In March 2022, the European Union imposed restrictions on RT and Sputnik, two of the main Russian state media brands aimed at foreign audiences. This was not simply about removing television channels from the air. The EU sanctions prohibited operators in the European Union from broadcasting or facilitating the distribution of content from the listed media outlets, including through cable, satellite, IPTV, internet service providers, platforms and applications.
Brussels stated the reason directly: Russia was using these media organisations to manipulate information and promote narratives that supported its aggression against Ukraine.
Almost four years after the first restrictions were introduced, RT is much harder to find on French television. But the picture changes when the question is reframed.
Instead of looking for RT as a television channel, it is worth looking at RT content after it leaves RT. This scenario is where one of the weaknesses of the restrictions becomes visible.
Across Europe, websites translate, republish or adapt material from Russian state and sanctioned media into local languages. In some cases, only the domain changes. In other cases, the headline or several paragraphs may be altered. Occasionally the Russian source is named at the bottom of the page. In some cases, a reader has to follow several links backwards before discovering where the text originally came from.
This is no longer only a question of propaganda narratives. It is also a question of how content from media organisations specifically targeted by EU restrictive measures continues to circulate.
On 25 August 2026, The New York Times published a report by Cassandra Vinograd and Oleksandr Chubko titled “What Happened to the Coveted Western Tanks Sent to Ukraine?”
The journalists described how the role of Western tanks on the Ukrainian battlefield had changed because of the mass use of inexpensive drones. Some expensive armoured vehicles had been moved away from the front line. Others stood camouflaged in forests, where, as the reporters noted, cobwebs had begun to appear on them.
The next day, 26 August, the story appeared on RT en français.
The headline had become considerably more dramatic: “Des blindés de pointe couverts de toiles d’araignée dans les forêts : les médias révèlent le triste sort des chars occidentaux en Ukraine”.
RT referred to The New York Times report but added a different context around it: statements from the Russian Ministry of Defence about destroyed Western armoured vehicles, references to Leopard 2 and Abrams tanks captured by Russian forces, and the Kremlin’s position that deliveries of Western weapons would not change the outcome of the war.
The original source of the factual material therefore remained an American news report. But a different editorial construction had already been built around it.
One day later, on 27 August, that campaign received a third link on the web. An article with almost the same headline appeared on the French-language website Réseau International, with direct attribution to RT France.
Within 48 hours, one story had travelled from The New York Times to RT en français and then, within several more hours, to Réseau International.
This route shows more than ordinary republication. At the first stage, there is an original piece of journalism. At the second, RT selects the elements most useful for its specific framing and adds official Russian propaganda context. At the third, the finished RT product moves to another French-language domain.
For a reader opening the final page in this chain, The New York Times remains somewhere near the beginning. What is immediately in front of them is a French-language article on a French-language website.
This is the mechanism we decided to examine more systematically.
Monitoring French-language resources showed that the example involving Western tanks was not an isolated case.
On Réseau International, we found a series of articles that the platform itself directly attributes to the Russian sanctioned outlet RT France, as well as reports that can be matched with specific RT publications through the headline, structure and text.
On 16 September 2026 at 14:02, RT en français published an article titled: «Lavrov: si l’Europe attaque la Russie, la guerre sera “très courte”».
The following day, 17 September, an article with exactly the same headline appeared on Réseau
In this case, there was no need for complicated textual comparison. The article itself was marked “par RT France”, while the headlines and opening paragraphs of both publications were identical.
The mechanism of Russian information operations is even clearer in the case of Kyiv’s energy crisis.
At the beginning of 2026, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko recommended that residents who had the opportunity temporarily leave the city because of an extremely difficult situation with electricity and heating supplies.
On RT, the story became one about the mayor of Kyiv calling on residents to leave the city.
On 22 January 2026, Réseau International published a version titled “Le maire de Kiev propose l’évacuation de la ville”:
https://reseauinternational.net/le-maire-de-kiev-propose-levacuation-de-la-ville/.
Four days earlier, RI had already published another RT France article: “Le maire de Kiev exhorte les habitants à fuir la ville face au chaos énergétique”:
https://reseauinternational.net/le-maire-de-kiev-exhorte-les-habitants-a-fuir-la-ville-face-au-chaos-energetique/. Réseau International itself identifies the latter article in its archive as RT France.
Screenshots of posts on Réseau International from January 18 and 22, 2026, regarding the status of electricity and heat supply in Kyiv.
The source of the original information was identified as Klitschko’s interview with Reuters.
This process is an important mechanism that can be described as an effect of hijacked legitimacy: an international or an authoritative Western source confirms an individual fact, while a Russian media organisation adds its own biased interpretation. The final online source then transfers both elements as a single construction.
