I think the most charitable thing that you could say about Zero Hedge is that it's... weirdly credulous of Russian propaganda (which in itself would make it a bad news site; you don't want a news site that'll just reprint any old nonsense it sees on Twitter). However, there may be more to it than that: https://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/is-the... (see the bit about Colin Lokey; the Bloomberg source article goes into more detail but is paywalled).
