The Kremlin rejected U.S. claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin is being misled by his advisers about Russia’s failures on the battlefield.
In a daily news briefing on Thursday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said “neither the State Department nor the Pentagon have real information about what is happening in the Kremlin.”
“They just don’t understand what’s going on in the Kremlin,” he said, warning that “such a complete misunderstanding leads to erroneous and rash decisions that cause very bad consequences.”
It comes after declassified U.S. intelligence claimed that Putin’s senior advisers have been “too afraid to tell him the truth” about the situation on the ground.
The Biden administration could soon announce a plan to release around 1 million barrels of oil a day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for as long as six months, a source familiar with the matter has told NBC News. The announcement could come as soon as Thursday.
In Ukraine, an evacuation convoy of 17 buses was able to leave the besieged port city of Mariupol Thursday morning, according to its city council, with further evacuations anticipated for Friday. Meanwhile, the Pentagon said it had seen Russian forces near Kyiv move north or into Belarus, with both the U.S. and U.K. saying it appeared troops were looking to resupply and reorganize.
