France’s media regulator has ordered internet providers and search engines to block 35 Russian state media websites — and some of the outlets on the list are ones researchers have been warning about for years.
On February 26, France’s audiovisual regulator ARCOM announced it had formally instructed internet service providers, domain name resolution providers, and search engines to block and delist 35 official websites of Russian media outlets subject to EU sanctions. On top of that, search engines were asked to delist pages belonging to four streaming platforms that give access to sanctioned Russian television and radio services.
ARCOM said it is using “all means at its disposal” to stop the distribution of sanctioned Russian media in France, including content republished on online platforms accessible from French territory. The full list of 35 sites has not been made public, but Le Figaro, which first reported the decision, identified several of them through a source close to the matter: sputniknews.lat, rtenfrancais.tv, news-front.su, southfront.press, and strategic-culture.su. According to BFM Tech, as cited by Generation-NT, esrt.press is also among the targeted sites.
This is not France’s first move against Russian media infrastructure. Back in March 2022, days after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, ARCOM suspended RT France, the French-language version of Russian state broadcaster RT, in line with an EU-wide ban. The same year, French satellite operator Eutelsat stopped carrying the Russian channels NTV Mir, Rossiya 1, Perviy Kanal, and NTV, after ARCOM found their Ukraine war coverage contained incitement to hatred and violations of basic journalistic standards. In March 2025, ARCOM ordered Eutelsat to stop broadcasting two more Russian channels, STS and Kanal 5. Then in July 2025, the regulator blocked 19 more websites. The February 26 decision is the third wave of website blocking in less than a year.
Named and known: The sites confirmed on the list
The full list of 35 sites has not been made public by ARCOM, but Le Figaro and BFM Tech identified several through sources close to the matter. For anyone who has followed Russian disinformation research, the names are not surprising. They are regulars.
News-Front (news-front.su) is a Russian multilingual propaganda outlet that has appeared in virtually every major fact-checking report on Russian disinformation in Europe. It publishes in multiple languages and has consistently served as one of the main distributors of Kremlin narratives across the continent. SouthFront (southfront.press) follows the same pattern, with a particular focus on military and geopolitical content designed to frame Russia’s war in Ukraine as legitimate and inevitable.
Strategic Culture (strategic-culture.su) presents itself as a journal of geopolitical analysis but has functioned in practice as a platform for pro-Kremlin narratives aimed at Western, and specifically European, audiences. Its inclusion on the list connects directly to the story of Xavier Moreau, which we address below.
Rtenfrancais.tv is an RT clone — one of the mirror domains created after the 2022 EU ban to keep RT content flowing to European audiences under a different web address. Sputniknews.lat is the Spanish-language Sputnik edition that kept migrating to new domains each time it was flagged. Esrt.press is another RT clone, this one targeting Spanish-language audiences — part of the same clone infrastructure that has kept RT alive across Europe since sanctions came into force.
Documented before they were blocked: What our research found
Several of the outlets now on ARCOM’s list are ones Insight News Media had been tracking long before February 26. That context matters, because it shows these were not obscure corners of the internet — they were active, measurable operations.
Insight’s investigation into RT’s clone network across Europe, published in February 2026, mapped more than 37 active mirror domains carrying identical RT content under new addresses — among them two French-language domains, rtenfrance.tv and rtenafrique.tv, both documented as actively delivering RT content to French-speaking audiences. The first was drawing around 12,000 visits per month, all from France. A separate domain, fra.mobileapiru.com, received 57,000 visits with 23% coming from France. Spanish-language RT clones including esrt.press and esrt.online were also pulling French-speaking audiences, with around 6-7% of their traffic originating from France.
The same investigation documented what happened to the French-language Sputnik after it was blocked in 2022. Rather than disappearing, its Telegram channel was quietly renamed “Fil à Retordre” to avoid detection, before the operation eventually relaunched as Sputnik Afrique, targeting French speakers in Africa and the francophone diaspora in Europe.
