Kremlin rejects U.S. claims Putin being misled by advisers

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.

The Ukrainian economy is expected to shrink by one-fifth this year, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development said Thursday. 

The EBRD said it expected Ukraine’s GDP to fall by 20 percent this year and Russia’s by 10 percent in its biannual Regional Economic Update published on Thursday.

The bank said the war was taking place in territories that produce about 60 percent of Ukraine's GDP. It said that the National Bank of Ukraine estimates that 30 percent of businesses have stopped production, while electricity consumption was estimated at about 60 percent of the pre-war level. 

"Projections are subject to an exceptionally high degree of uncertainty, including major downside risks should hostilities escalate or should exports of gas or other commodities from Russia become restricted," it noted.

Still, the EBRD further said that the war would have a "severe effect" on economies beyond the immediate area of the conflict.

"The war on Ukraine has been having a profound impact on the economies in the EBRD regions as well as globally," Beata Javorcik, Chief Economist of the EBRD, said. "Inflationary pressures were already exceptionally high and it seems certain they will now be worse, which will have a disproportionate affect on many of the lower income countries where we work.”