Putin’s message finds a home on French TV

Xenia Fedorova, the former head of RT France, has found a new platform on the country’s conservative news shows.

By MARION SOLLETTY
and LAURA KAYALI
in Paris

Illustration by Natália Delgado/POLITICO

The Kremlin’s flagship broadcaster may be banned across the EU. The former head of its French television outlet is not.

Xenia Fedorova, the ex-president of RT France, is a familiar face on the country’s conservative news shows, where her Russia-friendly commentary on Ukraine, NATO and European security is fueling alarm among lawmakers and disinformation experts ahead of France’s 2027 presidential election.

A one-time protégé of top Russian propagandist Margarita Simonyan, Fedorova once ran the French arm of Moscow’s state media operation from Paris. Now, with RT France shut down under EU sanctions, she has found a new platform inside media mogul Vincent Bolloré’s right-wing empire — appearing regularly on CNews TV and Europe 1 radio, where critics say Kremlin-aligned arguments are aired with little pushback.

Her new role was on display earlier this month when CNews invited her to dissect a “Victory Day” address by Russian President Vladimir Putin on May 9. The analysis she offered? Familiar Kremlin talking points.

“We now know that it’s the West who decided to prolong this conflict,” Fedorova said in her unmistakably Russian accent, echoing a Russian narrative about failed 2022 peace talks that Moscow has used to shift the blame for the Ukraine war away from the Kremlin’s invasion of the country. The host moved on without challenging her, turning instead to another guest who reinforced the same argument.

The segment prompted Valérie Hayer, a close ally of French President Emmanuel Macron and head of his liberal Renew group in the European Parliament, to lodge a complaint with the French TV regulator. It wasn’t the first time that an appearance by Fedorova had drawn official scrutiny, but so far they’ve done little to affect her prominence.

Xenia Fedorova signs her book “Bannie” at the Le Salon du Livre book festival at the Grand Palais in Paris on April 12, 2025. | Magali Cohen/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images

With Macron pledging new measures to combat foreign interference ahead of next year’s election, Fedorova’s on-air presence points to a loophole in Europe’s efforts to fight Russian disinformation. Sanctions can shut down a broadcaster, but they do little to stop the Kremlin’s message from appearing in mainstream media when a Russia-friendly commentator appears on French TV.

“People are entitled to their political opinions,” said Natalia Pouzyreff, a Renew lawmaker who also lodged a complaint last year. The crucial point “is that Xenia Fedorova’s remarks almost touch on matters of national security; they bear the unmistakable mark of the Kremlin.”

Federova declined to comment unless POLITICO agreed to print her answers sight unseen in full in a Q&A format — an all-or-nothing stipulation that POLITICO declined. CNews and Europe 1 declined to comment.

French MEP Valerie Hayer votes during a plenary session at the European Parliament in Strasbourg on May 20, 2026. | Sebastien Bozon/AFP via Getty Images

‘Instrument of influence’

To understand why Fedorova’s presence on French television has become so politically sensitive, it helps to go back to the moment she first made a splash in French political circles: a charged 2017 meeting between Macron and Putin at Versailles.

RT France hadn’t yet launched as a television channel but its website had aggressively covered the French presidential race, with Macron’s team accusing the Russian outlet of spreading misinformation during the campaign.

The campaign’s final stretch had also been hit by what became known as the Macron leaks, when internal emails from the then-candidate’s team were dumped online in an operation that the U.S. and the French government later attributed to the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and French President Emmanuel Macron participate in a joint press conference at Versailles on May 29, 2017. | Antoine Gyori/Corbis via Getty Images

Half an hour into a joint press conference in the Gallery of Great Battles, Fedorova — who was preparing the launch of RT France in Paris — rose to her feet under the high golden ceiling. First, she asked Macron about the role of Russia and France in ending the war in Syria. Then she asked him why RT and Sputnik, another Russian outlet, had been denied access to the recently elected president’s campaign headquarters.

Standing beside Putin, Macron delivered a curt answer that would define his posture toward Russian state media. “I have always had an exemplary relationship with foreign journalists, provided they are actually journalists,” Macron said. “When media outlets spread slanderous falsehoods, they are not journalists. They are instruments of influence.”

Macron’s broadside did not stop RT France from taking to the airwaves a few months later. Nor did it prevent Fedorova from becoming one of the most prominent Russian media executives in France.

French operation

In a memoir published last year, Fedorova mentions her “deeply personal” bond with Ukraine, where both her parents were born when it was still part of the Soviet Union. She grew up partly in Austria, where her widowed mother — whom she describes as a former journalist-turned-entrepreneur — emigrated with her seven children to escape the chaos that followed the collapse of the Iron Curtain.

Fedorova said she had first considered a career in diplomacy and studied international relations before deciding to turn to journalism. Her international background and language skills — Russian, German, English and some French, which she studied in Paris for several months — landed her a job with RT, where she rose quickly through the ranks.

Aged 37 at the time of RT France’s launch, Fedorova had spent much of her career inside the RT group, working in Moscow and Berlin before being tapped to lead the French operation. Encouraged by Simonyan, she became the outlet’s president and editorial director, building its newsroom, overseeing operations and shaping the channel’s strategy.

