TOP HEADLINES

• Kyiv said Russia was holding Minsk as a "nuclear hostage" after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to ally Belarus. "The Kremlin took Belarus as a nuclear hostage," the secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defence Council, Oleksiy Danilov, wrote on Twitter. READ MORE BELOW

• President Putin threatened to deploy depleted uranium munitions to Ukraine if Kyiv receives such ammunition from the West, after a British official suggested London could supply it to Ukraine. "Russia of course has what it needs to answer. Without exaggeration, we have hundreds of thousands of such shells. We have not used them yet," Putin said in an interview on Russian television.

• UN nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi said he would travel to Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia plant next week, warning of the "precarious" situation there. Grossi will be traveling to the plant for the second time since the conflict began "to assess first-hand the serious nuclear safety and security situation at the facility," said the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

• Kyiv said its forces were "managing to stabilize" the situation around Bakhmut, a now-destroyed city in eastern Ukraine that has seen the longest battle of the Russian offensive. The frontline situation is "the toughest in the Bakhmut direction," the head of Ukraine's armed forces Valery Zaluzhny said.

• More than 5,000 former criminals have been pardoned after finishing their contracts to fight in Russia's Wagner mercenary group against Ukraine, said Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of Wagner.

• Ukraine will no longer resort to "dangerous" monetary financing to fund the war against Russia, its central bank governor, Andriy Pyshnyi, told the Financial Times in an interview. The head of the National Bank of Ukraine said that it had "created huge risks for macro-financial stability" when the bank was last year forced to print billions of hryvnia to plug a budget shortfall, adding that an "open conflict" with the government over the issue had been resolved.

IN DETAIL

Putin says will deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus

Russian President Vladimir Putin said he would deploy tactical nuclear weapons in neighbor and ally Belarus, bringing the arms to a country at the gates of the European Union.

Putin has previously issued thinly veiled warnings that he could use nuclear weapons in Ukraine if Russia were threatened, reviving Cold War-era fears.

He also said he would deploy depleted uranium ammunition if Kyiv received the controversial weaponry from the West, following a British suggestion that it could supply Ukraine.

Putin said the move to deploy tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus was "nothing unusual."

"The United States has been doing this for decades. They have long placed their tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of their allies," Putin said.

Putin said he spoke to Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko and said "we agreed to do the same."

He added that Russia had helped equip Belarusian planes "without violating our international agreements on nuclear-non-proliferation... 10 planes are ready for this type of weapon to be used."

Russia has given Belarus an Iskander system that can carry nuclear weapons, Putin also said.

It will start training crews on April 3 and plans to finish the construction of a special storage facility for tactical nuclear weapons by July 1.

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