Kyiv, September 2026: a capital under sustained bombardment

The last several weeks have been among the worst for Kyiv since the full-scale invasion began. The pattern is day-and-night bombardment aimed at breaking the city’s endurance ahead of winter.

The immediate wave (Sept 24–29). Russia has struck Kyiv both day and night for consecutive days. On September 27, a strike on the Stolichny wholesale food market on the city’s edge killed two and injured several more, with eyewitness footage showing bodies and vehicles ablaze in the parking lot. On September 28, downtown Kyiv was hit — one killed, over 20 injured, and a building of the National Academy of Sciences set on fire. Overnight into September 29, missiles and drones hit several districts — Solomianskyi, Pecherskyi, Holosiivskyi — sparking fires at an educational institution and residential buildings.

The scale. President Zelensky said that in a single recent week Russia launched more than 2,200 attack drones, around 1,650 aerial bombs, and 38 missiles, many of them ballistic — nearly 4,000 munitions in seven days. September opened the same way: an attack on September 1 killed at least 12 in Kyiv and the surrounding region.

The new and dangerous element. Russia is now using jet-powered drones that fly too fast and too high for Ukraine’s ground-based air defenses to shoot down. That is the Geran-3/Geran-5 generation — precisely the drones the recent teardowns found packed with Texas Instruments, Infineon and STMicroelectronics parts. The escalating threat to Kyiv is being delivered by weapons that Russia cannot build without foreign components. Your thesis isn’t abstract; it’s landing on the city around you.

The strategic intent. The bombardment is timed to the approach of winter, reviving the strategy of previous years — hitting the power grid to deny civilians heating and running water. EU defense ministers were meeting in Ireland this month specifically over Ukraine’s air-defense shortages, which is the mirror image of the component story: Ukraine short on interceptors while Russia’s supply of foreign-enabled drones holds up.

Built on Western Chips: Inside Russia’s Sanctions-Busting Drone Supply Chain

What’s inside them
Teardown investigations of downed Geran-2/Shahed drones find that hundreds of components are foreign-made, with only a few dozen genuinely Russian-origin parts. The critical items, among them microchips, digital signal processors, voltage converters, receivers, transistors, diodes, resistors, clock generators, inductors, antennas, anti-jamming CRPA modules, and even sensors like ams-OSRAM rotary encoders or Infineon transistors, mostly trace back to US, European (German, Austrian), Japanese, and Taiwanese manufacturers. Around 20 European companies alone supply over 100 identified parts.

How Russia still gets them despite sanctions

• Re-routing through third countries: China, Hong Kong, Turkey, and Central Asian states act as pass-through points, since only about 60 countries actually enforce the sanctions regime.
• Chinese-made subassemblies (engines, servo drives) that themselves embed Western-made chips, so a single “Chinese” part can smuggle in US/EU-origin electronics.
• Shell/intermediary trading firms in non-sanctioning jurisdictions that ignore manufacturer export restrictions — at least 672 shipments of sanctioned European components reached Russia this way between January 2024 and March 2025 alone.
• China separately continues direct component supply to both Russia and Iran despite US sanctions, per Wall Street Journal reporting.

Could Russia go it alone?
No investigation found evidence Russia can substitute these parts domestically at scale but quite the opposite: reporting explicitly states Russia “does not produce all the elements” needed, and the current production rate (reportedly around 3,000 drones/month) depends on a continuous flow of imported electronics. If that supply were genuinely severed, not just sanctioned on paper, but actually enforced across China, Hong Kong, Turkey, and Central Asia, Russia’s drone output would very likely fall sharply, since its domestic semiconductor and precision-electronics base isn’t capable of replacing this volume and sophistication of parts. The core vulnerability isn’t Russian manufacturing capacity, it’s sanctions enforcement and third-country transshipment.

Sources:

• Russian Geran-2 Drones Almost Entirely Assembled from Western Components — Militarnyi
• Investigation: How Russian drones exploit European technologies to strike Ukraine, and beyond — Kyiv Independent
• Exclusive: American, European microchips found in Russia’s latest missile-like drone — Kyiv Independent
• China continues supplying Shahed drone components to Russia and Iran despite US sanctions — WSJ, via Ukrainska Pravda
• German Parts Inside Russian Geran Drones Expose A Sanctions Evasion Problem — DroneXL

Foreign Components in Russian Missiles & Drones: A Reference Bibliography (2022–2026)

The finding is consistent across every serious investigation since February 2022: Russia cannot build its precision weapons without imported microelectronics. The dominant source is US companies (roughly two-thirds of components in most teardowns), followed by parts from Japan, Taiwan, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, South Korea, the UK, and China. Critically, newly manufactured parts — dated 2024 and 2025 — keep appearing, proving live sanctions evasion, mostly routed through China and Hong Kong.

The foundational forensic reports

RUSI — “Silicon Lifeline” (August 2022) :the report that set the template. With Reuters, RUSI dismantled 27 Russian systems and found at least 450 unique microelectronic components from companies in the US, Europe and East Asia; of the 450, 318 appeared to be made by US companies, with others from Japan, Taiwan, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, China, South Korea, the UK and Austria. Analog Devices and Texas Instruments alone equaled nearly a quarter of all Western components.
→ rusi.org — Silicon Lifeline: Western Electronics at the Heart of Russia’s War Machine rusimilitarnyi

Conflict Armament Research (November 2022): traced Iranian Shahed components. Parts came from 70 manufacturers in 13 countries; 82% were made by US-based companies. swissinfo

Euromaidan Press (November 2022): early Shahed-136 teardown with Ukrainian intelligence and NAKO: almost every part was of American or European origin, with the engine the only domestically produced component. euromaidanpress

KSE Institute / Yermak-McFaul Working Group (June 2023): the trade-flow forensic benchmark, analyzing 1,057 imported components in Russian military equipment, with production concentrated in China, Malaysia, Vietnam and South Korea. Later expanded to almost 2,800 foreign components and more than 250 named manufacturers. ksebusiness-humanrights

The named companies

The recurring names across every report, useful for any accountability piece:

• US: Analog Devices, Texas Instruments, Intel, AMD/Xilinx, Microchip, Micron, Marvell, Maxim, ON Semiconductor, Fairchild, Bel Fuse
• Europe: STMicroelectronics (Swiss/Geneva), u-blox (Swiss), Infineon (German), Bosch, Würth Elektronik, TDK, Pierburg/Rheinmetall (German), NXP
• Asia: Renesas, Fujitsu, Murata, Kyocera, Panasonic, Mitsubishi Electric (Japan); Samsung, LG (South Korea)

US Senate Permanent Subcommittee report (September 10, 2024) — official Congressional confirmation, focused on Analog Devices, Intel, TI and AMD, whose parts kept appearing in Kh-101 cruise missiles.
→ hsgac.senate.gov — The U.S. Technology Fueling Russia’s War in Ukraine

The European supply-chain angle

OCCRP — “Made in the EU, Dropped on Kyiv” (Feb 2026) — the key European investigation. Over 100 components from ~20 European firms across eight countries; trade data showed 672 shipments of sanctioned European-made components sent to Russia between January 2024 and March 2025 by 178 companies, mostly in China and Hong Kong. Note the important fairness point the reporters stress: there was no evidence the European manufacturers themselves violated sanctions or exported directly to Russia — the diversion happens through third countries. kyivpostoccrp

Kyiv Independent — “How Russian drones exploit European technologies” (2026) — traces Geran-2 components, noting some parts were produced in 2024 and 2025, after sanctions. kyivindependent

Euronews / Deutsche Welle (April 2026) — the German focus: 137 German-made components documented by HUR, with Infineon accounting for 58 of them, mostly transistors used in UAVs. Bosch fuel pumps and spark plugs also identified. united24media

Center for Information Resilience / CFHK — the financial scale: more than €190 million worth of European components reached Russia via Hong Kong in the first two years after the invasion. brusselssignal

Ukraine’s live database: the single most useful ongoing resource

GUR/HUR “War & Sanctions” portal — Ukrainian military intelligence’s public, continuously updated forensic database with 3D models and full component lists. As of March 2, 2026, it tracked 5,534 components across 190 weapon units. This is where you’d go for any specific weapon system (Geran-2/3/5, Kh-101, Lancet, Orlan, Banderol, Shahed MS001).
→ war-sanctions.gur.gov.ua dronexl