This example matters precisely because the original event was not fabricated, but the original report was twisted.
It demonstrates that changing the perception of an event does not always require creating a fake. Occasionally it is enough to change the hierarchy of facts.
A story about a critical energy situation becomes, first and foremost, a story about a capital city whose residents are supposedly being told to “flee” or “evacuate”.
On 17 November 2025, RT en français published an opinion article by Alexandre Regnaud titled «Macron vend des Rafale en papier à Zelensky».
The author described Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to Paris as a “sketch tragi-comique” and the agreements concerning aircraft as a “mascarade”. Emmanuel Macron was portrayed as a president receiving Zelenskyy in order to create an appearance of his own international importance.
The same article then appeared on Réseau International under the same central headline, “Macron vend des Rafale en papier à Zelensky”:
https://reseauinternational.net/macron-vend-des-rafale-en-papier-a-zelensky/.
Here the Russian state media product was no longer simply explaining the war in Ukraine to a French-speaking audience.
It was evaluating the French president, French foreign policy and Paris’s defence agreements, and then receiving an additional channel of French-language distribution.
Réseau International is not the only example. On 31 July 2026, the website Qactus/L’Informateur published an article by Daniel Foster titled “Russie : Zakharova a parlé des dégâts croissants causés au Kazakhstan et aux États-Unis à cause de Zelensky”:
https://qactus.fr/2026/07/31/russie-zakharova-a-parle-des-degats-croissants-causes-au-kazakhstan-et-aux-etats-unis-a-cause-de-zelensky/.
At the end of the article, its origin was stated directly: “Source: RT en français”.
Here, however, the evidentiary limit is important. We confirmed Qactus’s own attribution of the article to RT en français but did not reconstruct the precise original RT page. For this reason, the case demonstrates the origin claimed by Qactus itself, but we do not include it among the fully reconstructed republication chains.
This distinction is easily lost if the exercise is reduced to counting “pro-Russian online outlets”. The relevant question is not the political label attached to a website, but the route taken by the information.
Another revealing example is New Eastern Outlook.
The European Union included New Eastern Outlook among the Russian media resources that had their broadcasting and distribution suspended. In the current EU Council list, New Eastern Outlook appears alongside RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation, NewsFront and other outlets.
Yet in 2026, Réseau International continued to publish articles that explicitly stated the source as “New Eastern Outlook”.
For example, in the article “Le fascisme doit être détruit”, Réseau International directly names NEO as its source: https://reseauinternational.net/le-fascisme-doit-etre-detruit/.
Another RI article, “Quand la praxis de Washington contredit ses desseins”, also ends with direct attribution to New Eastern Outlook:
https://reseauinternational.net/quand-la-praxis-de-washington-contredit-ses-desseins/.
This case is particularly important when considering the effectiveness of restrictions.
The EU can restrict the distribution of New Eastern Outlook itself. However, a New Eastern Outlook text can be found at another address on a French-language website.
Another route leads to Observateur Continental.
In June 2020, EU DisinfoLab published a technical investigation into two websites, Observateur Continental and OneWorld. The investigation identified hidden links with the Russian agency InfoRos through domain registration, website structures and other technical and human connections.
InfoRos, in turn, has been described in US Treasury sanctions documents as an organisation primarily directed by the 72nd Main Intelligence Information Centre of Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU.
But another distinction must be made here. Technical and organisational links between Observateur Continental and InfoRos do not prove that every individual Observateur Continental article was written by InfoRos or by the GRU.
Another part of the distribution route, however, can be established without such assumptions.
Réseau International regularly publishes material that carries the direct label “source : Observateur Continental”. In 2026, the outlet published an article concerning Franco-Ukrainian activity in the
Another republication concerned Chinese-African cooperation and similarly identified Observateur Continental as its source.
The point, again, is not simply to attach a political label to a website. It is to reconstruct the movement of information narratives from one platform to another.
Up to this point, the investigation has focused on texts, domains and republications. But the Russian information presence in France has another dimension: people who move between Russian and French media environments.
One of the central figures is Xavier Moreau.
On 15 December 2025, the European Union placed him under sanctions. The official EU act describes Moreau as a former military officer, a Franco-Russian businessman and the founder of the Stratpol website, another pro-Kremlin online outlet in the French language, yet still not under sanctions.
The Council of the EU goes further, stating that Moreau acts as a voice for pro-Russian and pro-Kremlin propaganda, disseminates conspiracy claims concerning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and participates in the use of information manipulation and interference.
Moreau lives and works in Moscow.
