Usually not the biggest fan of bellingcat because they tend to be overconfident (and often wrong as a result), but when you have a surplus of information like in this case there’s little they can deny…
Bellingcat is funded by the NED (National Endowment for Democracy) so a CIA front admitting to the assassination is interesting.
Conflating Bellingcat with the CIA is a hilariously bad take.
“Last year marked the final year of project funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) that provided funding for Russian-language workshops at no cost to journalists and human rights researchers based in Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia and the Caucasus. We continued our project for the Swedish Postcode Lottery (SPL), which among others supported free trainings on ideological extremism for organisations in Europe.”
You seem to be misinformed. Also, provide proof that the NED is CIA, because that is quite a claim!
That is however a claim promulgated by the propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist State:
The United States has long used democracy as a tool and a weapon to undermine democracy in the name of democracy, to incite division and confrontation, and to meddle in other countries’ internal affairs, causing catastrophic consequences.
Link: https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/zxxx_662805/202205/t20220507_10683090.html
The NED is not the CIA (and the degree of inter-agency cooperation is likely not much greater than that between the CIA and NSA), but it serves the same purpose as an arm of the US intelligence apparatus. This is indisputable, as admitted directly by the founder of the NED.
IIRC with the pending fall of the Soviet Union (the primary counterweight to US influence) the US no longer saw a need for covertly influencing governments.
