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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

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June 3, 2025

Ukraine Lands a Blow

In recent weeks, Ukraine has been bracing for an expected summer Russian ground offensive that has already shown signs of materializing, as land-warfare expert Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a British defense think tank, detailed two weeks ago.

That may still be the case, but in recent days Kyiv has turned heads with a slew of successful attacks.
 
Today, Ukraine’s security service said it had struck the Kerch Bridge, which connects Russian-occupied Crimea to Russia, with underwater explosives. This follows a notable set of Ukrainian drone strikes deep inside Russia on Sunday.
 
In those Sunday aerial drone strikes, Ukraine’s military “destroyed dozens of Russian warplanes parked at air bases thousands of miles from the front lines, according to a source in the country’s security services, in one of Kyiv’s most audacious and sophisticated counter assaults since the beginning of the war,” as CNN’s Svitlana Vlasova, Victoria Butenko, Tim Lister, Mitchell McCluskey and Helen Regan reported. “The operation … saw drones hit targets across a large swathe of Russia, including in Belaya—which is closer to Japan than Ukraine—and at Olenya base near Murmansk in the Arctic Circle, according to the source.”
 
The attacks could be significant. The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Michaels and Jane Lytvynenko write of the weekend strikes on Russian airfields: “A sizable portion of the [aircraft] fleet Moscow uses to launch guided-missile attacks on Ukraine … was damaged or destroyed … Russia no longer produces the decades-old Tupolev planes that were targeted in the attacks, meaning it has lost a cornerstone of its ability to project military power beyond its borders. Newer Russian planes are more modern and agile but lack vital characteristics of the destroyed bombers, most significantly their range and the quantity of munitions they can carry. … Of more than 100 Tupolev bombers that Russia is known to have, Ukraine said it had damaged or destroyed more than 40.” At The War Zone, a defense-news website, Thomas Newdick writes: “[T]here’s little doubt that the Ukrainian operation will have a long-term effect on Russian strategic aviation.”
 
Russia’s losses of these kinds of bombers “will put major pressure on a key Russian force that was already operating at maximum capacity,” RUSI Senior Research Fellow and airpower specialist Justin Bronk tells the Global Briefing in emailed comments.

Russia’s long-range aviation force, Bronk notes, “has been very heavily tasked throughout the conflict [in Ukraine], maintaining a regular pattern of massed cruise missile and anti-ship quasi-ballistic missile salvos against Ukrainian cities, power infrastructure, bases, defence industry and other targets; while also maintaining semi-regular patrol flights into the Arctic, North Atlantic and northern Pacific for nuclear and conventional deterrence signalling.” As the Journal’s reporters also noted, Bronk observes: “The aircraft are, to all intents and purposes, impossible to replace as the [Tupolev] Tu-95 [bomber] has not been produced for more than 30 years and the Tu-22M3 has not been produced since the mid-1990s. Old airframes do exist in stock, but bringing them back to operational condition and upgrading their systems to Tu-95MS or Tu-22M3 standard would be extremely expensive and take many years to start producing any new usable aircraft.”
 
CNN Chief International Security Correspondent Nick Paton Walsh wrote of the weekend drone strikes that the damage to Russia “is twofold: to the internal narrative that Moscow can [continue its war effort] indefinitely—it clearly cannot, if surprises like these keep coming. And secondly, to its ability to visit the sort of bulk destruction it has relied upon to grind forwards in the war. The latter can slow its progress, but former is more dangerous. Tiny cracks can spread. For now, they are all Ukraine is able to inflict, but their longer-term impact, like so much in this war, is utterly unpredictable.”

What It Could Mean for Peace Talks

These Ukrainian attacks could make a peace deal—sought by US President Donald Trump in talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin—less likely. Russian and Ukrainian negotiators resumed talks in Istanbul on Monday, with Russia repeating demands that Ukraine give up territory and limit the size of its military. Last Wednesday, Trump appeared to give Putin a two-week deadline—after having said repeatedly that he believes, but wants to test, that the Russian president is serious about peace.
 
“It was already hard to imagine a breakthrough emerging from the direct talks between Russia and Ukraine set to be renewed in Istanbul on Monday,” CNN Chief Global Affairs Correspondent Matthew Chance wrote Monday. “But in the aftermath of what appear to have been multiple large-scale Ukrainian drone strikes against strategic bases across Russia, it’s even less likely either side will be prepared to shift their red lines.” Chance writes today of the negotiations: “The fact that Putin has once again dug in his heels and presented an uncompromising response to calls for peace, may now force Trump to act.”

Trying to End Russia’s

War on Ukraine

In the second part of Sunday’s all-star GPS panel, the Financial Times’ US national editor Edward Luce and the American Enterprise Institute’s Kori Schake talked about Russia’s new offensive in Ukraine—and prospects for peace.

In Poland, the Pendulum Swings Back

“A historian and populist firebrand who boasted about his brawls with soccer hooligans has narrowly won Poland’s presidential election, in a political upset that could torpedo the centrist government’s efforts to unspool the legacy of authoritarianism in the country,” as CNN’s Rob Picheta reports.
 
Poland’s new president-elect, 42-year-old Karol Nawrocki—a supporter of Trump who visited the White House in the weeks before Poland’s vote on Sunday—defeated liberal Warsaw mayor and electoral favorite Rafał Trzaskowski, keeping the right-leaning Law and Justice (PiS) party in the Presidential Palace with 50.89% of the vote.
 
