In your briefing today:

📣 Polls have opened in Scotland and across the UK as a new Holyrood parliament is elected for Edinburgh, a new Senedd is elected in Wales, and around 5,000 council seats and six mayoral positions are up for grabs across England. It’s the biggest poll since the 2024 General Election.

Polls close at 10pm tonight, but what happens next varies across the UK: England and Wales will see results overnight, while Scotland will have to wait until around lunchtime tomorrow for any news of the 129 Holyrood seats up for grabs: there’s no overnight count here this time, after arrangements remain changed following the Covid pandemic.

📣 Two British people are self-isolating at home after they left the cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak, MV Hondius. They left the ship after it had set off from Argentina a month ago, but do not have symptoms. Three people have died from the “rat virus” outbreak, with 150 still on board as it sails for the Canary Islands. There, passengers will be disembarked and flown home to quarantine. (BBC)

📣 There’s confusion about what the US plans to do next in the Middle East, after 24 hours of contradictory signals from the White House, which have ranged from claims that a ceasefire is holding and negotiations are going well, to threats to start bombing Iran once more. The AP agency perhaps generously says the Trump administration is sowing confusion. (AP)

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📣 Former SNP council leader Jordan Linden, who was found guilty of multiple sex offences against boys and young men, has been jailed for 18 months. (Daily Record)

📣 Edinburgh’s King’s Theatre is still £500,000 short of its final target for its refurbishment work: they’re planning bucket collections and other initiatives to make up the shortfall. (Scotsman)

📣 Sixteen people have become unwell since visiting a petting farm in South Queensferry. (BBC)

📣 Russia has demanded foreign embassies in Kyiv be evacuated ahead of this weekend, amid threats it will attack the Ukrainian capital during its Victory Parade celebrations in Moscow. (Independent)

📣 Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged suicide note has been unsealed by a federal judge. (Guardian)

📣 JP Morgan Chase offered $1 million to settle a sexual assault and harassment case weeks before a former investment banker filed a lawsuit, which has since set the finance world alight. (WSJ has the exclusive)

📣 A German tourist has won compensation of more than £850 after losing a sun lounger race at a Greek resort. (BBC)

⚽️ PSG will defend their Champions League title against Arsenal later this month after the French side overcame Bayern Munich on aggregate, earning a 1-1 draw in Germany. Last week’s clash in Paris may have been a modern classic of attacking football: the latest instalment wasn’t as thrilling, although it did confirm PSG’s utter dominance in every aspect of the game. (Guardian) (🎥 Highlights)

🗣️ Is Vladimir Putin losing his grip on Russia? Today marks the 25th anniversary of his inauguration as President of the Russian Federation: he does so amid suggestions he’s spending much of his time hiding in a bunker, fearing for his personal safety, while outside the world is shaping itself in ways he always feared.

Multiple reports paint a picture of the President increasingly obsessed by the war in Ukraine, micromanaging Russian operations there at the expense of domestic issues, and doing so deep underground. Reports the FT (£): “Concern over a coup d’état or an assassination attempt, specifically involving drones, has intensified sharply.”

The perception of a risk to his safety appears bad enough to send Putin into even greater isolation than he has demanded since Covid. According to a leaked European intelligence dossier, close staffers around Putin now have surveillance systems in their homes.

“Cooks, bodyguards and photographers who work with the president are also banned from travelling on public transport,” reports CNN.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) has also said it has seen “corroborating evidence of enhanced security measures for Putin and high-ranking Russian officials”, the Institute said in an update on Monday.

Part of the new precautions, rolled out in the wake of the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - the Iranian Supreme Leader - in February, have involved shutting down mobile internet services in the centre of Moscow. The Times reports Russian worries Israel had been able to monitor Khamenei’s movements by hacking into street surveillance cameras: Moscow has 250,000 such cameras.

It speculates on the various ways he could lose power: a coup, an orderly transition to an anointed heir, or simply natural causes. “The average life expectancy of a Russian man is 68,” notes the Times, but - depsite all the rumours - there’s little hard evidence Putin, who “enjoys world-class healthcare are rarely drinks”, is in anything other than decent health.

He does have a problem with his popularity, however. That has dipped to its lowest level since 2022 although, to be sure, his ratings would still delight many of our own politicians: he’s gone from roughly 80% net approval to roughly 60%, according to the Levada Centre, with those assessing Russia to be “on the wrong path” has increased, to roughly 30%.

But the relative dissatisfaction with Putin and his direction has arrived sharply and, in the words of The Economist, “not as an event but as a sensation, felt everywhere at once: “Vladimir Putin has led Russia into a dead-end and nobody has a map for what comes next,” the newspaper says this week. “The first manifestation is a shift in the language used by senior officials, regional governors and businessmen: they have stopped using the first-person plural when talking about the actions of authorities in the country.”

Alexander Etkind is the author of Russia Against Modernity: a book that argues Russia’s invasion of Ukraine wasn’t just a land grab or a political flex, but a strike against the modern world of climate awareness, energy transition and digitisation.

In the New Statesman today he argues Putin has a weakness that can also - in some contexts, such as being a KGB officer - be a strength: a reduced sense of danger, and a lack of belief in his own mortality. “It almost certainly explains why he launched a war that surprised his own elite – people who shared his apocalyptic mood but had not imagined he would actually pull the trigger,” writes Etkind.

Putin’s problem is that all he does - even if apparently successful - brings about what he fears most. “Putin feared Nato expansion – and brought it to the gates of St Petersburg,” writes Etkind. “He feared Ukrainian nationalism – and conjured it into an existential force. He feared European unity – and forged it.

“He feared the dissolution of Russian power – and set in motion the military exhaustion, elite fragmentation, and regional resentment that make dissolution more likely.”

For all that, we should still expect to see Putin inspecting his armed forces during the Victory Day parades in Moscow this weekend. But, with Russia and Ukraine yet to agree a ceasefire around the event the anxiety about safety will remain.

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