In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll introduce a Russian propagandist, Xenia Fedorova. She’s best known for running Russia’s state propaganda media in France, and then writing a whole book to whine about how it got shut down by the EU after Russia invaded Europe.

Xenia was born in 1980 in Kazan, Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, now Russia. She got an Executive MBA from the Berlin School of Creative Leadership in 2014, and did her whole career (since December 2005) at the Russian state propaganda outlet, RT.

RT (previously “Russia Today”), established by Putin in June 2005, is active all around the world to spread vatnik narratives. Together with Sputnik, it is the main foreign propaganda outlet for Russian bullshit. Both outlets are led by the master vatnik Margarita Simonyan.

At RT, Xenia was Simonyan’s protegee. As most of you know, Margarita has openly called for bombing Ukrainian civilian infrastructure & laughed about hoping for a famine in Ukraine.

If you’re interested in Simonyan, check out our video about her:

Between 2014 and 2017, while Putin was already invading Ukraine, Xenia was still tweeting in Russian about “Banderites” and “Crimea Path to the Homeland” hashtag, spreading the Kremlin narratives justifying the invasion and promoting Putin’ militaristic speeches.

But at the same time, she was also working as the CEO for a “cool” new Russian-state owned media company, Ruptly. The company was based in Berlin, and it tried to attract a younger left-leaning demographic by promoting its content on social media.

Ruptly was a highly sophisticated operation that mostly shared real, factual content but at times spread outright disinformation and Kremlin propaganda. This role has now been overtaken by the thousands of AI-generated “news sites” that spread fake news and deepfake content.

In 2017, Xenia departed Ruptly and was sent to France to create RT France, which she directed up until its closure in 2022. The channel was known for its “high-quality” reporting, such as the article titled “North Korea: The happiest people in the world.”

Undex Xenia’s leadership, RT France was pure propaganda, and one former employee described the editorial line as follows: “It always had to go along with the pro-Russian line, or at least we had to make sure that the Russians weren’t attacked or couldn’t be attacked.”

On the morning of Russia launching their full-scale invasion in Ukraine, Fedorova instructed her employees to downplay the brutal war. According to one journalist, she checked absolutely every story while showing a “tremendous deal of interventionism.”

Fedorova denied the invasion of Ukraine, calling it a mere “special operation” in the Donbas. In a message to journalists, she warned: Be careful with videos & claims that Russia is attacking Ukrainian cities. This information is false. The operation is only in the Donbas.”

In March 2025, Xenia published a book titled “Banned: Freedom of expression under conditions”. In it, she criticizes the Western democracies for “censorship”. The book seems like a big joke, considering that she herself was censoring her employees while managing RT France.

Now, I haven’t read Xenia’s book, but I bet there’s not much talk about the killings and imprisonments of journalists, opposition figures and activists in Russia, either. Oh, and RT France sued @maximeaudinetbecause he dared criticize them.

After all this, Xenia was hired by Canal+ in 2025, and promotes vatnik narratives regularly on CNews. Due to its promotion of French far-right ideas, along with the spreading of fake news and conspiracy theories, CNews has been compared to a French version of Fox News.

CNews, along with Fayard, her book’s editor, are all connected to French billionaire Vincent Bolloré. Bolloré’s news outlets promoted the Union of the Far-Right alliance between members of The Republicans and the National Rally for the 2024 French election.

To conclude, Xenia Fedorova is a 100% vatnik propagandist, who formerly worked for heavily censored and biased Russian state-media, but recently found a new home in the French version of Fox News. She’s keen on critizicing the West for censorship, but stays quiet on Russia.

This soup will soon be published in French and German, make sure to follow @vatniksoup_fr and @vatniksoup_de.

The 2nd edition of Vatnik Soup — The Ultimate Guide to Russian Disinformation is officially out!

You can order your copy here:

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