Ukrainian emergency teams are gradually restoring power supply to areas of northern Ukraine that were cut off from the power grid as a result of Russian attacks, Prime Minister Yulia Sviridenko said late last night in a post on the messaging app "Telegram", Reuters reported, quoted by BTA.
Sviridenko said that power supply had been fully restored in two areas of the border Sumy region that were hit by Russian attacks last night. Repair work is also underway in the neighboring Chernihiv region, where more than 300,000 customers were left without power after Russian air strikes on Wednesday.
According to Sviridenko, in the northern city of Slavutych, near the defunct Chernobyl nuclear power plant, critical infrastructure facilities have been reconnected to the grid and emergency teams hope to soon restore power to the rest of the city.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky discussed new aid packages and the development of the "Security Action for Europe" program with Portuguese Prime Minister Luiz Montenegro. of the EU Council, known as the SAFE program, Ukrinform reported, citing a post by the Ukrainian leader on the social platform "Facebook".
""We discussed further assistance in the field of defense, including new assistance packages and the development of the SAFE program. I called on Portugal to join the PURL initiative (allowing the provision of American military equipment to Ukraine - ed. note). Another topic was Portugal's readiness to participate in the reconstruction of Ukraine," Zelensky reported.
The Ukrainian president thanked the Prime Minister of Portugal and the Portuguese people for their consistent support for Ukraine from the very beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, and in particular for their financial support for the "Superhero Schools" project.
Earlier today, Zelensky also spoke with Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson about the Swedish "Gripen" fighter jets and the use of frozen Russian assets for the defense and reconstruction of Ukraine, Ukrinform notes.
The SAFE program was adopted by the EU Council in May 2025, and 19 member states, including Bulgaria, expressed their intention to participate in it.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said that the new Russian-orchestrated provocation at sea against his country is another case of hybrid warfare, the Polish news agency PAP reported, quoted by BTA.
"This is war", Tusk said. During yesterday's summit of the European political community in Copenhagen, he participated in a discussion with his British counterpart Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron.
"We must put an end to such illusions. The first is that there is no war. Some of us prefer to define this as full-scale aggression, incidents or provocations. No, this is war. A new type of war, very complex, but war," he said, referring to the recent incident with the Russian shadow fleet used by Russia to evade sanctions imposed against it.
"We had another incident near the port of Szczecin," he said without providing further details.
"There are Russian units and, frankly, we have new incidents in the region and in the Baltic Sea every week, almost every day. The provocation involving drones was the most spectacular as far as the Polish side is concerned, but, frankly, there are similar cases every day on our border with Belarus," the Polish prime minister added.