France’s decision to expel Xenia Fedorova, the former head of RT (Russia Today) France, is being treated in Paris as a national security story. It is also a story that divides the French far right.

RT France went off air in March 2022, when the EU sanctioned the Kremlin-funded broadcaster over Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Fedorova, its director, did not leave the country and did not leave public life.

She resurfaced as a commentator on CNews, Europe 1 and Le Journal du Dimanche, all three belonging to the Bolloré group owned by the right-wing billionaire Vincent Bolloré, and continued to deliver pro-Russian and anti-Western talking points into mainstream French broadcasting under a different banner.

Grave threat

Then, at the end of July, the Interior Ministry ordered her immediate expulsion, revoked her residence permit and froze her assets, citing “a grave threat to public order” and a threat to “the fundamental interests of the State”.

Officials accused her of relaying Kremlin disinformation and taking part in Russian influence operations ahead of the 2027 presidential election. Fedorova was abroad when the order landed; a Paris court rejected her emergency appeal on 3 August, and she has said she will not return unless it is suspended. Her currrent whereabouts are unknown.

The response exposed a fault line running straight through the French right, rather than dividing neatly along party lines.

Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella of the Rassemblement National (RN) themselves said nothing publicly. But their own party was not unified in their silence.

RN’s Assembly spokesperson, Thomas Ménagé, backed the expulsion outright, saying that Fedorova had simply “met the criteria” for it.

Thierry Mariani, however, a Le Pen-aligned MEP, took the opposite view, warning the decision might “finally succeed in silencing one of the rare dissenting voices in the French press that wasn’t repeating the officially sanctioned narrative on the Ukraine conflict”.

That split may be significant. National Rally has spent years trying to shed its old reputation for Moscow-friendliness, a reputation built on a Russian bank loan and Le Pen’s past praise for Putin.

Old sympathies

Mariani’s intervention is a reminder that the old sympathies haven’t disappeared so much as gone quiet at the top while persisting further down the party.

Elsewhere on the right, Bolloré-linked commentary sites and figures close to Éric Zemmour and Marion Maréchal framed the expulsion as an assault on free expression.

The media universe in which Fedorova operated – Bolloré’s – is a cluster of far-right supporting outlets that has spent a decade giving sustained, sympathetic airtime to immigration, national identity and “culture war” framing.

It is often compared to US Fox News for its role in shifting the boundaries of acceptable opinion rightwards.

Ultra-right milieu

Beneath that mainstream layer sits France’s smaller, harder ultra-right milieu: the successor networks to the officially dissolved Génération Identitaire, the monarchists of Action Française, the neo-fascist Les Nationalistes, the youth group Luminis Paris, and revolutionary-nationalist remnants of the banned Zouaves Paris.

These sit alongside regional identitarian groups such as Patria Albiges and Des Tours et des Lys.

These groups may be numerically small, but they are capable of violent mobilisation, with links to like-minded networks elsewhere in Europe.

What connects the right-wing talk-show set to the street-level milieu is a shared narrative: the Great Replacement theory, the false claim that elites are engineering mass immigration – particularly from Muslim-majority countries – to displace Europe’s white populations.

It is standard fare across the European far right, and it is precisely the kind of polarising material that Russian information operations have been amplifying online, not because the groups take Kremlin orders, but because the far-right narrative already does Moscow’s work for it.

National security

Le Monde had reported on 22 July that Fedorova had avoided the EU’s latest sanctions round despite her public profile.

However, France did not wait for further EU action, and on 29 July, the French Interior Ministry ordered her immediate expulsion on national security grounds.

Whether the courts ultimately uphold the order is still open. But the affair has already done something more durable than settle one broadcaster’s status: it has put an official French government finding on record that a Kremlin-linked commentator’s presence on a billionaire-owned far-right network constituted a security threat.