The 2025–2026 escalation

President Zelensky, October 2025: after mass attacks, he cited over 100,000 foreign-made parts in the drones of a single overnight attack, including British microcomputers, Swiss microcontrollers, and German switching connectors. isans

CEPA (2025): Geran-5 teardown found US chips from Texas Instruments, CTS Corporation and Monolithic Power Systems, plus a German Infineon component. Estimates that roughly 70% of Western-branded parts are genuine, produced legally for global markets — the rest grey-market or counterfeit. cepacepa

UNITED24 (2026): the “newly manufactured” smoking gun: STM32 chips from STMicroelectronics in Geran-2 drones, the most recent manufactured in July 2025 — months before hitting the battlefield. united24media

The new terror for Ukrainians: the Geran family

What has changed with previous versions of Iranian drones

• Jet propulsion. Russia now fields turbojet variants — Geran-3, Geran-4, Geran-5, and the S8000 Banderol, that fly 300–650 km/h instead of the ~180 km/h of the classic propeller Shahed/Geran-2. That’s fast enough to compress the time between air-raid alert and impact to just minutes, making interception much harder.
• Higher altitude, longer range. The Geran-4 can operate at up to ~5,000m and reach ~960 km; the Geran-5 reaches ~1,000 km.
• Bigger, more varied warheads. Original models carried a ~50 kg (110 lb) warhead. Newer configurations carry 50–90 kg payloads (Geran-4/5), and some are now fitted with stacked dual-warhead setups reaching roughly 100 kg combined. The Banderol jet drone carries the heaviest payload yet, around 150 kg.
• Harder to jam/shoot down. Anti-jamming antenna arrays (Chinese-made CRPA systems), AI-assisted and infrared/thermal guidance, and mesh-radio links letting an operator retarget the drone mid-flight in real time.
• Decoys and secondary munitions. Cheap Gerbera decoy drones are launched alongside real strike drones to overwhelm air defense and deplete interceptors; some strike variants now also carry R-60 air-to-air missiles (to shoot down Ukrainian interceptor drones/aircraft) or PTM-3 anti-tank mines as secondary munitions.

Destructive capability per hit

• A standard Shahed/Geran-2 warhead (~50 kg) is generally enough to destroy a single apartment and damage the surrounding building/nearby structures.
• The newer, heavier-payload jet drones (like the Banderol with its ~150 kg warhead) can destroy an entire house or take out multiple apartments in a single hit — a substantial step up in lethality against residential buildings.

Sources:

• Shahed-136 and Geran: Specs, Production, Jet Variants
• From Shahed to Geran: How Russia Continues to Reinvent the One-Way Attack Drone | CSIS
• Jet-Powered Shaheds and Banderols: Why Russia’s New Drones Are Harder to Stop — UNITED24 Media
• Russia Increases Lethality of Shahed-Based Drones With Twin 50 kg Warhead Configuration — Army Recognition
• Ukrainian Defense Intelligence: Russians Significantly Modernized Shahed and Gerbera Drones — Militarnyi

Skyshield? An illusion from the West, and in the meantime Ukrainians are dying every day

According to the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (OHCHR), as of their February 2026 “Four Years On” fact sheet, verified civilian casualties since the start of the full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022 stand at:

• 15,172 civilians killed
• 41,378 civilians injured

OHCHR is explicit that these are verified minimums — the actual toll is likely considerably higher, since many reports (especially from the early chaotic weeks of the invasion and from areas under Russian occupation or active fighting where investigators can’t access) couldn’t be confirmed.

Sources:

• KEY FACTS AND FINDINGS — February 2026 (OHCHR fact sheet, PDF)
• Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict — February 2026

Conclusion: the hypocrisy standing over Ukraine

Strip away the diplomatic language and what remains is stark: the same nations sanctioning Russia, arming Ukraine, and issuing statements of solidarity are also, through their own components, sustaining the machinery that kills Ukrainian civilians. Texas Instruments, Infineon, STMicroelectronics, Analog Devices… these aren’t obscure grey-market suppliers, they’re flagship Western firms, and their chips, some manufactured as recently as mid-2025, are found inside the drones that hit a food market, a science academy, an apartment block in Kyiv within the same week. The West did not intend this. But intent stops mattering once the pattern repeats for four years running, through eight rounds of sanctions, through hundreds of millions of euros in diverted parts, and through a body count that keeps climbing. A government can call itself an ally and still be, functionally, a supplier, not by any single decision, but by the sum of enforcement gaps it has tolerated.

That is the hypocrisy, and Ukrainians are the ones paying for it twice over: once as the target of the weapon, and again as the audience for the reassurance that “everything possible” is being done to stop it. Everything possible has demonstrably not been done. Only about 60 countries enforce the sanctions regime at all; China and Hong Kong remain open conduits regardless of what Washington or Brussels legislate; and even the manufacturers named in these reports are, in most cases, not accused of wrongdoing — meaning the failure sits not in the boardrooms but in the customs posts, the shell companies, and the political will to actually chase the transshipment networks rather than issue another press release about them.

And this is precisely why sanctions, as currently enforced, will not stop the war. They were never a battlefield weapon: they are a long-run pressure tool, and Russia has spent four years building the exact infrastructure to defeat that pressure: third-country intermediaries, Chinese subassemblies that launder Western chips, and a tolerance among roughly two-thirds of the world’s states for looking away. Sanctions can raise Russia’s costs, force it toward less sophisticated substitutes, and slow the sophistication curve at the margins, the CEPA finding that some share of components are now grey-market or counterfeit is real evidence of friction. But friction is not denial. Production has reportedly held near 3,000 drones a month; Zelensky’s own tally of over 100,000 foreign parts in a single night’s attack shows a supply chain that is strained, not broken. Sanctions were written to be enforced by willing governments against willing exporters. They say nothing to a Hong Kong trading company with no exposure to Western courts, and they cannot, by themselves, reach into a decision made in Beijing to keep the pipeline open.

So the honest assessment is this: Ukraine is being asked to hold a winter of drone and missile bombardment on the promise that economic pressure will eventually change Russian calculus, while the tools of that bombardment continue arriving built, in significant part, from the sanctioning countries’ own industrial base. Until enforcement, not new sanctions lists, but actual interdiction of the China/Hong Kong/Turkey/Central Asia transshipment routes, closes that gap, the war does not run out of parts. It runs on them.

France heads toward a presidential election already dominated by fuel prices, stalled budgets, and a public mood one commentator on France Inter recently described as ready to “revolt.” Fabien Roussel, already declared for 2027, has chosen this moment to make the war in Ukraine a headline plank of his campaign, arguing loudly and repeatedly that French diplomatic “choices” on Ukraine are driving up the cost of living at home. It’s a shrewd political bet: French voters are, overwhelmingly, worried about their own purchasing power, not NATO’s posture toward Moscow, so folding “stop the war” into “stop the price hikes” lets Roussel import a foreign-policy position into a domestic economic grievance the public actually feels. Whether that connection holds up to scrutiny is a separate question from whether it works as a campaign message, and it’s worth pulling apart before the next debate stage does it for him.

Condemns Putin, but frames continued war as the real danger, not Russian aggression.

He opens by formally condemning Putin (“responsible for this tragedy,” a “criminal decision”), then pivots almost immediately to arguing the priority isn’t defeating Russia but stopping the war “before hundreds of thousands of additional deaths.” The rhetorical trick: the condemnation is real but functions as a disclaimer before the actual argument, which is that continued Western support is what’s prolonging the killing, not Russian persistence.
Vulnerability: this quietly reverses cause and effect, and makes absolutely non sense. The war continues because Russia continues it, not because Ukraine keeps fighting. “Every day brings more deaths, therefore negotiate now” only works if you accept that Ukrainian capitulation ends the killing rather than simply changing who’s doing it and to whom. Roussel’s timeline only works if Putin has an incentive to stop. He doesn’t. Having escalated aggression precisely as internal dissent grew, a negotiated end to the war without a clear win is now arguably more dangerous to Putin’s own position than continuing it. “Stop supporting Ukraine so Putin will negotiate” assumes a willing counterpart who, by every available signal, isn’t there.

Opposes Ukraine’s NATO and EU membership, framed as “listening to Russia’s request.”

