EU lists Xenia Fedorova after years of access in France

The European Union on 24 September added Xenia Fedorova, the former president of RT France, to its sanctions list for foreign information manipulation and interference.

The Council said the Russian media executive had “participated in the implementation and dissemination of RT France’s editorial line, including pro-Russian narratives in the context of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine,” and remained active in spreading those narratives in France and the wider Union. Asset freezes and travel restrictions follow. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot presented the listing as a sequel to Paris’s summer expulsion order and freeze of her assets.

🔴 Expulsée de France 🇫🇷, la chroniqueuse pro-Kremlin Xenia Fedorova désormais sanctionnée par l'UE🇪🇺.
La chroniqueuse russe Xenia Fedorova a été sanctionnée par l'UE jeudi pour avoir relayé des discours propagandistes russes dans le contexte de la guerre en Ukraine.
Elle est… pic.twitter.com/o1ibtMZYkf
— France-AfriqueMÉDIA (@FranceAfrique23) September 24, 2026

The decision closes a gap that European and French officials had left open for years. Fedorova, 45, born in Kazan, spent almost her entire career inside the RT system. She joined the Kremlin-funded network after it launched, worked in Moscow and Berlin, and in 2017 was sent to Paris by RT chief Margarita Simonyan to build the French channel. She became president and editorial director, hired the newsroom and set strategy. During the 2017 French presidential campaign, Emmanuel Macron publicly branded RT and Sputnik “organs of influence,” not journalism, after they circulated false claims about him. RT France still went on air that December. Fedorova stayed in France after the EU banned the channel in 2022 and it shut in 2023. In 2024 the authorities renewed her residence permit for ten years.

She then moved onto platforms owned by Vincent Bolloré – CNews, Europe 1 and Le Journal du Dimanche – as a regular commentator. Critics, including the Quai d’Orsay, said she recycled Kremlin lines on Ukraine, NATO and European institutions with little challenge. She published a 2025 book, Bannie, framing her treatment as conditional free speech. MEPs in Renew Europe pushed in June 2026 to put her on the EU blacklist. The July package omitted her name; France had not formally requested the listing. Only on 29 July did the Interior Ministry issue an expulsion order, calling her a conduit for Russian disinformation campaigns aimed at destabilising public order and undermining trust in institutions. A Paris court rejected her appeal in early August. She was abroad when the order took effect and kept writing from outside France. In September the interior minister warned CNews of criminal penalties if she returned to air.

That sequence is the core of the “laxity” charge. A state-backed RT executive who had already been named as an influence actor in 2017 was allowed to remain, obtain a long residence permit after the channel ban, and occupy prime slots in a major private media group until an election year concentrated minds. France acted first with expulsion; Brussels followed two months later. Fedorova and her lawyers call the measures censorship. EU and French authorities now treat her as part of Russia’s hybrid toolkit, not as an ordinary columnist who happened to disagree with official policy. The listing does not unwind the years in which that distinction was blurred.

Caption: A corporative photo of Xenia Fedorova from her years at RT France