Poland’s president is something of a figurehead compared with the prime minister, but critically, the president holds a legislative veto. As Picheta writes, current PiS President Andrzej Duda has used it to block the agenda of Prime Minister Donald Tusk—a pro-EU liberal whose election in December 2023 was seen as a turning point for Poland. Under PiS governance, the country had attracted widespread criticism for an illiberal slide. (At the pro-democracy, DC-based think tank Freedom House, Warsaw-based correspondent Christian Davies wrote in an analytical briefing: “Since Law and Justice came to power in Poland in 2015, it has waged a campaign to take control of the Polish judiciary in open defiance of the law, the constitution, and the courts.”) Tusk’s election had seemed to reverse that trend.
 
Now, the pendulum has swung back toward right-leaning populists.
 
“Mr Nawrocki’s victory may now cripple the government’s effort to repair the rule of law,” The Economist writes. “The government lacks the two-thirds majority in parliament needed to override [a presidential veto]. The hard right’s win seems also likely to touch off a crisis for Mr Tusk’s eclectic coalition, which includes everything from progressive leftists to a conservative farmers’ party. PiS will doubtless try to persuade right-leaning MPs to defect and bring down the government.”
 
In recent weeks and months, it had looked as if Trump-style populism had been waning around the world. In April, Canada voted for Prime Minister Mark Carney on the strength of his pushback against Trump’s insults and tariffs. Australia, similarly, reelected Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese last month. In mid-May, Romania elected pro-EU centrist Nicusor Dan, over a MAGA-style opponent.
 
Poland’s result points in the opposite direction, Bloomberg columnist Lionel Laurent writes: “It’s now increasingly clear that Trumpian attacks on the old certainties and dependencies of the transatlantic relationship aren’t creating an equal and opposite reaction. Polarization on issues like migration, abortion and Europe was on full display” in Poland’s election. The victorious Nawrocki “wore his Catholic values on his sleeve, attacked Brussels’ Green Deal and opposed Ukraine’s membership in NATO. Coupled with the shattering of 50 years of two-party dominance in Portugal, the recent centrist victory in Romania is starting to feel more like the end of a trend than the beginning. … Even amid a trade war, MAGA-infused politicians are riding high, with the AfD leading national polls in Germany and France’s National Rally expected to win the first round of 2027 presidential elections whoever’s leading it.”

‘Anti-Anti-Feminism’ and South Korea’s Vote

South Korea’s opposition Democratic Party candidate, Lee Jae-myung, is on track to become the next president after the ruling conservative People Power Party candidate conceded following today’s snap election.
 
The main backstory to this vote was the unpopular martial-law declaration in December by since-impeached-and-removed then-President Yoon Suk Yeol, of the conservative People Power Party. In that chaotic episode, Yoon suspended legislative and political activities, claiming the country was under threat from North Korea. The backlash was swift, and after a barricaded standoff between Yoon supporters and investigating authorities, South Korea’s Constitutional Court ruled against Yoon and permanently removed him from office.
 
Some characterized this strange saga as part of a toxic cycle. Country expert Nathan Park told Politico’s Catherine Kim last spring that South Korea’s political parties were locked in a vengeful  course of tit-for-tat investigations, following the conviction of former President Park Geun-hye in a corruption scandal in 2018. Writing in the Journal of Democracy in April of this year, Joan E. Cho and Aram Hur concluded that the crisis over Yoon’s martial-law declaration, “though shocking, reflects longstanding nationalist polarization rooted in unresolved conflicts tracing back to the Korean War. Such polarization distorts democratic competition, incentivizing partisan elites to prioritize state capture over democratic norms. South Korea’s democracy, born amid nationalist conflict, faces persistent dangers as nationalist polarization erodes democratic stability and incentivizes cycles of political revenge.”

Writing before today’s vote, The Atlantic’s Arash Azizi cited still another toxic cycle: South Korea’s fraught gender politics.

South Korea expert Park observed in a 2021 Foreign Policy op-ed a male, right-wing backlash against women’s rights that had woven itself into the country’s politics. A feminist movement known as 4B also arose, in which some young South Korean women pledged bi—or “no”—dating men, sex with men, marrying men or having children with men.
 
The Atlantic’s Azizi wrote: “The ever-higher profile of the feminist movement has inspired right-wing forces to present themselves as the champions of disgruntled men. … Yoon capitalized on men’s grievances in his 2022 run for president, using anti-feminism as a cudgel against the outgoing center-left president. In his campaign, Yoon promised to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. He repeatedly claimed that South Korea did not have a misogyny or gender-violence problem.”
 
Lee, today’s victorious Democratic Party presidential candidate, had faced Yoon in 2022—but hadn’t made gender politics an emphasis, Azizi wrote. This time was a bit different. “In the past, [Lee] has rebuked Yoon for claiming that there is no gender inequality in South Korea,” Azizi wrote. “[H]e has also promised to reduce the gender-wage gap, strengthen laws against stalking and dating violence, offer free HPV vaccines to adolescents, and establish a system for reporting and monitoring businesses with discriminatory employment practices. Feminists will likely support him to prevent the right’s return to power.”