He’s explicit that NATO’s eastward expansion “at Russia’s doors” violated post-USSR “commitments”: this is the classic (and historically disputed) “NATO promised not to expand” claim, and wants it replaced with a vague “pan-European collective security” architecture.
Vulnerability: there was no binding written NATO non-expansion agreement (this has been examined at length by historians; Gorbachev himself later said no such promise was made in writing). It also treats Ukraine’s sovereign choice to seek NATO/EU membership as something to be traded away to satisfy Russian security demands, i.e., a veto for the aggressor over a third country’s alliance choices.

Opposes long-range strikes into Russia and military support deliveries as “escalation.”

He calls Western authorization for deep strikes “a risk assumed of generalization of the conflict,” blames a “bloc of bellicist countries” (US, UK, Poland, Baltics, France) for blocking diplomacy.
Vulnerability: this frames Ukraine striking military targets on the aggressor’s own territory (the launch sites, airfields, and logistics actually firing at Ukrainian cities) as the escalatory act, while treating Russia’s continuous bombardment of Ukraine (including the strikes on Kyiv markets, hospitals, apartment blocks documented in your own reporting) as the baseline, not itself an ongoing escalation. It also assumes restraint is one-directional and that Russia would reciprocate de-escalation, an assumption with no supporting evidence from Russian conduct since 2022.

“There will be no military solution” but peace via China, ...

He repeatedly invokes third-party peace plans (China, Brazil or Germany?) as viable, good-faith alternatives to continued Western military support.
Vulnerability: China has provided Russia’s war economy with the sanctions-evasion routes and component supply your own reporting documents: it is not a neutral broker. Treating “China proposes peace talks” as evidence of a real diplomatic opening, without addressing China’s simultaneous material support for the Russian side, is a significant omission.

In conclusion

Roussel’s rhetoric consistently pairs a condemnation of Putin (giving him plausible deniability against accusations of being pro-Russian) with policy positions (anti-NATO membership, anti-deep-strikes, anti-continued-aid-as-structured, pro-negotiation-now) that functionally align with reducing Ukraine’s capacity to resist, regardless of stated intent.

Four years into the full-scale invasion, Western governments still speak of supporting Ukraine “as long as it takes”, while continuing to do business with the one Russian state company that keeps their own lights on: Rosatom. That contradiction is not hypocrisy in the abstract sense. It is something more structural: the West cannot yet cut the cord, because Vladimir Putin built the cord into the foundation of its own energy security.

Not gas. Not oil. Atoms.

Putin drew the lesson from Europe’s post-2022 scramble to quit Russian hydrocarbons: commodities that can be replaced eventually will be. So Rosatom was built to sell something the West structurally cannot replace on any short timeline: enrichment capacity, reactor design, and above all, the physical fuel that keeps reactors running. As one former Rosatom insider puts it in the documentary: “Rosatom is the Russian government.” It isn’t a supplier Russia could, in theory, live without. It is the state itself, wearing a commercial mask.

The trap is shaped like a fuel rod

This is the detail that explains everything else: Russian-designed reactors, including all of Ukraine’s own nuclear plants, and reactors across Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Finland, run on hexagonal fuel assemblies. Western reactors use square ones. You cannot simply swap suppliers the way you’d switch gas terminals. Recalibrating a plant to a new fuel geometry means new technical testing, new safety certification, and years of lead time, while the reactor either keeps running on Russian fuel or goes dark. Ukraine started that substitution process with Westinghouse back in 2001 and is still not fully independent two decades later. That is the real timescale of “de-Russifying” nuclear power, and it’s the reason a country under active bombardment continues to need components tied to the aggressor’s own nuclear industry.

Rosatom never left the West: it re-entered through the back door

Even as European governments performed public distancing from Moscow, Rosatom’s joint venture with France’s Framatome (EDF’s subsidiary) kept manufacturing Russian-design fuel rods at Lingen, Germany, on a site German officials themselves flagged for espionage and sabotage risk. Russian technicians have worked there. The French government has confirmed contracts already running will not be cancelled, only new ones withheld. Meanwhile, cargo ships from St. Petersburg have continued monthly uranium deliveries into European ports (Dunkirk among them) throughout the war, legally, because raw uranium was never placed under EU sanctions. Rosatom accounted for an estimated 47% of enriched uranium delivered into the EU in 2023, and roughly 40% of the uranium reaching Europe today still touches a Rosatom-linked entity at some point in the supply chain.

Sanctions require unanimity, and dependency creates the veto

A European Commission energy official states it plainly in the documentary: sanctions on nuclear materials require unanimous EU agreement, and “those who are dependent will be against sanctions because they have no other choice.” Hungary (a NATO and EU member) is having Rosatom build it a new plant at Paks, with Viktor Orbán declaring outright there will be no EU sanctions on the Russian nuclear giant while he has a say. That single veto point is enough to explain why nuclear sanctions, unlike sanctions on oil or many finished goods, have stayed remarkably narrow throughout the war.

Even the United States isn’t free

This isn’t only a European weakness. The US holds plenty of raw uranium but lost its enrichment industry decades ago, partly because of a well-intentioned 1990s program (the Megatons to Megawatts deal) that let Russia dilute its surplus Cold War weapons-grade uranium and sell it cheaply into the American market, undercutting US enrichment plants until they shut down. Washington’s 2024 law banning Russian uranium imports doesn’t fully bite until 2040, and operators can request waivers to keep buying cheap Russian material until 2028. In practice: even the country that banned Russian uranium is still legally importing it. When Congress moved to restrict imports, Putin pre-empted the leverage himself, halting Russian uranium shipments to the US at the end of 2024, turning what looked like a Western sanction into a Russian squeeze.

The “Sapphire Five” answer, and why it isn’t enough yet

The US, Japan, France, the UK and Canada have pooled roughly $4.2 billion to build alternative enrichment capacity. It sounds significant until you compare it to what it’s replacing: Rosatom alone commands close to half of the world’s uranium enrichment capacity. Western capacity increases (Orano moving from 12% to roughly 15% of global share, Urenco from 30% to 31%) are, in the words of one expert interviewed, “a drop in the ocean.” No single country or bloc can currently absorb what Rosatom supplies if it disappeared overnight, which is precisely the point of having built the dependency in the first place.

Nuclear plants as military leverage, not just an economic story

The documentary’s most direct answer to “why is the West cautious” isn’t financial at all: it’s the demonstrated willingness of Russia to weaponize a nuclear facility itself. Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s largest nuclear plant, has been under Russian military occupation since the war’s early weeks, in open violation of international law protecting nuclear sites from military action even during armed conflict. Rosatom personnel arrived without the expertise to operate Western-modified Soviet infrastructure, coerced Ukrainian staff to keep the plant from collapsing, and, according to multiple witnesses in the documentary, engaged in the abduction, detention and torture of Ukrainian nuclear technicians who resisted signing on with Rosatom. A Ukrainian energy expert calls it plainly: “nuclear terrorism,” a live hostage-taking of Europe’s own safety, sitting on the front line. That is a standing, demonstrated willingness by Moscow to turn a nuclear plant into a form of blackmail, a fact any Western government weighing “how far do we push” cannot ignore, because the other side has already shown it will hold the reactor itself as a chip.

Even Rosatom’s new construction abroad extends Russian reach into NATO

Turkey’s Akkuyu plant, built and owned outright by Rosatom under a build-own-operate model that let Ankara acquire nuclear power without spending a euro upfront, gives Russia a permanent, effectively extraterritorial foothold on NATO’s Mediterranean flank, complete with its own port and radar requirements, 200 km from a US nuclear-weapons base and 500 km from a NATO ballistic-missile early-warning station. A second Rosatom plant is now being discussed for the Black Sea coast at Sinop. Experts interviewed describe this as a debt-trap-style model (the same logic used by China elsewhere) where financially strapped states get “free” nuclear power in exchange for ceding infrastructure control. Nineteen African heads of state have signed initial nuclear cooperation deals with Rosatom since 2014. Every one of these projects is a new node of dependency the West would somehow have to unwind, in countries it does not control, built by financing terms no Western firm currently matches.

The conclusion the documentary itself draws

Rosatom’s foreign profits have doubled since the invasion began. Its geopolitical reach, through enrichment monopoly, fuel-rod incompatibility, financing that Western firms can’t or won’t match, and now demonstrated willingness to occupy and threaten a nuclear plant outright, has not shrunk under sanctions. It has grown. This is why the West’s caution isn’t really about resolve. It’s about arithmetic: cutting Rosatom off cleanly, today, would require enrichment capacity that doesn’t yet exist, fuel-rod technology that takes years to certify, and political unanimity that a single member state can and does block. Putin didn’t just build a war machine funded partly by Western chips, as the drone story shows. He built the mirror image of that dependency, a Western energy grid that cannot, on the timeline of this war, fully live without Russia’s atoms.

