French operation
In a memoir published last year, Fedorova mentions her “deeply personal” 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 — whom she describes as a former journalist-turned-entrepreneur — emigrated with her seven children to escape the chaos that followed the collapse of the Iron Curtain.
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 — Russian, German, English and some French, which she studied in Paris for several months — landed her a job with RT, where she rose quickly through the ranks.
Aged 37 at the time of RT France’s 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’s president and editorial director, building its newsroom, overseeing operations and shaping the channel’s strategy.
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.
In her memoir, Fedorova took pride in driving the network’s coverage. “Some accused us of having amplified the Yellow Jackets movement, as if we had falsified history,” she wrote, dismissing the allegations as “ridiculous and defamatory.”
At RT France, Fedorova presided over a newsroom staffed largely by French journalists, even if — according to a senior editor who worked there at the time — her rudimentary French didn’t allow her to supervise coverage closely.