In September 2026, Le Monde reported that his programme “Ici Moscou” was broadcast by RT. At the end of 2025, he also attended Russia Today’s 20th anniversary celebration at the Bolshoi Theatre, an event attended by Vladimir Putin.
Moreau himself told Le Monde something else relevant to this investigation: that he knew the former head of RT France, Xenia Fedorova, and had met her at the Russian Embassy in France.
This evidence is not enough to establish a joint operation.
It is enough, however, to document an intersection between two information environments. And that intersection leads to one of the most current French cases.
Xenia Fedorova worked within the RT system from 2005. Between 2015 and 2017, she headed the Berlin-based video agency Ruptly and in 2017 became president and director of news at RT France. These biographical details are now recorded directly in an EU sanctions act.
After RT’s broadcasting was suspended, her presence in the French information environment did not end.
From 2025 onwards, she regularly appeared in or published in French media, including CNews, Europe 1 and Le JDNews. These three French media outlets are specifically named in the EU Council decision of 24 September 2026.
The Council states that after RT was suspended, Fedorova continued to disseminate Kremlin-friendly narratives in French media aligned with the positions of the Russian authorities concerning the war against Ukraine, European assistance to Kyiv, NATO and relations between Russia and the EU.
According to Euronews, French media regulator Arcom received two complaints concerning her appearances on CNews. One related to statements about Latvia, while another concerned her interpretation of why Russia’s war had continued.
On 10 May, Fedorova said: “On sait aujourd’hui que c’est l’Occident qui a décidé de prolonger ce conflit”, meaning that, in her view, it was the West that had decided to prolong the conflict.
This is an important example of a change in the causal frame.
In such a presentation, the centre of responsibility shifts from the Russian invasion to Western military and financial support for Ukraine.
The subsequent EU decision identified similar elements. It accused Fedorova of presenting Western support as a factor prolonging the war, portraying Russia as seeking peace and Europe as seeking confrontation, and disseminating arguments in which NATO and EU policy were presented as threats to European security.
The authors of this investigation did not produce analytical descriptions. They are elements recorded in the EU sanctions decision.
An even more serious point concerned Ukrainian children.
The EU stated that Fedorova questioned established information concerning the unlawful transfer and deportation of children from Ukraine. The underlying issue has an independent documentary basis: in 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova in connection with allegations concerning the war crime of unlawful deportation and transfer of children.
Reports from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights have also documented cases of forced transfer and deportation, while noting that the lack of access to Russia and occupied territories makes it impossible to determine the full scale.
Even before the European decision, at the end of July 2026, French authorities issued an expulsion order against Fedorova. Le Monde reported that the Interior Ministry justified it on the grounds of an “atteinte aux intérêts fondamentaux de l’Etat”.
On 24 September 2026, the EU imposed restrictive measures against her. On the same day, the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs confirmed that these measures included an asset freeze, a prohibition on EU citizens and companies making funds or economic resources available to her, and a ban on entry into or transit through EU territory.
At this point, the story almost completes a cycle. RT France no longer broadcasts in the European Union. But the person who once headed it subsequently appeared on French national television, spreading the same narratives to French audiences.
This process is not the same mechanism as the republication of RT material by Réseau International. It is another level of the same problem: restricting a media brand does not automatically eliminate the spreading of its propaganda content.
Republication and individual media figures explain only part of the picture.
The next level is infrastructure created to scale the distribution of messages.
In February 2024, the French service VIGINUM published a report on its investigation into a network it named Portal Kombat.
At that point, the network consisted of at least 193 websites. According to VIGINUM, these sites did not produce their own content. Instead, they massively retransmitted material from three main types of sources: Russian or pro-Russian social media accounts, Russian news agencies and official websites.
For French audiences, one of the sites was pravda-fr[.]com.
VIGINUM identified the use of mass automation and SEO optimisation to increase reach.
A subsequent technical investigation established the significant role of TigerWeb, a company based in Russia-occupied Crimea, in creating and administering websites within the network.
At the same time, VIGINUM was careful about the evidentiary boundary. It noted technical similarities with InfoRos infrastructure but said that at that stage it could not formally establish a direct link between the two systems.
By 29 April 2024, VIGINUM had identified 224 Portal Kombat portals covering almost all EU member states as well as several countries in Africa and Asia.
Here, the strength of the system no longer lies in the authority of one source.
It lies in the number of addresses on which the same message can appear.
VIGINUM identified another mechanism in the operation known as RRN, Reliable Recent News.
Here the Russian source is not simply hidden. Instead, the reader is shown a false French source.
In 2023, VIGINUM established that 355 domain names had been used to appropriate the identities of media organisations in several European countries.