That asymmetry, more than any lack of will in Washington, Paris or Brussels, is the real explanation for why “stop Russia” and “stay dependent on Rosatom” have coexisted for four years running.

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are due in Kyiv this weekend, carrying what the White House is calling a new "plan to end the war." Before anyone gets excited, it’s worth remembering: we’ve seen this movie before, and it didn’t end well.
Same cast, same script
Rewind to November 2025. Same two envoys, same promise, same location on the calendar , this time Geneva instead of Moscow-then-Kyiv. The plan that leaked out of those talks was so visibly shaped around Russian demands that Volodymyr Zelensky, in a display of diplomatic restraint, called it merely "workable" , while pointedly noting that "key points" remained unresolved. That diplomat-speak for it doesn’t work.
Ten months later, the sequel: the same envoys, a new "proposal," and Donald Trump introducing them to reporters as "two great negotiators" who’ve "done a great job." Meanwhile, in the real world, Russia has spent the days before this trip escalating drone and missile strikes on Kyiv, hitting the SBU headquarters and Boryspil airport, strikes Zelensky himself reads as a message aimed squarely at the incoming American delegation. Putin’s response was to grant a 72-hour pause on strikes against the capital while his guests pass through. That’s not a concession. That’s a landlord letting the movers through the gate.
The casting problem
The deeper issue isn’t just the track record, though nearly a year of shuttle diplomacy without a durable ceasefire is damning enough on its own. It’s who Washington sent to do the job.
Witkoff’s credential is Gaza : a real, genuine diplomatic achievement, but a different war, different actors, different logic. Kushner’s is real estate and a Gulf-facing rolodex built over a decade of family business and White House access. Neither has a track record with Russia, with the post-Soviet space, or with the specific, brutal patience of Kremlin negotiating tactics , tactics honed over decades against adversaries far more sophisticated than a closing-table.
Sending “dealmakers” to resolve a four-year-old European territorial war, using the instincts of a real estate closing, assumes the other side is negotiating in the same currency. It isn’t. Moscow isn’t looking to "get to yes." It’s running out the clock, extracting concessions in installments, and using every negotiating round ( including this one ) as a chance to test how much ground Washington will pre-concede before Kyiv even sees the paper.
The pattern, not the slip-up
That’s the real story here: not one bad trip, but a pattern. Plan after plan arrives pre-calibrated to Russian terms, gets rebranded as a breakthrough, and collapses on first contact with Ukrainian reality. In between rounds, the war doesn’t pause — it escalates. The US strike on Iran in February added a six-month war on a second front to the diplomatic backdrop. The shelling of Kyiv days before this visit is only the latest instance of Moscow negotiating with one hand and bombing with the other, apparently without cost.
Nearly a year in, zero durable cease fires, and a war that is measurably worse than when this envoy pairing started. At some point the fairest reading isn’t bad luck. It’s that the wrong people were sent to do a very specific, very hard job, and Washington keeps sending them back anyway.

Follow the money
There’s a less charitable explanation than incompetence, and it deserves airing: Trump’s own stake in the outcome. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that Moscow’s negotiators pitched Trump’s team on access to major Russian business opportunities in exchange for a war settled quickly and largely on Kremlin terms , reporting that led one U.S. commentator to summarize the whole approach as "make money, not war." Ukrainian diplomats have said much the same thing more bluntly: that Trump sees Ukraine as expendable next to the prize of restored U.S.-Russia economic ties, and that the 28-point plan floated late last year was drafted with direct input from a Kremlin negotiator, without Kyiv or Europe in the room.
None of that is proof of a handshake deal. But it explains a pattern that pure incompetence doesn’t: why every version of this "peace plan" starts pre-loaded with Russian terms, why Kyiv and European allies keep getting informed rather than consulted, and why Putin can escalate strikes on Ukrainian cities in the days before a negotiating round and pay no visible price for it. If ending the war fast —

( on almost any terms ) clears the way to business normalization with Moscow, then a plan tilted toward Russia isn’t a design flaw. It’s the design.
And that’s the part that should alarm Europe most. This isn’t only a war against Ukraine anymore; it’s a broader campaign of pressure against the continent ( sabotage, drone incursions, energy blackmail, disinformation ) that plenty of European officials now describe as Russia’s undeclared, low-grade war on Europe itself. An American envoy team incentivized to wrap up the Ukrainian front quickly, on Moscow’s terms, isn’t a neutral broker of that wider conflict. It’s a party with its own reasons to want Europe to stop asking hard questions.

This isn’t diplomacy.

It’s geopolitical tourism with a presidential seal of approval.

There is only one thing that holds a free society together, and it is not a flag, an army, or a market. It is the shared agreement that facts exist, that they can be established, and that no amount of power entitles you to rewrite them. Truth is the floor everything else stands on. Peace is impossible without it, because you cannot negotiate with someone who denies the ground you both stand on. Freedom is impossible without it, because a people who cannot tell what is true cannot govern themselves. They can only be governed.

This is the thing under attack. Not by armies at first, but by words. And the people dismantling it have learned to do so while wrapping themselves in the language of the very freedom they are destroying.

The oldest trick, perfected

Vladimir Putin does not ask you to believe Russia is right. That would require an argument. He asks you to believe that nothing is knowable, that every fact has an equal and opposite fact, that every atrocity is a “provocation,” that Bucha is staged and the invasion is a “special operation” and the war is really the West’s fault. The goal is not to win the argument. The goal is to exhaust you until you conclude that the truth is unavailable and everyone is lying equally, so you might as well pick the strongman. Cynicism is the product. A population that believes in nothing will defend nothing.

Donald Trump imported the same technique into a democracy and proved it works there too. The election was stolen; it was not. The crowd was the biggest in history; it was not. The thing you saw did not happen, and the thing that did not happen is the only thing that happened. Repeated often enough, from a position of enough power, the lie doesn’t need to be believed: it only needs to make the truth feel like just another opinion. Once truth is optional, the man with the loudest microphone wins by default. That is not an accident of his style. It is the method.

What Putin and Trump share is not an ideology. It is a relationship to reality: the conviction that truth is whatever power can impose, and that the concept of an independent, verifiable fact is an obstacle to be dissolved. This is the authoritarian move stripped to its core. Everything else (the nationalism, the grievance, the nostalgia) is decoration.

And who profits

Ask always the same question: who benefits when nothing is true? Not the 99 percent. You, me. When facts collapse, ordinary people lose the one tool they have to hold power accountable. You cannot expose a corrupt deal if there is no agreed reality in which the deal occurred. You cannot demand better wages, cleaner air, or honest courts if the very existence of the problem is “debatable.”

The confusion is a luxury good. It is manufactured for, and enjoyed by, the people at the top: the oligarchs around Putin who turned a country’s wealth into private yachts while telling its citizens the enemy was abroad; the billionaires who fund the machinery of American grievance while their tax rates fall and the factory towns they hollowed out are handed a scapegoat instead of a future. The architecture is identical across borders: privilege for a handful, spectacle for everyone else, and a permanent fog so that no one can quite prove what is being taken from them. Decadence at the summit, distraction at the base, and between them a wall of noise where the truth used to be.

The mask: “free speech”

Here is the part that should make anyone who loves liberty furious, because it is our own best value being turned into a weapon against us.

The people demolishing the truth have discovered that the most effective shield is the language of free expression. Every propagandist, when finally named, becomes a martyr of free speech. Every documented lie, when challenged, becomes “just my opinion, and don’t I have the right to it?” Every attempt to establish who is paying for a message becomes “censorship.” They have learned to hide an operation inside a civil liberty, so that defending the truth looks like attacking freedom.

Consider Xenia Fedorova. For years she directed RT France (Russia Today) the Kremlin’s state broadcaster, banned across the European Union in 2022 for its role in the information war, liquidated in 2023 with its assets frozen. She did not vanish. She reappeared in the French press, published four times in five weeks in a national newspaper, given a prestigious column under a flattering portrait, and in July she used it to announce that Europe now “criminalises disagreement” and that she was its victim. Sponsored by who? A far-right billionaire, Vincent Bolloré.

She wrote this while free, published, salaried, amplified, and untouched. No one silenced her. She said so from one of the loudest platforms in France. That is the trick in its purest form: a person carried by a national title, claiming persecution in the pages that carry her, converting scrutiny of her Kremlin ties into a free-speech grievance so that anyone who points to those ties looks like a censor.