The sputniknews.lat story is a case study in how this migration works in practice. Insight tracked the full chain: the outlet moved from sputniknews.lat to latamnews.lat, then to noticiaslatam.lat, each time carrying the same logo, the same editorial line, and even the same historical archive. We reported on the first migration in June 2024 and on the second domain in August 2024. The first domain was quickly blocked. A second one emerged. Now sputniknews.lat itself has made it onto France’s list — confirmation that the strategy is visible, even if stopping it entirely is another matter.
A French face on Kremlin content
One name that connects several threads in this story is Xavier Moreau. A former French army officer who has lived in Moscow for over two decades and holds Russian citizenship, Moreau runs two websites — Stratpol and Strategika — that have functioned as significant nodes in the French-language pro-Kremlin information space. Insight News Media’s research on pro-Russian websites in France, published in May 2024, identified both platforms among the top 40 outlets disseminating Kremlin narratives to French audiences, documenting how their content circulated through a network of interconnected pro-Kremlin sites.
In December 2025, the EU placed Moreau on its sanctions list. According to the official sanctions registry, he was designated for acting as a mouthpiece for pro-Kremlin propaganda and for spreading conspiracy theories about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including the claim that Ukraine orchestrated its own invasion to join NATO. The inclusion of strategic-culture.su in ARCOM’s blocking list, a platform editorially close to the circles Moreau operates in, is a further sign that French authorities are moving against this ecosystem more systematically.
Moreau’s response to being sanctioned was to give an interview to Sputnik Africa, where he described the decision as an attempt to “kill the messenger.” As of February 20, just days before ARCOM’s announcement, he was still publishing his weekly Stratpol bulletin.
40 French sites, two years later
When Insight News Media published its analysis of 40 French websites spreading pro-Kremlin narratives in May 2024, it mapped a network linked not just by similar content and shared narratives, but by mutual citations and referral traffic. The sites promoted a consistent set of themes: that Ukraine and its Western allies had already lost, that NATO was responsible for the war, that Zelenskyy was illegitimate, and that far-right parties should win European elections.
Since that research was published, the landscape has shifted, but only partially. Some outlets have gone quiet or disappeared entirely. The site rrn.media, which was part of the broader RRN disinformation campaign documented by France’s own digital watchdog VIGINUM, now displays a seizure notice. But the major nodes in the network — reseauinternational.net, stratpol.com, planetes360.fr — remain active and continue publishing. Sanctions did not stop Moreau from producing content. The question is whether blocking his associated platforms will limit how far that content travels.
A separate concern raised in our research is the role of Sputnik Afrique, specifically its French-language edition at fr.sputniknews.africa. This outlet is not primarily aimed at French domestic audiences but at French-speaking African countries, where Russia has been actively working to undermine French influence. The content, however, travels back. Web analytics show that fr.sputniknews.africa appears as a closely related site to reseauinternational.net, suggesting overlapping readerships. It is not yet known whether fr.sputniknews.africa is among the 35 sites in ARCOM’s latest blocking order — the full list has not been published. Given its role in the broader French-language disinformation ecosystem, that question is worth asking.
Blocking is a start, not an answer
What France is doing matters. Ordering ISPs, DNS providers, and search engines to simultaneously block and delist a site makes it genuinely harder to reach — much more so than a single-layer takedown. The coordinated approach ARCOM is now using reflects lessons learned from years of watching single-point blocks fail as outlets simply register new domains and carry on.
But the history of this space is also a history of adaptation. The same investigation that tracked sputniknews.lat found its successor domains already operating before the first one was flagged. RT’s clone network grew faster than regulators could block it. News-Front and SouthFront have survived multiple rounds of sanctions and restrictions. The outlets France is now targeting did not become fixtures of the European disinformation landscape by accident — they were built to last.
What is clear from years of tracking this network is that the content does not stop when a domain goes dark. It migrates, it rebrands, and it finds new audiences. France’s decision is a meaningful step. Whether it is enough depends on what comes after.
