv are particularly keen on talking to each other, and have little expectation of actual progress, they are likely to play along just to keep Trump interested.

CNN
 — 

Ukraine has carried out large-scale drone strikes against four airbases deep inside Russia, destroying multiple combat planes, according to a source in the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU).

If confirmed, the attacks would be the most ambitious simultaneous strikes on Russian airbases carried out by Ukraine since the war began.

The SBU source said that Russian bombers were “burning en masse” at four airbases hundreds of miles apart, adding that drones had been launched from trucks inside Russia.

More than 40 aircraft were known to have been hit, according to the source, including TU-95 and Tu-22M3 strategic bombers and one of Russia’s few remaining A-50 surveillance planes.

The airfields targeted included Belaya in Irkutsk, some 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles) from Ukraine’s border with Russia, and the Dyagilevo base in Ryazan in western Russia, about 520 kilometers (320 miles) from Ukraine, which is a training center for Russia’s strategic bomber force.

The Olenya base near Murmansk in the Arctic Circle, more than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) from Ukraine, was also struck, according to the source, as well as the Ivanovo airbase, more than 800 kilometers (500 miles) from Ukraine. Ivanovo is a base for Russian military transport aircraft.

There has been no comment from the Russian Defense Ministry on the attacks. But the governor of Irkutsk region, Igor Kobziev, said that drones had been launched from a truck near the Belaya base.

Kobziev said on Telegram that the exact number of drones deployed had not been determined. Emergency and security services were at the site, he added.

SBU drones were targeting aircraft that bomb Ukrainian cities every night, the SBU source said – estimating the damage caused to the Russian side at more than $2 billion.

One video supplied by the source purportedly shows the Belaya airfield in flames and the voice of the head of the SBU, Lt. Gen. Vasyl Malyuk, commenting on the situation. “How beautiful Belaya airfield looks now. Enemy’s strategic aircraft,” he says.

CNN was able to confirm the location of that video, as well as two others posted on social media showing smoke rising from the Belaya airbase. It was not immediately able to independently verify other videos provided by the SBU.

The SBU source said that the operation was “extremely complicated from a logistical point of view,” with the drones carried inside wooden mobile homes that had been carried into Russia on board trucks.

“The drones were hidden under the roofs of the houses, which were already placed on trucks. At the right moment, the roofs were remotely opened, and the drones flew to hit Russian bombers.”

One video purportedly of one attack appears to show drones rising from a truck, as vehicles pass on a nearby highway. Another image shows the roof of the truck on the ground.

The source added that people involved were already back in Ukraine.

CNN’s Frankie Vetch and Eve Brennan contributed to this report.