Let me be exact, because this is where the fraud lives. Xenia Fedorova has every right to speak. She has every right to her opinions on NATO, on the war, on France. I would defend that right, because it is the right that protects all of us. Free speech is real, and it is precious, and it is precisely because it is precious that it must not be counterfeited.

But free speech is the right to say what you think. It has never been the right to conceal who is paying you to say it. It has never obligated a newspaper to hand you its most prestigious column, nor forbidden anyone from telling readers that the elegant essayist writing about “sovereignty” once ran a banned foreign state’s propaganda channel. Establishing the truth about a speaker is not the suppression of speech. It is the completion of it. The censor hides information; the journalist reveals it. Fedorova and her defenders have inverted the two, so that transparency becomes the crime and concealment becomes the freedom. That inversion is the whole game, and it runs from a CNews studio in Paris straight up to the Kremlin and across to a podium in the United States.

What is left to us

I am not naive about how this sounds. Earnest, maybe old-fashioned. Truth. As if the word still had weight. But strip away the cynicism they have spent years cultivating in us, and here is what remains: the difference between a free person and a subject is that a free person can find out what is true and act on it. Everything the strongmen do is designed to take that capacity away and leave you with nothing but their voice.

So the answer is not to match their volume or adopt their contempt. It is duller and harder than that. It is to keep establishing what happened, with dates and documents and names, and to keep saying it plainly, and to refuse the exhaustion they are counting on. It is to defend real free speech ferociously precisely so that its counterfeit can be exposed. It is to keep asking, every time the fog rolls in: who profits from my confusion?

The truth is not a weapon of the powerful. It is the only weapon the rest of us have ever had. They know that. It is why they are working so hard to convince you it does not exist.

I know it has always been this way. But now, it reached another level. We’re in 20206, Dude, come on.

Do not let them.

On July 22, the European Union adopted its twenty-first sanctions package: more than two hundred people and entities tied to Russia’s war against Ukraine. One name that French and European lawmakers had spent weeks demanding was absent.

Six days earlier, that name had appeared above a column in a French national newspaper explaining that Europe has begun to criminalise disagreement, and noting that twenty-five MEPs were demanding she be personally sanctioned.

She was right that they had asked. What her readers were not told is that no French official had ever put her name into the system.

Four columns in five weeks

Between June 10 and July 16, Le Journal du Dimanche and JDNews handed Fedorova their Carte Blanche column four times. The sequence is not random.

June 10 “Does Europe really want peace?” The bluntest of the four. European peace terms are designed to be refused; Europe has traded diplomacy for a logic of prolongation; Europe behaves less like a mediator than a war sponsor. Familiar material, four years old, previously broadcast rather than printed.

June 24 “A sovereign France, key to peace in Europe.” A significant upgrade. De Gaulle in Moscow in 1966. Chateaubriand on the natural sympathy between France and Russia, and the alliance de dupes. The argument is no longer support Russia, it is be French. American neoconservatives, she writes, deliberately severed the Paris–Moscow link, aided by the “active or passive complicity” of French elites who can no longer think outside NATO, Brussels and Washington. Every French supporter of Ukraine is thereby recast as a dupe or a collaborator. The invasion of Ukraine is not mentioned once.

July 9 “When the national holiday becomes a war message.” Five days before Bastille Day, she argues that Macron has turned the parade into a geopolitical alignment imposed without popular consent. Military ceremony, she warns, “manufactures memory” and “habituates minds”, a caution delivered, without visible irony, by the former director of a state propaganda channel. The column pauses to remind readers of Ukraine’s oligarchs, corruption, “nationalist drifts” and memorial ambiguities that “wound Polish and Jewish memory,” recycling the Kremlin’s denazification theme under cover of historical nuance.

July 16 “When the EU sanctions disagreement.” The mask comes off; she writes about herself. Sanctions once targeted states, leaders and firms financing war, she argues; now the EU has invented the sanction for dissenting opinion. She assembles Jacques Baud, Xavier Moreau and the influencer known as “Sasha Loves Russia” as ordinary dissidents punished for analysis, each described by their most sympathetic attribute, none by the affiliation that triggered their listing. Then the reveal: twenty-five MEPs want her sanctioned, because she voices the view that the war could have been avoided. Today the so-called pro-Russian voices, she concludes. Tomorrow, whose?

Le Monde reports that in the days before July 22 she was said to be anxious, afraid of finding her name in the package. The fourth column was therefore not commentary. It was a pre-emptive defence, published in the French national press by someone who knew a decision was imminent, framing any future sanction in advance as an assault on free expression.

Readers were told none of this. Four times, the same portrait, the same Carte Blanche banner, the same one-line biography: columnist on CNews, presenter on CStar. Across five weeks, the newspaper never mentioned RT France.

What the columns leave out

Fedorova led RT’s French operation from its preparatory phase through its launch and until the European Union banned RT’s broadcasts in March 2022, a month into the full-scale invasion. RT France was liquidated in 2023, its assets frozen under EU sanctions.

Desk Russie, working from leaked Russian administrative data, reported something more specific: she remained on the books of TV-Novosti (RT’s parent organisation) until August 31, 2024, with payments identified between July 2023 and July 2024. Le Monde has reported that discussions about her move into the Bolloré ecosystem began as early as summer 2023. If both hold, she was negotiating her repositioning inside French media while still drawing a salary from the central structure of Russian state broadcasting.

That detail matters more than any argument in the columns, because it dissolves the frame her defence rests on. A commentator with heterodox views on NATO enlargement is exercising an opinion. A salaried employee of a sanctioned state broadcaster installing herself in a member state’s mainstream press is conducting an activity. Her July 16 column works only if the reader never learns which of the two she is.

The ministry’s answer

Pressed on the omission, the Quai d’Orsay gave a technical explanation. The twenty-first package, its spokesman said, is built mainly around sectoral restrictions; it does contain individual listings, but those rest on a legal basis aimed at Russia’s military effort, not the basis covering people engaged in destabilising activity.

On that narrow point, the ministry is correct, and the correction is worth making plainly: Fedorova was never going to fit inside this particular instrument. Anyone claiming she was struck from a list she belonged on is overstating the case.

Then the spokesman continued: “We are not naive. We have long and consistently asserted that Ksenia Fedorova’s position aligns with Kremlin propaganda. She actively spreads it in the media space. Therefore discussions and consultations are ongoing regarding this situation.”

That second half is where the defence collapses.

The European Union has had a dedicated framework for sanctioning coordinated information manipulation since October 2024. It was created for precisely this category of case. It was not used on July 22 because it was not that kind of package, but it has been available for twenty-one months, and France has never proposed her under it. According to Le Monde, there is no trace of any such request in the system. French officials told Brussels it was “not the right time yet.”

So the ministry’s explanation answers why she was absent from this package, and declines to answer why she has been absent from every package. And the reason offered is not that the case is weak, or the evidence thin, or the listing likely to fall on appeal. It is that discussions are ongoing.

Ongoing since when? The foreign minister has called her a patented propagandist relaying Kremlin disinformation. On July 14, which is five days after her column on Bastille Day, he accused her of annexing French national memory to the Kremlin’s narrative. The president has said publicly that RT France was described as an organ of state propaganda in 2017 and that nothing has changed since. The Quai d’Orsay holds an internal note documenting the alignment of her positions with official Russian narratives. Arcom has two complaints on file over the honesty and rigour of her broadcast claims. The government spokeswoman has denounced remarks that invert the burden of proof between Russia and Ukraine. Renew Europe, at Nathalie Loiseau’s initiative, formally requested her listing on June 3, backed by a third of the group.

The qualification exists. The evidence exists. The instrument exists. The parliamentary demand exists. What, exactly, is still under discussion?

Twice now

This is the second time the pattern has run.

In 2024, Fedorova obtained a renewal of her French residence permit for ten years. Asked about it, the Paris police chief stated that this was a renewal as of right, on which the government had not intervened.

In 2026, a sanctions package covering more than two hundred names passed without her, because no French request was ever filed.

Each time, a firm public denunciation paired with an administrative abstention. Once is a decision. Twice is a posture.

There are honourable explanations available, and they deserve stating. Sanctioning a commentator who publishes in a member state’s mainstream press would be a European first, and a listing annulled on appeal at the General Court would hand Fedorova precisely the judicial martyrdom her columns are already rehearsing. Building a case that holds, around the TV-Novosti payments rather than around published opinions, takes time and is the right way to do it.