Protestors from the organization For Ukraine at Fedorova’s book signing in Paris on April 12, 2025. | Magali Cohen/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images

The network never became a mass-audience broadcaster, according to Maxime Audinet, chair in influence strategies at the Paris National Institute of Eastern languages and civilizations, who wrote a book about RT. But the station proved politically useful for the Kremlin, particularly during the Yellow Jackets crisis of 2018 to 2020, when RT France gave the anti-government protest movement prominent and sympathetic coverage on air and across social media.

In her memoir, Fedorova took pride in driving the network’s coverage. “Some accused us of having amplified the Yellow Jackets movement, as if we had falsified history,” she wrote, dismissing the allegations as “ridiculous and defamatory.”

At RT France, Fedorova presided over a newsroom staffed largely by French journalists, even if — according to a senior editor who worked there at the time — her rudimentary French didn’t allow her to supervise coverage closely.

She was insistent on selecting the guests, the senior editor recalled. With the U.K. grappling with the fallout of the country’s decision to leave the EU, everyone invited to speak on the subject “had to defend Brexit,” said the senior editor, who was granted anonymity to speak freely.

RT France’s run ended abruptly after Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — or, as Fedorova still calls it, Russia’s “special operation.” The EU banned RT and Sputnik in 2022 as part of its sanctions response, and the French operation was later liquidated, putting Fedorova’s newsroom, a mix of French and Russian journalists, out of business.

Bounce back

RT France was officially shuttered in 2023, but Fedorova stayed in France. Within a couple of years she had found a new home within right-wing magnate Vincent Bolloré’s media empire, which published her memoir and hired her as a regular contributor across several outlets.

Vincent Bolloré attends an event to celebrate 200 years of French daily newspaper Le Figaro in Paris on Jan. 13, 2026. | Julien de Rosa/AFP via Getty Images

Her ties to Bolloré’s world predated RT France’s closure. As head of the Russian-backed channel Fedorova had lobbied telecom and television executives to expand RT’s distribution in France. In 2020 she secured a slot for the channel in the television package of Canal+, a prized gain for a broadcaster still fighting for mainstream reach.

“At the time she talked a lot about Bolloré, how nice he was, that she had lunch with him several times,” the former senior editor at RT said.

Soft-spoken, with long brown hair that frames her face, Fedorova quickly became a familiar presence on CNews, the 24/7 news network that has built its success on hour-long talk shows on security issues and migration led by in-house star Pascal Praud. She now appears twice a week on the channel’s news shows, where she shares views closely aligned with those of the Kremlin, whether it’s downplaying the Russian threat to Europe or criticizing “NATO’s warmongering rhetoric.”

To her critics, the problem is not just what Fedorova says, but the setting in which she says it. “In the current context, where the war in Ukraine is one of the leading news subjects, she often contributes,” said Audinet, the author of the book on RT. “The problem is that she does so without anyone challenging her. Nobody on CNews says ‘what you are saying here is not actually right.’”

Praud, the star CNews host, recently echoed the longstanding pro-Russian narrative that NATO’s eastward expansion had caused the war in Ukraine, prompting fears among disinformation watchdogs that Fedorova’s narratives had percolated up the station’s food chain.

Her rise has also been eased by the migration of former RT France staffers to CNews. On one program where she appears regularly, the host is one of her former employees, who greets her as “Dear Xenia.”

Putin’s Victory Day address is shown on a big screen during a parade in Moscow on May 9, 2026. | Igor Ivanko/AFP via Getty Images

“She’s like a queen,” said André Lange, founder and coordinator of the Diderot Committee, an informal lobby group targeting Russian propaganda networks, who has sparred with Fedorova in the past.

‘Like Darth Vader’

One former contributor who crossed paths with Federova on set described her as a feared presence, saying few people were willing to challenge her because of her perceived proximity to the channel’s senior leadership.

“It’s like Darth Vader entering the room, everybody stops talking,” the former contributor said, recounting an instance when, as they were joking about their boss, they were abruptly shushed by one of the TV hosts as Fedorova entered the studio.

Bruno Clermont, a retired general who was one of CNew’s regular defense consultants, publicly accused her of causing his dismissal from the contributors pool, shortly after he delivered negative comments about Russia regarding a development related to the war on Iran. “My fault is simple: displeasing the Russian Xenia Fedorova,” he wrote on LinkedIn. Clermont declined to comment for this story.

“There are implicit rules,” said the former contributor quoted above, who was granted anonymity in order not to jeopardize their professional prospects. “You know you need to go along, or at least not speak against [her], otherwise you’re done.”

For now, there seems to be little French authorities can do about her. The complaints to France’s television regulator have produced little visible effect, and there’s no evidence she receives money from the Kremlin.

“She is a foreign agent in the spirit, but perhaps not in terms of funding,” said Pouzyreff, the Renew lawmaker who lodged the complaint against Fedorova. “There is a legal complexity behind all of this, because we are a state governed by the rule of law.”

“Unlike Russia.”