More than 20 people were injured after Russian strikes hit the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia. Ukrainian regional authorities said four people were also injured in a Russian joint drone and artillery attack on localities east of Nikopol city in southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region. Russia's Ministry of Defence reports that its air defence units destroyed 10 Ukrainian drones in an hour. Eight of the drones were intercepted over the border region of Bryansk and two over Russian-annexed Crimea. Yury Slyusar, acting governor of Russia's Rostov region, located on Ukraine's eastern border, said Russian air defence units destroyed Ukrainian drones over five districts.

Vance made the comments in a wide-ranging interview, in which he defended Trump's approach to the war in Ukraine. "Yes, of course, [the Ukrainians] are angry that they were invaded," Vance added. "But are we going to continue to lose thousands and thousands of soldiers over a few miles of territory this or that way?" Trump this week suggested that Ukraine might be willing to cede Crimea - which Russia invaded in 2014 - in order to reach a truce settlement. But Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky had earlier implied that he would be unable to accept Russian control of the peninsula, citing the Ukrainian constitution. In a separate interview with Fox News on Thursday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said there needed to be a "breakthrough" in the conflict soon, otherwise Trump "will have to decide how much time to dedicate to this". Russian president Vladimir Putin this week announced a temporary three-day ceasefire from 8 May, to coincide with anniversary celebrations marking the end of World War Two.

Despite the evident practical importance of license plate recognition (LPR), corresponding research is limited by the volume of publicly available datasets due to privacy regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). To address this challenge, synthetic data generation has emerged as a promising approach. In this paper, we propose to synthesize realistic license plates (LPs) using diffusion models, inspired by recent advances in image and video generation. In our experiments a diffusion model was successfully trained on a Ukrainian LP dataset, and 1000 synthetic images were generated for detailed analysis. Through manual classification and annotation of the generated images, we performed a thorough study of the model output, such as success rate, character distributions, and type of failures. Our contributions include experimental validation of the efficacy of diffusion models for LP synthesis, along with insights into the characteristics of the generated data. Furthermore, we have prepared a synthetic dataset consisting of 10,000 LP images, publicly available at https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.13342102. Conducted experiments empirically confirm the usefulness of synthetic data for the LPR task. Despite the initial performance gap between the model trained with real and synthetic data, the expansion of the training data set with pseudolabeled synthetic data leads to an improvement in LPR accuracy by 3% compared to baseline.

Footage circulating on social media appeared to show smoke rising over the Feodosia terminal. Local Russian-installed officials told RIA Novosti that efforts to extinguish the fire were ongoing. Meanwhile, the defence ministry in Moscow said that 12 Ukrainian drones were shot down over the peninsula overnight out of a total of 21 launched by Kyiv. In a statement announcing the attack, Ukraine's general staff said that oil products shipped from the terminal were being used to "meet the needs of the Russian occupation army". The facility was previously hit in a Ukrainian drone strike in March.

One person has been killed and others wounded in a Ukrainian drone attack on a ferry at port in southern Russia, the regional governor has said. Krasnodar governor Veniamin Kondratyev said the ferry had caught fire at Port Kavkaz but there was no risk of it spreading. The port lies a few kilometres from the Kerch bridge, which enables road and rail travel between Russia and the Crimean peninsula, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014. "Unfortunately there are injured and dead among the crew and port staff," Mr Kondratyev said. He added that emergency services were on the scene.

The Russian navy's Black Sea Fleet has been forced to rebase nearly all its combat-ready warships from occupied Crimea to other locations, and its main naval hub is becoming ineffectual because of attacks by Kyiv, Ukraine's navy chief said. Vice-Admiral Oleksiy Neizhpapa said Ukrainian missile and naval drone strikes had caused heavy damage to the Sevastopol base, a logistics hub for repairs, maintenance, training and ammunition storage among other important functions for Russia. "They were established over many decades, possibly centuries. And clearly they are now losing this hub," Neizhpapa told Reuters in a rare interview in the port city of Odesa ahead of Ukraine Navy Day on Sunday. More than 28 months since Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv has dealt a series of stinging blows to Moscow in the Black Sea although Ukrainian ground troops are on the back foot across a sprawling front.

Russia launched missiles against Kyiv for the third time in five days, part of an apparent escalation of the aerial bombardment of Ukrainian cities as the war stretches into its third year with the front line largely stationary. Five people were injured in the strike on the Ukrainian capital, with two of them taken to hospital, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. Russia fired two ballistic missiles at Kyiv from occupied Crimea in the daylight attack, but both were intercepted above the city, said Serhiy Popko, the head of the city's military administration. Multiple explosions were heard in the capital, in the latest scare for residents. Ukraine has been appealing to its allies for months for greater air defence capabilities as Russia steps up its attacks across the country.

It is, however, naval drones that have made Russia's Black Sea fleet particularly vulnerable. Under relentless attacks, Moscow was forced to withdraw the core of its fleet from Crimea and move them further east, to Novorossiysk. And even there, Russian ships remain within reach of Ukrainian drones.

In one of the biggest strikes on the Black Sea fleet, last September Ukraine attacked naval targets and port infrastructure, using as many as 10 missiles and three unmanned boats. It caused a large fire at a Sevastopol shipyard.

Ukraine said it critically damaged the Caesar Kunikov, a Russian landing warship, off occupied Crimea, in a drone attack, the latest blow to the Russian navy's Black Sea Fleet. Ukraine said the ship, one of Russia's newest vessels, had a crew of 87 and had taken part in wars in Georgia and Syria as well as Ukraine. There was no official comment from Russia on the attack. Newly-appointed Ukrainian armed forces chief Oleksandr Syrskyii visited troops fighting around the key flashpoint of Avdiivka on the eastern front line, and described the situation as "extremely complex and stressful". Syrskyii, who was accompanied by Defence Minister Rustem Umerov, said Russian forces had "a numerical advantage in personnel".