Biden: Putin adviser may be placed under house arrest

A US government spokesman said on Wednesday that US intelligence officials say the Russian military leadership misled Putin and that there are tensions between them.

On Thursday evening, Swedish time, President Joe Biden commented on the information regarding Putin.

– There is a lot of speculation. I can’t say this for sure, but he appears to have isolated himself and there are indications that he has fired or placed some of his advisers under house arrest, Biden said at a press conference, according to CNN.

– But we don’t have much concrete evidence of that.

Russia denies

From the Russian side, the information is rejected. Rather, it is evidence that the United States does not have a real view of what is happening in the Kremlin, says Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

“They do not understand President Putin, they do not understand the mechanisms of decision-making, they do not understand how we work,” he said.

Peskov further warns that this kind of “total ignorance” leads to “wrong and hasty decisions with very disastrous consequences.”

Russia vowed on Tuesday to withdraw its forces from areas near Kyiv and Chernihiv. However, this has been met with skepticism from the other side and there is not much to suggest that this is happening.

Rather, Ukraine, the United States, and the United Kingdom described it as a necessary Russian regroupment.

Refusal orders

The British Ministry of Defense announced on Wednesday that “Russia’s stated focus on an offensive in Donetsk and Luhansk is likely to be a subtle acknowledgment that more than significant progress is difficult to maintain.”

Jeremy Fleming, head of British signals intelligence agency GCHQ, said in a speech in Australia that Putin had grossly misjudged the situation.

“We have seen Russian soldiers, who lack weapons and morale, refuse to carry out orders, sabotage their own equipment and even accidentally shoot down their planes,” the British intelligence chief said.