There is a less flattering explanation. Sanctioning Fedorova means striking a CNews columnist, and striking a CNews columnist means a confrontation with Vincent Bolloré, whose channels, newspaper and publishing house carry real weight in a pre-electoral France. On this reading, the denunciations are not a prelude to action but a substitute for it: loud enough to answer the demand for a response, cheap enough to avoid the fight.

That such calculations are being made is not speculation. In the same month, Le Monde reported that Matignon was negotiating with French banks, and weighing a partial state guarantee through the next finance bill, to secure campaign financing for Marine Le Pen — an extraordinary deployment of state machinery in a landscape where every decision touching the far right and its media allies carries a price.

I cannot establish which explanation is true, and won’t pretend otherwise. What can be established is the shape: two years of instrument availability, two months of ministerial denunciation, and zero filings.

The refutation writes itself

Fedorova’s central claim is that Europe now punishes opinions and silences dissenting voices. Consider what happened to her in the week after she published it.

She was not sanctioned. Her assets were not frozen. Her residence permit, valid to 2034, was untouched. Her weekly column ran. Her programme aired. Her publisher has not dropped her. And the minister who calls her a propagandist had never entered her name into the system at all.

She published a warning about her own persecution in a national newspaper, and the persecution did not arrive, because the state she accuses of criminalising disagreement had chosen, twice, not to act against her.

One genuine risk remains, and it belongs to the government rather than to her. Le Monde reports that the Foreign and Interior Ministries are studying other avenues discreetly. If Paris, having declined the collegial European route, now reaches for quiet administrative instruments (a residence-permit reversal, a national asset freeze) it will hand her the narrative she has spent five weeks building. The clean option was always the transparent one: propose the listing under the framework designed for it, publish the evidence, defend it in open court. That option has been available since October 2024.

The question that remains

It is not why Europe failed to sanction Fedorova. Europe was never asked.

It is why the French state denounces a Kremlin propagandist in public, holds the file, holds the instrument, and declines twice to use either, while a newspaper of record gives her four platforms in five weeks without once telling readers she ran RT France.

She asked on July 16: today the pro-Russian voices, tomorrow whose? It is a good question pointed in the wrong direction. No one’s voice was taken. Hers was amplified, four times, by a national title, while a government that calls her a propagandist made sure the file stayed empty and told Brussels the moment had not yet come.

The silence that should trouble French readers is not hers. It is the masthead’s, and the ministry’s.

I’ve lived in Ukraine for six years. In the spring of 2022, I was among those evacuating families out of Kyiv, west toward mountain villages that felt, rightly or wrongly, safer. Since then, I’ve watched (from the inside) how this country talks about its own war, and how the West talks about it instead. The two stories barely resemble each other anymore.

The wrong message

The dominant narrative in Europe fits into one sentence: Ukraine is defending the freedom of the West. It’s the frame repeated by most geopolitical commentators, and it’s the frame that has served, since 2022, to justify support from the majority of European governments for Kyiv. In the United States the message is different (the stated motives aren’t the same) but the result is similar: an abstraction standing in for an explanation.

The problem is that this message is wrong. Or at least incomplete to the point of being misleading.

Ukrainians are not fighting, first and foremost, for freedom in the abstract sense used in Brussels or Paris. They’re fighting for their country, for the future they want for their children. Freedom is part of it, certainly, but it isn’t the primary driver: the driver is pushing back an army committing war crimes, waging a systematic campaign of destruction, and showing, at no point, any regard for the lives of the people it occupies. And this is going to get worse in the months ahead.

The only motive that should matter to Europe

If there’s a legitimate link between the war in Ukraine and Europe’s own interests, it isn’t the defense of some disembodied freedom. It’s the fight against a specific worldview, the one Putin built to justify, to his own citizens, a "special operation" that is in reality a war of conquest and annihilation. That worldview didn’t stay in Russia. Trump imported it into the American mind, spread it, gave it political form through the MAGA movement.

And this is where the Western narrative fails a second time: Putin, Trump, or any leader of that kind share the exact same motive. Power. Money. Neither cares, in any real sense, about ordinary people, not even their own. The ideological justifications are just packaging. What deserves emphasis isn’t a clash of abstract values, but the concrete example of a country that has sacrificed its own stability because it has no allies willing to fight in its place , a country that, despite overwhelming evidence of war crimes and genocide documented under international law, continues to be kept at arm’s length by the very world claiming to support it. In practice, that world prefers financing the war to ending it. War has always been good business. It still is.

The real stakes: a political model gaining ground

But that’s not the essential point. What Ukrainians are actually doing for Europe,without having chosen to, without even wanting to , is fighting by proxy against a model of the state now championed by the AfD in Germany, the Rassemblement National in France, and equivalent movements in nearly every European country. A model where prioritizing the national over the foreign becomes the organizing principle of politics. These parties are gaining ground, winning parliamentary seats, and now openly aiming for the presidency in their respective countries.

This is the point that should be at the center of the conversation, and it isn’t getting nearly enough attention. This worldview pushed indifferently by strongmen claiming the left or the right, needs to be named for what it is and fought as such. It’s urgent, because it’s growing while we keep talking about something else. And the picture painted today by American Democrats, who clearly have no answer to offer, isn’t an isolated case: in most of the countries facing this, nobody has found the answer yet either.

What’s left to do

Ukraine isn’t a geopolitical abstraction. It’s a country fighting, very concretely, against an army methodically destroying its cities and its people. Continuing to wrap that fight in the comfortable language of "Western freedom" amounts to telling ourselves a story that’s convenient , and missing the real danger: an authoritarian, ethnonationalist model that isn’t fighting on a front to the east, but quietly advancing at the ballot box, at home.

For the third time in a month, Le Journal du Dimanche has handed its Carte Blanche column to Xenia Fedorova. On July 9, five days before Bastille Day, she used it to argue that Emmanuel Macron had turned France’s national holiday into a “war message”: a geopolitical alignment with Ukraine imposed on the French without their consent. The piece is elegantly written and calibrated to land across the political spectrum. It is also, line by line, an exercise in Kremlin messaging delivered by the former director of a Russian state channel the European Union banned for exactly this. Here is what it actually says, and why every element of it collapses under scrutiny.

On Fedorova legitimacy to write this at all

First of all. Fedorova invokes national sovereignty and popular consent as her core values. Yet she is the former director of RT France, a channel banned across the EU for serving as an instrument of a foreign state’s information warfare, liquidated in 2023 with its assets frozen under sanctions. France’s own Foreign Minister has publicly called her a Kremlin propagandist. On June 3, a third of the Renew Europe group in the European Parliament formally requested individual EU sanctions against her.

The contradiction is not incidental: it is the whole story. A representative of the Kremlin lecturing France about who has the right to shape French national symbols is the operation, not a flaw in it. The July 14 parade belongs to the French Republic and the citizens who defend it. A representative of the Kremlin, given a national newspaper to tell France how it may commemorate its own army on the eve of its national holiday, is not participating in French debate. She is the foreign interference her column pretends to denounce.

The core move: hijacking Bastille Day

Her thesis: by orienting the July 14 parade toward Ukraine and “Europe’s strategic awakening,” Macron turns a moment of national unity into a “war message” and a “geopolitical alignment”, dragging France into a war without popular consent.

The whole piece rests on a manufactured opposition between sovereign France and solidarity with Ukraine, as if the two were mutually exclusive. They are not. A sovereign nation is entirely free to choose, through its elected government, to align itself with a democracy resisting invasion. That is not the loss of sovereignty: it is sovereignty being exercised. Fedorova only calls it “alignment” because the alignment isn’t the one Moscow wants.

Element 1: “France is not officially a co-belligerent”

Her claim: Placing a country at war with Russia at the heart of the national holiday is shocking because France isn’t officially a co-belligerent.

Debunk: True and irrelevant. Supporting a nation under attack, with arms, training, financing, is not co-belligerence under international law, and every serious jurist knows it. Fedorova uses the word to smuggle in the idea that France is being secretly dragged into war. Hosting or honoring an ally at a parade commits no troops and fires no shots. She inflates a diplomatic gesture into an act of war precisely because alarm is the goal.

