![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Xenia-protest-2025-1024x683.jpg\")
Protestors from the organization For Ukraine at Fedorova\u2019s book signing in Paris on April 12, 2025. | Magali Cohen\/Hans Lucas\/AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\nFrench operation<\/p>\n
In a memoir published last year, Fedorova mentions her \u201cdeeply personal\u201d 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 \u2014 whom she describes as a former journalist-turned-entrepreneur \u2014 emigrated with her seven children to escape the chaos that followed the collapse of the Iron Curtain.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 Russian, German, English and some French, which she studied in Paris for several months \u2014 landed her a job with RT, where she rose quickly through the ranks.<\/p>\n
Aged 37 at the time of RT France\u2019s 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\u2019s president and editorial director, building its newsroom, overseeing operations and shaping the channel\u2019s strategy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Protestors from the organization For Ukraine at Fedorova\u2019s book signing in Paris on April 12, 2025. | Magali Cohen\/Hans Lucas\/AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In her memoir, Fedorova took pride in driving the network\u2019s coverage. \u201cSome accused us of having amplified the Yellow Jackets movement, as if we had falsified history,\u201d she wrote, dismissing the allegations as \u201cridiculous and defamatory.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
At RT France, Fedorova presided over a newsroom staffed largely by French journalists, even if \u2014 according to a senior editor who worked there at the time \u2014 her rudimentary French didn\u2019t allow her to supervise coverage closely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"French operation In a memoir published last year, Fedorova mentions her \u201cdeeply personal\u201d bond with Ukraine, where both…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25167,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[735,10766,375,36,5,1649,7273,11816,987,6254,372,582,7645,1148,18609,18610,308,18611,18612,2973,584,803],"class_list":["post-25166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-france","tag-defense","tag-disinformation","tag-elections","tag-emmanuel-macron","tag-france","tag-french-election-2027","tag-intelligence","tag-intelligence-services","tag-media","tag-misinformation","tag-russia","tag-sanctions","tag-services","tag-social-media","tag-soviet-union","tag-telecoms","tag-ukraine","tag-valerie-hayer","tag-vincent-bollore","tag-vladimir-putin","tag-war","tag-war-in-ukraine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}