A top security adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned on Sunday that Russian plans to station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus would destabilise that country.

“The kremlin took Belarus as a nuclear hostage,” Oleksiy Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, wrote on Twitter.

Mr Putin said that such a move would not violate any nuclear nonproliferation agreements. He added that the US has stationed nuclear weapons on the territory of European allies.

“There is nothing unusual here either: firstly, the United States has been doing this for decades.

“They have long deployed their tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of their allied countries,” he said.

The Russian president said he had agreed with president Lukashenko of Belarus, a supporter of the invasion, that Russia would place tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus “without violating our international obligations on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.”

Russia has moved ten aircraft to Belarus that would be capable of carrying tactical nuclear weapons, president Putin claimed.

Mr Putin did not specify when the weapons would be transferred to Belarus, but claimed he construction of a storage facility for tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus by July 1.

Commander Oleksandr Syrskyi claimed that the group, who have been at the front of Moscow’s assault on eastern and southern Ukraine, are losing “considerable strength” amid the fight for Bakhmut.

The Ukrainian military also claimed 1,020 Russian troops had been killed in the past 24 hours after unsuccessful attacks on Lyman, Avdiivka, Marinka and Shakhtarsk.

Kyiv’s ambassador has urged more people in the UK to host refugees fleeing Russia’s invasion, on the one-year anniversary of the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

Thanking Britons for standing “shoulder to shoulder” with Ukraine, ambassador Vadym Prystaiko said in a video message that 160,000 Ukrainian women and children had now arrived under the scheme since Vladimir Putin’s invasion last February – but warned that “some still need your help”.

Refugee charities told The Independent that Homes for Ukraine had been “riddled with flaws” in its first year, while councils cautioned that “significant challenges remain” to ensure Ukrainian refugees “can be supported in the long-term”.

More than 5,000 Russian prisoners who fought in Ukraine were pardoned after finishing their contracts to fight in the war, the founder of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group said.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the boss of the Wagner Group, reportedly recruited thousands of men from prisons, offering them the chance of freedom in return for serving in some of the most dangerous battles in Ukraine.

“At the present time, more than 5,000 people have been released on pardon after completing their contracts with Wagner,” Prigozhin said.

Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez said he would push for fair peace in the war in Ukraine that included “territorial integrity” during a state visit to China next week.

Mr Sanchez, speaking to journalists at the Ibero-American Summit meeting in the Dominican Republic, said he would discuss peace prospects with Chinese president Xi Jinping, who is trying to position himself as a mediator in the war between Russia and Ukraine.

“The most important thing … is that when this peace is reached in Ukraine, it will be fair and lasting … and when we talk about fair, I mean that the territorial integrity of Ukraine, which has been violated by Putin, is respected,” Mr Sanchez said in a news conference.

The top commander of Ukraine’s military said his forces are pushing back against Russian troops in the long and grinding battle for the town of Bakhmut.

“The Bakhmut direction is the most difficult. Thanks to the titanic efforts of the defense forces, the situation is being stabilised,” Gen Valerii Zaluzhnyi said in a post on Telegram giving a synopsis of a telephone call with Adm Sir Tony Radakin, Britain’s chief of defence staff.

The seven-month battle for Bakhmut, where Russian forces have closed in on three sides, is the longest clash of the war, with Russia deploying both regular soldiers and fighters of the mercenary Wagner Group.

Russian forces must go through Bakhmut to push deeper into parts of the eastern Donbas region, though Western officials say that the capture of the city would have limited impact on the course of the war.

Russia is reneging on its weapon delivery commitments to India as arms supplies have hit a roadblock due to the war in Ukraine, according to the Indian Air Force (IAF).

The comments seem to be the first sign that India could recalibrate its dependency on Russia amid continuing border challenges it faces from its nuclear neighbours Pakistan and China.

The IAF told a committee of India’s lower house in parliament in a statement published that Russia had scheduled a “major delivery” this year, without specifying what this delivery was.

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has spoken out against Vladimir Putin’s decision to store nuclear weapons in Belarus.

“As long as President Putin has nuclear weapons, Europe cannot be safe,” ICAN’s interim executive director Daniel Hoegsta said in a statement on Saturday.

“He justfies this dangerous escalation by citing decades of NATO nuclear sharing. As long as countries continue their complicity in considering nuclear weapons as anything other than a global problem, this helps give Putin cover to get away with this kind of behaviour.”