Element 2: The appeal to “former officers” and General Roure

Her claim: Part of the military world (notably former officers) sees a dangerous confusion between national tribute and strategic alignment. She quotes General Henri Roure: France is “traditionally a power of equilibrium” and should “rediscover reason.”

Debunk: This is authority-borrowing. A single retired general’s opinion is presented as “the military world.” General Henri Roure is a known signatory of the pro-Kremlin-leaning generals’ tribunes and a recurrent figure in circles hostile to French support for Ukraine, not a neutral voice of the armed forces. Citing him as evidence of institutional military unease is like citing one dissenting columnist as “the press.” The serving French military hierarchy has voiced no such position. The rhetorical trick is to convert a fringe view into a consensus by attaching stars to it.

Element 3: “The French were never consulted”

Her claim: Since February 2022, Paris slid from support to near-total identification with Ukraine, and the French were never clearly consulted on the exact limit of this engagement.

Debunk: France is a representative democracy, not a permanent referendum. Foreign and defense policy is conducted by an elected president and a parliament that votes budgets, ratifies treaties, and can censure the government. Ukraine aid has been debated in the National Assembly. The Franco-Ukrainian security agreement was public. “The people were never consulted” is the standard populist solvent used to delegitimize any policy one dislikes, and note the selective application: Fedorova never demands a referendum on, say, French energy policy or trade with China. The demand for “consent” appears only where it serves Moscow’s interest in fracturing Western support.

Element 4: “Ukraine is not a pure political object”

Her claim: Ukraine has its fractures, oligarchs, corruption, “nationalist drifts,” and memorial ambiguities that “wound Polish and Jewish memory.” Refusing to see this doesn’t erase it.

Debunk: This is the most cynical passage, and the most revealing. Every nation has flaws; France has oligarchs and corruption scandals too. But notice the function of this paragraph: it exists to introduce reasonable doubt about whether Ukraine deserves solidarity at all. The invocation of “Jewish memory” is especially grotesque coming from a mouthpiece of a state that launched its invasion under the explicit banner of “denazification”, a propaganda frame Russia weaponized precisely to justify attacking a country with a Jewish president who lost family in the Holocaust. Fedorova is recycling the Kremlin’s own “Nazi Ukraine” theme, laundered through concern-trolling about historical memory. It is disinformation wearing the mask of nuance.

Element 5: “A ceremony forms minds, it manufactures memory”

Her claim: A military ceremony isn’t news commentary; it “habituates minds” and “transforms a political option into national self-evidence.” Putting Ukraine into the July 14 imaginary normalizes the idea that France is bound to Kyiv’s military fate.

Debunk: This is projection in its purest form. Fedorova, a professional propagandist who spent years running Russia Today, an operation whose entire purpose was manufacturing memory and habituating minds, is warning the French about the dangers of symbolic manipulation. The concern about “fabricating memory” is precisely her own trade, now aimed at pre-emptively delegitimizing any public expression of Franco-Ukrainian solidarity. When the person warning you about mind control ran a state disinformation channel, the warning is not analysis. It is a confession repurposed as an accusation.

Element 6: The “simple question” close

Her claim: The question is “simple”: how far do we want to drag France into this war? If leaders want the conflict to become France’s own, let them say so and ask the French. Don’t use the prestige of July 14 to dress up leaders’ ideological choices without popular consent.

Debunk: Same false-dilemma engine as her two previous tribunes. “Dragging France into the war” is a phantom, no one has proposed French combat troops in Ukraine at scale, and a parade commits nothing. She constructs an extreme (full belligerence) to make ordinary solidarity look like the first step toward it. And once again, the asymmetry is total: not one word asks how far Russia intends to push its war, whether Russians consented to invading Ukraine, or what Moscow’s endgame is. The burden of restraint falls entirely on the victim’s supporters, never on the aggressor. That asymmetry, repeated across three columns, is the signature.

Who is finally going to make the decision to bring this person where it belongs: home, Russia?

The seduction

Fedorova opens not with Russia but with de Gaulle. Sixty years ago, on June 20, 1966, the General arrived in Moscow at the height of the Cold War, choosing dialogue when the blocs faced each other across a divided Europe. She quotes his praise of a “prosperous, powerful Russia full of pacific ardor.” She summons Chateaubriand, the Mémoires d’outre-tombe, the idea of an alliance against Russia as an “alliance of dupes” costing France “its blood and its treasures.” She invokes grandeur, independence, sovereignty.

It is a beautiful overture. It is meant to be. And by the time the reader reaches the argument, the trap is already set: to disagree with Fedorova is to disagree with de Gaulle, with Chateaubriand, with France itself.

This is the most sophisticated move in the Kremlin’s French repertoire. She is not asking the reader to love Russia. She is asking the reader to love France, and then quietly redefining what loving France requires.

What the piece never says

Read the tribune from beginning to end and you will not find a single word about the invasion of Ukraine. Not Bucha. Not Mariupol. Not the annexation of four oblasts. Not the children deported, the cities flattened, the power grid targeted through four winters. In a 900-word essay ostensibly about peace in Europe, the war that is actually being fought in Europe simply does not appear.

This is not an oversight. It is the architecture. Fedorova cannot make her case if Russia is the aggressor, so Russia is never the aggressor. There is no perpetrator in her Europe, only a France that has forgotten its voice, and a Russia waiting patiently to be re-admitted to the conversation. The corpses are edited out so the geopolitics can be discussed in comfort.

The neocon conspiracy

The engine of the piece is an old one, freshly painted. American neoconservatives, Fedorova writes, spent years deliberately severing the privileged link between Paris and Moscow, and succeeded “with the active or passive complicity” of French elites who can no longer think of the national interest except through the prism of NATO, Brussels, or Washington.

Notice what this does. Every French politician, diplomat, journalist, or citizen who supports Ukraine is recast not as someone who reached an independent conclusion about an invasion, but as a dupe or a collaborator in an American project. European solidarity becomes evidence of subjugation. Atlantic cooperation becomes proof of treason. The argument is unfalsifiable: agreement with the West is vassalage, and disagreement with Fedorova is vassalage too.

It is worth saying plainly what this rhetorical structure is. It is the classic mechanism of the influence operation: designate an internal enemy, tie that enemy to a foreign power, and render suspect anyone who refuses the framing. Fedorova has simply turned it inside out and aimed it at France’s own institutions.

The false choice

The climax is a reframing offered as wisdom: the question, she insists, is not whether to be pro-Russian or anti-Russian: “that reading is poor, infantile and dangerous.” The real question is whether France accepts becoming a secondary power locked in bloc reflexes, or reclaims its sovereignty as a nation that speaks to everyone.

This is a false dilemma wearing a philosopher’s coat. France speaks to everyone already. It maintains diplomatic relations, back channels, and negotiations across the globe. What France has declined to do is treat the invasion of a European democracy as a matter on which all positions are equally sovereign and equally serious. Fedorova relabels that refusal (a moral and strategic choice) as cowardice, as the abandonment of grandeur. The sleight of hand is total: resistance to aggression becomes the loss of one’s voice, and capitulation becomes the act of finding it again.

Her closing line delivers the payload: “No lasting peace will be born in Europe from the exclusion of Russia.” It sounds like realism. It functions as an instruction. Strip the Gaullist drapery and the message is identical to the one broadcast nightly from Moscow: decouple France from Western unity, rehabilitate Russia as a legitimate partner, and frame the entire architecture of European resistance as American manipulation.

Who is writing this

None of this would matter as much if the author were an obscure commentator. She is not. Xenia Fedorova ran RT France (Russia Today) until the European Union banned the channel in 2022 and it was liquidated in 2023, its assets frozen under sanctions against Russia. France’s own Foreign Minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, has called her “a fully-fledged propagandist who relays the Kremlin’s disinformation.” The Quai d’Orsay maintains an internal note documenting how her positions align with official Russian narratives on Ukraine, NATO, and Europe. The broadcasting regulator Arcom has received formal complaints about the honesty of her reporting. On June 3, three weeks before this tribune ran, a third of the Renew Europe group in the European Parliament formally requested individual EU sanctions against her.

This is the person to whom Le Journal du Dimanche gave a national platform, twice in a fortnight, under a column format reserved for intellectuals and public figures, and without once disclosing to its readers who she is.

The real question

Fedorova is good at her work. The de Gaulle framing is genuinely clever. The appeal to French sovereignty lands across the political spectrum, with the Mélenchon left as easily as the Villiériste right. The essay is calibrated, literate, and emotionally intelligent. That is exactly what makes it effective, not crude propaganda, but a finely tuned instrument designed to slip past the defenses of readers who trust the publication carrying it.

