A court in the Russian city of St. Petersburg sentenced anti-war activist Olga Smirnova to six years in prison on August 30 on a charge of spreading fake news about the armed forces.
The problem with the RFA source is the CIA funding, not that it's in English. It's pretty disingenuous to try to imply Newizu is pro-Putin or anti-imperialist, or anti-west or anything else that would qualify as a separate bias or agenda.
I don't think they're implying anything like that? A Russian source talking about a bad thing Russia did is generally more reliable than a CIA source saying the same thing, since there's less incentive to make stuff up.
I searched for her name and despite the RFE article being a week old, no other more credible outlets have picked up on it. Maybe other outlets are using a different romanization of her name but this is certainly a red flag.
It literally isn't. RFE is definitely a US propaganda platform, but it objectively has nothing to do with the CIA these days. But you should probably check under your bed one more time just to make sure.
RFE also "objectively" had nothing to do with the CIA for nearly 20 years after it was created, at which point it turned out the CIA had been funding it all along. But now we know they've stopped because they said they did, and anyone suggesting that they're not editorially independent is a paranoid loon, just as they would've been in the 50's and 60's.
Some of us don't believe that the people whose job it is to lie stopped lying because they said they did. Suggesting that the CIA is still doing things that they did regularly and successfully kept hidden in the past is not a conspiracy theory.
A shitty source not being the absolute worst source doesn't make it any less shitty than it is. If your only options for news are US government propaganda or Russian government propaganda, the only valid choice is to stop following the news.