South Korean lawmakers provide update on estimated casualties following briefing by country’s intelligence agency.

About 600 North Korean soldiers have been killed fighting in Russia’s war in Ukraine, South Korean lawmakers have said, citing intelligence officials.

Speaking after a closed-door briefing by the National Intelligence Service (NIS) on Wednesday, Lee Seong-kweun and Kim Byung-kee told reporters that an estimated 4,700 North Koreans had been killed or injured so far in the war.

Lee and Kim, who co-chair the legislature’s intelligence committee, made their comments two days after Pyongyang confirmed for the first time that it had sent troops to Russia to support Moscow’s war.

In a report by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on Monday, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was quoted as saying he had ordered the deployment of troops to “annihilate and wipe out the Ukrainian neo-Nazi occupiers and liberate the Kursk area in cooperation with the Russian armed forces”.

The latest casualty figures mark a significant jump from the NIS’s briefing to lawmakers in January, when the spy agency reportedly said that about 300 North Korean troops had been killed in the conflict.

In their briefing to reporters, Lee and Kim, members of the conservative People Power Party and liberal Democratic Party, respectively, said that the NIS estimates that Pyongyang has deployed about 15,000 soldiers in total.

The lawmakers also said that Pyongyang appears to have received technical assistance on spy satellites in return for its assistance, as well as drones, electronic warfare equipment and SA-22 surface-to-air missiles.

“After six months of participation in the war, the North Korean military has become less inept, and its combat capability has significantly improved as it becomes accustomed to using new weapons such as drones,” Lee told reporters.

The massive power outage that wreaked havoc in Europe is being blamed on a pair of likely solar plant breakdowns in southwest Spain, a report said.

By 7 a.m. local time Tuesday, more than 99% of energy demand in Spain had been restored, the country’s electricity operator Red Eléctrica announced. Portuguese grid operator REN said on Tuesday morning that all the 89 power substations had been back online since late last night and power had been restored to all 6.4 million customers. 

Red Eléctrica said it identified two power generation loss incidents in southwest Spain – likely involving solar plants – that caused instability in the Spanish power grid and contributed to a breakdown of its interconnection to France, according to Reuters.

The economic cost of Monday’s blackout across the Iberian Peninsula could range between $2.5 billion to more than $5 billion, it cited investment bank RBC as saying.

POWER RESTORED TO HALF OF SPAIN AS TRAVEL DECIMATED 

“We have never had a complete collapse of the system,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said in a televised address Monday night.  

Emergency workers in Spain said they had rescued some 35,000 passengers on Monday who were stranded along railways and in underground tunnels. 

Video that aired on Spanish television showed people evacuating metro stations in Madrid, and empty stations with trains stopped in Barcelona. Spain’s parliament was also left in the dark, public broadcaster RTVE reported.  

The ATP Tour said play at the Madrid Open tennis tournament was suspended for the day due to the power outage.  

In Portugal, several Lisbon subway cars were evacuated, courts stopped working and ATMs and electronic payment systems were affected. Traffic lights in Lisbon also stopped working during the outage. 

REN, Portugal’s grid operator, described the incident Monday as a “rare atmospheric phenomenon.” 

WALL STREET BANKER WASHES UP DEAD ON PARADISE BEACH WEEKS AFTER DISAPPEARING ON VACATION   

People wait on a platform as metro operations resume partially in Madrid, Spain, on Tuesday, April 29, following the nationwide power outage.  (Reuters/Violeta Santos Moura)

“Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high-voltage lines, a phenomenon known as induced atmospheric vibration,” it was quoted as saying. “These oscillations caused synchronization failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.” 

However, on Tuesday, Spain’s meteorological agency AEMET said that it had not detected any “unusual meteorological or atmospheric phenomena” Monday and no sudden temperature fluctuations were recorded at their weather stations. 

Eduardo Prieto, Red Eléctrica’s chief of operations, said the instability in the power grid caused the Spanish and French electricity interconnection through the Pyrenees mountains to split, leading to a failure on the Spanish side, according to Reuters. The news agency reported that some parts of France suffered brief power outages on Monday as well. 

People sleep in a sports facility designated for people who were stuck at a train station in Barcelona, Spain, on Tuesday, April 29. (Reuters/Bruna Casas)

Authorities were still investigating what happened on Tuesday. 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.