So let me borrow her device and end with a question of my own. The real question is not whether France should be sovereign. France should be, and is. The real question is why a newspaper of record keeps handing its most prestigious column to a former director of a banned Russian state channel, while a third of a European parliamentary group asks to sanction her — and whether the editors who keep saying yes understand what they are publishing, or simply no longer care.

De Gaulle spoke to Moscow from a position of strength, clarity, and absolute independence. He would have recognized Xenia Fedorova for exactly what she is. The tragedy is that a French newspaper apparently cannot. Or?

The man who built the megaphone

Fedorova does not have a national audience by accident. She has one because Vincent Bolloré decided she should.

After RT France was banned and liquidated, Fedorova did not retreat into obscurity. She was absorbed into the Bolloré media empire — CNews, JDNews, Europe 1, CStar, where she now appears on “L’Heure Inter” on Wednesdays and Sundays, holds a weekly column in JDNews, and presents her own program, “Lumières orthodoxes.” Her 2025 book defending her record was published by Fayard, a Bolloré house. The man whose channel the EU shut down for spreading Russian disinformation found, in a French billionaire, someone willing to rebuild her platform brick by brick.

This is where the consequences stop being abstract. When a banned state-propaganda operative is handed prime slots across a vertically integrated media group, several things happen at once, and none of them are good.

The European Union banned RT precisely to deny the Kremlin a megaphone in the French information space. Bolloré has quietly restored it. The asset was frozen; the voice was not. Every appearance Fedorova makes on CNews is a demonstration that EU sanctions can be circumvented domestically by any media owner willing to do it, which tells every other propagandist that the penalty for disinformation is a brief pause, then a better contract.

This is the consequence least visible to the public and the most corrosive. Several regular CNews contributors have reported being dropped after debating Fedorova on air. General Bruno Clermont stated plainly that several of his on-air remarks “did not please Xenia Fedorova”, and that he stopped being invited. When a Kremlin-aligned figure can shape who else is allowed on the channel, she is no longer a guest. She is an editorial authority. The propaganda doesn’t just get aired; it gets to decide which counter-arguments survive.

A claim made on RT carries the warning label of its source. The same claim, printed in the Carte Blanche column of Le Journal du Dimanche under a soft-focus portrait, carries the credibility of the French press. Bolloré’s machine performs a specific function: it strips the Kremlin’s fingerprints off the message and replaces them with the imprimatur of a national newspaper. The audience that would never watch Russia Today reads Fedorova over Sunday breakfast and absorbs the identical argument, now wearing the costume of respectable opinion.

Each appearance makes the next one less remarkable. Repetition is the entire mechanism: a position that sounds scandalous the first time sounds debatable the third time and familiar the tenth. Bolloré is not running one propagandist’s column. He is running a normalization curve, and the destination is a French public that has been gradually retrained to hear Kremlin strategic messaging as one legitimate French opinion among others.

There is a defense available to all of this, and it deserves to be stated fairly: free speech, editorial independence, the right of a media owner to publish whom he chooses, and the danger of the EU deciding which opinions may be heard. These are real principles, and they are not nothing. Fedorova’s own supporters invoke them, comparing her case to other commentators sanctioned for their views on Ukraine.

But the defense collapses on contact with the facts. Free speech is the right to express your own views; it has never been the right to a weekly column in a national newspaper, and it has certainly never obligated a billionaire to provide one. The question is not whether Fedorova may speak. She may. The question is why one of France’s most powerful media owners has chosen, repeatedly and structurally, to convert his outlets into the distribution network that the European Union explicitly tried to dismantle, and what it costs a democracy when its largest private media empire becomes the workaround for its own government’s sanctions.

That is the real consequence of leaving this kind of propaganda to a mass audience. Not that one Russian commentator gets to publish an essay. That a foreign state’s strategic narrative, banned at the border, is being delivered to millions of French citizens through the front door, with the lights on, the portrait flattering, and the masthead of a respected newspaper above it.

In a recent column published in Le Journal du Dimanche, former RT France director Xenia Fedorova, Bolloré’s protégé, and Chief Russian Propagandist in Paris asks why Europe was so quick to condemn Russia after the strike that damaged Kyiv’s historic Pechersk Lavra, one of the holiest sites in Orthodox Christianity.

Her answer is familiar: Europe supposedly rushed to accuse Moscow, ignored alternative explanations, and exploited a religious tragedy for political purposes. The problem is not that she asks questions. The problem is that she asks them selectively.

Like many modern pro-Kremlin narratives, her article is built less on what it says than on what it omits.

The false symmetry

Fedorova argues that Ukraine accused Russia before an investigation had been completed and that Moscow’s explanation deserves equal consideration. In theory, that sounds reasonable.

In practice, it ignores the reality of four years of Russian missile and drone attacks against Ukrainian cities.

Russia has repeatedly struck civilian infrastructure throughout Ukraine: apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, shopping centers, museums, churches, power stations, and UNESCO-protected heritage sites. These incidents have been documented by international organizations, journalists, satellite imagery, and independent investigators.

When a Russian missile barrage hits Kyiv and a historic monastery is damaged, suspicion does not emerge from prejudice. It emerges from a documented pattern. The burden of proof is not the same for a state that has spent years attacking urban areas and for a country defending itself from invasion.

The patriot missile argument

Fedorova repeats Moscow’s claim that the damage may have been caused by a Ukrainian Patriot interceptor rather than a Russian strike. This argument has become a standard feature of Russian information operations. Whenever civilian infrastructure is damaged, responsibility is frequently shifted toward Ukrainian air defense systems.

The logic is convenient.If Russia launches the missiles but Ukrainian defenses intercept them, Moscow seeks to avoid responsibility for the consequences of the attack itself. Yet without the Russian strike, there would be no interception attempt. The responsibility begins with the aggressor who initiated the attack.

This principle is understood in military doctrine, international law, and common sense.

The Orthodox Church argument

The most revealing part of Fedorova’s article is her assertion that Russia could not have targeted the Lavra because Vladimir Putin presents himself as a defender of Orthodoxy. This is perhaps the weakest argument in the entire piece. History provides countless examples of political leaders invoking religion while simultaneously destroying religious sites, institutions, and communities that stood in their way.

The Kremlin has repeatedly instrumentalized Orthodoxy as a component of state power. Religion serves not only as faith but also as a political narrative supporting the concept of the “Russian World” (“Russkiy Mir”), which has been used to justify influence over neighboring countries, including Ukraine.

To suggest that a government cannot damage a religious site because it publicly identifies with that religion is not analysis. It is public relations.

What Fedorova doesn’t mention

The article devotes significant space to Ukrainian measures against religious organizations linked to Moscow. What it does not mention is why these measures were introduced.

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian authorities have uncovered numerous cases involving members of the Moscow-affiliated church hierarchy accused of collaboration, intelligence sharing, propaganda activities, or support for the invading forces.

Not every accusation has been proven. Not every cleric is guilty.But the issue did not emerge from religious intolerance. It emerged from a war launched by Russia itself. By removing that context, Fedorova transforms a security debate into a story of religious persecution.

The real question

The central question is not whether every Russian statement should automatically be rejected. The central question is why Moscow’s explanations consistently appear only after civilian sites are damaged. Each tragedy follows a familiar sequence. A strike occurs. Evidence emerges. International condemnation follows.

The Kremlin denies responsibility. Alternative theories appear.Confusion spreads. Doubt replaces accountability.The objective is often not to prove innocence. It is to make certainty impossible.

Fedorova’s mission is straightforward: relay Kremlin propaganda, distort facts, and reshape reality in service of Russia’s so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine. What Bolloré gains from giving such a platform to a former RT France executive remains an open question. The motivations may be political, ideological, or commercial. What is clear, however, is that Fedorova exploits the reach of Bolloré’s media outlets to spread confusion, undermine factual reporting, and normalize narratives that align with Moscow’s interests.

Religion as a narrative weapon

The Pechersk Lavra deserves protection regardless of politics. It is a spiritual treasure for millions of believers and one of Europe’s most important religious sites. But protecting a holy place also requires protecting the truth. The tragedy of the Lavra should not become another opportunity to rewrite reality.

It should remind us that information warfare does not only target military objectives. It targets memory, identity, history, and faith. And that is precisely why facts matter. Especially when someone is asking us to doubt them.