I would recommend to browse press.coop and (maybe) newsie.social instances.
Neither me nor my friends don't beleive Russian media.
There is a quite popular russian principle: listen to the government's plans and prepare to exaclty the opposite.
Indeed! And the problem is that you never know when :)
I had been scrolling Mastodon timeline and found Flet - a framework for writing Flutter apps in Python.
Though I haven't tried it yet, it could be interesting and useful for you.
Links:
I use Ice Cubes client on my iOS. And it has a feature called "Local timelines". I just add an interesting instances there and read it without any problems, just like if it was my local timeline.