Poltava Oblast
Russian air attacks kill five at Ukraine's Naftogaz gas facilities
What are Russia's gains from the Iran war? 'We are not losers; we are winners' Russian air attacks kill five at Ukraine's Naftogaz gas facilities At least five people have been killed in Russian air strikes on Ukrainian state-run gas facilities in the Poltava and Kharkiv regions, officials said, a day after Kyiv and Moscow announced unilateral ceasefires to take effect later this week. Three employees and two rescue workers were killed and 37 people were wounded in the overnight missile and drone barrage, Serhiy Koretskyi, the CEO of Ukraine's state energy company Naftogaz said on Tuesday. This was a combined strike involving UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) and ballistic missiles," said Koretskyi. He added that the attack cut gas supply to nearly 3,500 customers. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian authorities had shown "utter cynicism" by announcing a ceasefire and then launching missile and drone attacks on his country. "Russia could cease fire at any moment, and this would stop the war and our responses.
Six dead as Russia hits energy and residential sites in Ukraine
At least six people have died after Russia launched hundreds of missile and drone attacks on energy infrastructure and residential targets in Ukraine overnight. A strike on an apartment building in the city of Dnipro killed two people and wounded 12, while three died in Zaporizhzhia. In all, 25 locations across Ukraine, including the capital city Kyiv, were hit, leaving many areas without electricity and heating. Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said on Telegram that major energy facilities were damaged in the Poltava, Kharkiv and Kyiv regions, and work was under way to restore power. In Russia, the defence ministry said its forces had shot down 79 Ukrainian drones overnight. The Ukrainian air force said Russia had launched more than 450 exploding bomber drones and 45 missiles.
Deaths, injuries after Russia hits residential and energy sites in Ukraine
Is Trump losing patience with Putin? Will sanctions against Russian oil giants hurt Putin? At least 10 people have been killed, and more parts of Ukraine have been plunged into darkness, after another night of intense Russian attacks across the country, local authorities said, as diplomatic momentum to end the nearly four-year war falters. Ukraine's military announced on Saturday morning that hundreds of Russian drones, as well as missiles launched from the air, ground and sea, targeted critical infrastructure, a frequent Kremlin target as another harsh winter of war looms. Most of the missiles went through defences, with only nine successfully shot down, but 406 of the drones were intercepted.
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,319
Can Ukraine restore its pre-war borders? Why are Tomahawk missiles for Ukraine a'red line' for Russia? Is Russia testing NATO with aerial incursions in Europe? One person was killed and about 30 others injured after two Russian drones struck trains at a station in Ukraine's northern Sumy region. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of "terrorism", while Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Moscow deliberately targeted civilians during the attack.
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,305
How is Russia replenishing its military? What is a'coalition of the willing'? How China forgot promises and'debts' to Ukraine How are Europe, the US pulling apart on Ukraine? Russian forces launched a large-scale missile and drone attack, targeting areas across Ukraine, killing at least three people and wounding dozens more, according to Ukrainian officials. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia launched 580 drones and 40 missiles, and that the attacks took place across nine regions, including Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv, Chernihiv, Zaporizhia, Poltava, Kyiv, Odesa, Sumy and Kharkiv.
Charting the past year of Russian drone and missile attacks on Ukraine
How is Russia replenishing its military? What is a'coalition of the willing'? How China forgot promises and'debts' to Ukraine How are Europe, the US pulling apart on Ukraine? On Sunday, Russia launched its largest drone and missile attack since the war began, firing a total of 823 projectiles into Ukraine. The attack killed at least four people, wounded 44, and caused damage to a key building in Kyiv's government district, making it the first on the site since the full-fledged war began in February 2022.
US will 'have to' send weapons to Ukraine, Trump says days after Pentagon pause
President Donald Trump says the U.S. will have to send more weapons to Ukraine, just days after Pentagon paused critical weapons deliveries to Kyiv. President Donald Trump on Monday said that his administration would be sending defensive weapons to Ukraine so the war-torn country could defend itself from Russia's ongoing invasion, an apparent turnaround after the Pentagon said last week it was pausing such deliveries. His comments came as Russian attacks on Ukraine killed at least 11 civilians and injured more than 80 others, including seven children, officials said Monday. "We have to," Trump said when questioned at the start of a dinner he was hosting at the White House for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "They have to be able to defend themselves. They're getting hit very hard now. We're going to send some more weapons -- defensive weapons primarily."
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,154
Overnight Russian drone attacks on east, south and central Ukraine damaged civilian infrastructure and businesses in the Poltava region and injured civilians in the Odesa region, Ukrainian officials said early on Wednesday. Odesa came under a "massive attack" by Russian drones overnight on Tuesday, wounding at least three people, the head of the regional administration, Oleh Kiper, wrote on his Telegram page. A residential building in a densely populated urban area of Odesa, civilian infrastructure and an educational facility were hit, he said. Air defence units repelled Russian air attacks on the Kyiv region and Ukraine's second largest city of Kharkiv, regional governors said in posts on Telegram channels. Russian forces said they have retaken St Nicholas Belogorsky monastery in the village of Gornal in Russia's Kursk region, where Ukrainian troops had been based, Russia's TASS news agency quoted a security source as saying.
Russia claims to have seized new villages in eastern Ukraine
Russia claims it has captured two villages in eastern Ukraine where its forces have been steadily advancing for months, as Ukraine's president urged allies to deliver all the weapons they have promised to send to Kyiv. The Russian Defence Ministry said on Sunday that soldiers have captured the village of Yantarne in the eastern Donetsk region, about 10km (six miles) southwest of Kurakhove, a key logistics hub that Moscow claimed to have seized last week – a day after Russia's army said it had also taken new territory northwest of Kurakhove. The Defence Ministry added that soldiers had also captured the village of Kalinove in the northeastern Kharkiv region. The village is on the western bank of the Oskil River, which for a long time formed the front line between the two armies in the region. A Ukrainian official, quoted by the AFP news agency, said on Thursday that Russian forces had managed to establish a bridgehead on the western bank after crossing the river.
License Plate Images Generation with Diffusion Models
Shpir, Mariia, Shvai, Nadiya, Nakib, Amir
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.