Ukraine-Russia news – live: Putin’s threat of using tactical nuclear weapons is ‘real’, warns Biden

The threat of Vladimir Putin using tactical nuclear weapons is “real”, US president Joe Biden said as the war in Ukraine inches closer to 500 days.

“When I was out here about two years ago saying I worried about the Colorado river drying up, everybody looked at me like I was crazy,” Mr Biden said in California.

“They looked at me like when I said I worry about Putin using tactical nuclear weapons. It’s real.”

Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, Russia ’s staunch ally in the continuing invasion of Ukraine, confirmed delivery of Moscow ’s tactical nuclear weapons in his country last week, claiming that some of the nukes were three times more powerful than the atomic bombs the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

This is Russia’s first such deployment of warheads, of shorter-range and less powerful nuclear weapons that can be used in a war, outside its borders since the fall of the Soviet Union.

As the war enters its 481th day, Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukrainian defenders were making progress and there are no lost positions, “only liberated ones”.