In France, the operation imitated trusted French media outlets such as Le Parisien, 20 Minutes, Le Monde and Le Figaro.
The French service counted at least 49 fake Le Parisien articles, seven impersonating 20 Minutes, one imitating Le Monde and one imitating Le Figaro.
The operation went further. A website imitating the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs was created and used to publish a false document claiming that France intended to introduce a new “security tax” on financial transactions to fund assistance to Ukraine.
In this case, the reader was not supposed to see RT. They were not even supposed to see an obscure French-language website.
They were supposed to believe they were reading Le Parisien or the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs.
The operation known as Matriochka uses another distribution method.
On 10 June 2024, VIGINUM published a technical report on a campaign it had been tracking since at least September 2023.
Its operators created fabricated reports, photographs, graffiti, memes and other material. They then coordinated the posting of this content in replies to journalists, media organisations and fact-checkers on X, asking them to verify it.
The campaign targeted media and fact-checking organisations across over 60 countries.
The mechanism is paradoxical. A journalist receives a fake, investigates it and debunks it. But through the very act of verification, the journalist may help bring that fabrication to a much larger audience.
In the previous cases, manipulation began with information that already existed.
RT could reinterpret a genuine news story. Réseau International could republish a finished article. Portal Kombat could distribute it across dozens of sites.
Storm-1516 operates differently.
First, the story itself is created. Then a false “original source” is created to give the story the appearance of genuine journalism.
According to VIGINUM, this was how an information operation targeting Emmanuel Macron was constructed in early February 2026.
On 4 February, a video began circulating on X claiming a sensational discovery in documents connected to the Jeffrey Epstein case. It alleged that journalists had found compromising correspondence linked to the French president.
But the journalistic investigation cited by the story did not exist.
Instead, a website called france-soir.net had been created. Its address closely resembled that of the genuine French publication France-Soir, france-soir.fr.
The domain was registered on 1 February 2026, only three days before the story appeared.
The fake article was attributed to Victor Cousin, a real journalist at Le Parisien who had not written it.
The fabricated story therefore acquired something designed to look like evidence: a French news website, the name of a genuine journalist and a page that could be cited as a “source”.
On 6 February, VIGINUM published a technical analysis of the operation.
The French service attributed it to the Russian Storm-1516 information modus operandi with a very high level of confidence and identified the use of technical infrastructure belonging to another mechanism, CopyCop. VIGINUM separately published a description of the operation and its attribution to Storm-1516 on the official SGDSN website.
This mechanism differs fundamentally from ordinary republication.
The reader is no longer simply offered a particular interpretation of a real event.
For a fabricated event, false evidence is created to demonstrate that it supposedly happened.
It would be tempting to finish this investigation with a simple diagram: the Kremlin created a network of French-language outline outlets through which it continues to distribute its messages after restrictions were imposed on RT and Sputnik.
But the evidence shows a more complicated picture.
In one case, we see direct republication of RT content. In another, material from New Eastern Outlook or Strategic Culture is transferred to a French-language website. Researchers have established technical links with the Russian organisation InfoRos for Observateur Continental.
Portal Kombat functions as infrastructure for mass distribution. RRN fabricates the pages of genuine French media organisations. Matriochka tries to draw journalists and fact-checkers into spreading fabricated material. Storm-1516 can create both the fictional story and the false “original source” that supposedly proves it.
These are different mechanisms involved in a broader information operation.
They do not demonstrate the existence of a single centre controlling every website, author or republication. But they reveal something more important: for a message to spread, it is not necessary to control everyone who repeats it.
In the French-language information environment, we can see how this process operates.
A piece appears on RT and then on Réseau International. Another arrives through New Eastern Outlook or Strategic Culture. Observateur Continental becomes the source for another French-language republication. Portal Kombat can automate this process on a much larger scale.
With every additional step, the original source of the message can become less visible.
Occasionally it disappears completely.
Instead of a Russian media outlet, the reader sees a French website.
The conclusion after almost four years of European sanctions on RT and Sputnik is therefore not that the measures failed. They restricted these media organisations’ direct distribution channels in the European Union.
But restricting the transmitter has proved easier than stopping the movement of a message once it has already been created.
And this development changes the question facing France ahead of the 2027 presidential election.
What matters is no longer only how many people in France directly read or watch RT.
The more important question is how many messages originating within the Russian information ecosystem can reach a French reader after republication, translation and a change of address, at the point when the reader can no longer see where those messages came from.
In 2022, a Russian state propaganda media product could often be recognised by its logo. Four years later, the most important part begins where that logo disappears.
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