The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that President Vladimir Putin is being misinformed about how poorly his troops are performing in Ukraine, an official said on Wednesday.

Irina Starikova, 41, is codenamed Bagheera, after Rudyard Kipling’s black panther in The Jungle Book, and has been captured by Ukraine in a major blow to Putin.

The mayor said forces had seized back full control of the town which had become one of the main hotspots of fighting after Kremlin soldiers hoped to march on to the capital.

IAN GALLAGHER: Silhouetted against a wall of flame, firemen battle to control an oil depot inferno after a devastating Russian cruise missile attack on Lviv.

President Biden landed in Poland, where he will get a first-hand look at the humanitarian crisis facing Ukrainian refugees and visit a fabled division helping bolster NATO’s eastern flank.

MARK GALEOTTI: The war in Ukraine has turned into a disaster and everyone is looking for other people to blame. The atmosphere of mistrust is being stoked by Western intelligence services.

Biden is preparing to sanction hundreds of Russian lawmakers, including most of Russia’s State  Duma on Thursday, just as he jets off to Europe to meet with NATO leaders.

Joe Biden said that recent Kremlin propaganda claiming the US and Ukraine had chemical or biological weapons were a clear sign that Moscow was ‘considering using both of those’.

‘I want to say to everyone, the Russian people are really against the war,’ Ovsyannikova said on ABC’s This Week. ‘It’s Putin’s war, not Russian people’s war.’