KEY TAKEAWAYS• On September 24, the European Union sanctioned Xenia Fedorova, the Russian former head of the French arm of Russia Today (RT) and media commentator for the Bolloré group for her role in engaging in foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI). It follows a French expulsion order against the Russian propagandist in July 2026.• Accused of spreading Kremlin propaganda, she counterattacks by presenting herself as the victim of “single-minded thinking” spread by mainstream media in Western countries.• In doing so, she exploits a clever rhetorical and cognitive mechanism: rather than trying to convince us, the aim is to turn our own aspiration to critical thinking against “official” sources, to push Russian propaganda.The European Council has decided to adopt restrictive measures against Xenia Fedorova for her role in Russia’s continued hybrid activities, and in particular for engaging in foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI), “thereby undermining democracy and stability in the EU and its member states”. The former head of the French network of Russia Today (RT) until the ban of this Russian state media outlet by the European Union after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Xenia Fedorova had found, early 2025, a prime platform in the media outlets owned by French media mogul Vincent Bolloré: CNews, Europe 1, JDNews. It was via these channels that she regularly defended the Kremlin’s positions on the war in Ukraine, minimising the Russian invasion, or downplaying the documented abduction of Ukrainian children reported by the international press.In late July 2026, France issued a deportation order against Fedorova, after Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez accused her of being “a channel for disinformation campaigns run by Russian authorities”, while the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Noël Barrot branded her a “card-carrying propagandist”. Fedorova disputes these labels – she has filed appeals against the deportation proceedings, without success – and presents herself as a marginalised, even “banned” voice from a restrictive French media landscape (echoing the title of her book, published in 2025 by Fayard, a publishing house owned by Vincent Bolloré).It is this last argument that deserves closer attention. As outlined in Maxime Audinet’s latest book on Russia Today (RT), Fedorova’s rhetorical method consists of relaying, without the slightest criticism, the official Russian narratives on the war in Ukraine and other topics, all the while presenting RT as a “counter-hegemonic” and “alternative” media outlet standing up to a supposed “single-minded thinking” of Western media. Youtube (don’t forget to activate dubbing in English) The established account – which finds, through multiple independent and expert sources, Russian aggression and the illegal annexation of Ukrainian territories – is never engaged with on its merits. It is instead recast as a “dominant”, institutional narrative, and therefore suspect by construction. Fedorova’s own speech, meanwhile, dons the garb of the persecuted outsider that authoritarian establishment forces would supposedly like to silence.An old cognitive reflex, turned on itselfThis process is not improvised, nor is it simply a matter of Fedorova’s personal skill. It exploits a mechanism well documented by cognitive science: epistemic vigilance.According to the work of Dan Sperber, Hugo Mercier, and their colleagues, humans possess intuitive capacities to assess not only the content of a message, but also the reliability of its source – particularly its capacity, willingness and interest in deceiving us. The more powerful a source appears, the more it seems positioned to manipulate us and capable of harming us should it try to deceive us. As a result, the more powerful a source – for instance because it is governmental – the more this informational filter is likely to be triggered, especially in the minds of citizens with low trust in political institutions.Epistemic vigilance is a generally healthy reflex: it keeps us from believing just anyone at their word and from being exploited. Communication could only have evolved, over the course of our species’ history, because it was, on average, advantageous for both those who send and those who receive messages – something only possible if instances of deception can be detected.But this vigilance mechanism can be hijacked, exploited for ends contrary to individuals’ interest in knowing the truth. By labelling the true Western narrative on Ukraine as “single-minded thinking” in order to discredit it, Fedorova activates this aspiration to critical, independent thinking among a public that has legitimately been burned by real precedents of lies or contradictions in governmental discourse. Among these lies and contradictions, one can cite the lies of the G.W. Bush administration regarding supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in 2003, but also France’s contaminated blood scandal, the signing of the Lisbon Treaty despite the “no” vote on the European Constitution project, or the inconsistencies of Emmanuel Macron and his government regarding the effectiveness of masks during the COVID-19 pandemic.Ordinary citizens who are receptive to Fedorova’s and Russian propaganga often do not realise the reasons why the European discourse on Ukraine is more reliable than the Russian one. The European discourse has been produced by institutions that broadly follow collective, distributed, and professional fact-checking procedures like independent audit and expertise, peer review, cross-referencing of sources. A European expert or journalist who publishes a major error about who triggered the war in Ukraine risks torching their reputation, and potentially loosing their job. The fact those institutions operate in European, by and large democratic nations with free elections, political pluralism and an independence of powers means their claims are subject to a much higher degree of scrutiny, to stronger demands for transparency and integrity than the Kremlin’s discourse. Meanwhile, Fedorova’s own source, the Russian state – an aggressor state defending its own narrative of a conflict it started – escapes the same suspicion, even though it ought to be the prime target of it.A classic technique in Russian influence operationsThis is not an isolated invention. Political communication specialist Ilya Yablokov showed, as early as 2015 in the journal Politics, that RT builds a significant part of its editorial strategy on mobilising conspiracy theories aimed precisely at delegitimising Western narratives by portraying them as instruments of a hidden power, all while presenting Russian positions as the authentic voice escaping this control.Social scientists Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews theorised a similar type of Russian disinformation effort under the name of the “firehose of falsehood”: the production of a massive volume of false content, disseminated continuously across multiple channels, with no concern for internal consistency.According to the authors, the goal of this latter type of disinformation is often not so much to convince the audience of one particular alternative version of the facts, but rather to produce a generalised cynicism: the idea that the truth is unknowable anyway, that no one can be trusted, which renders any rational debate grounded in shared facts pointless. Sometimes, sowing doubt is enough: it is not always necessary to secure acceptance of a given claim.Excessive intellectual conservatism, uneducated scepticismIt would be tempting to conclude that the public, who is convinced by this kind of “anti-establishment” discourse, is simply ‘gullible’. It is, in a sense, the opposite. As Sperber, Mercier, and their colleagues point out in their work on epistemic vigilance, the dominant bias in human cognition is not to believe others too readily. It is rather a form of epistemic conservatism, a difficulty in granting another person’s testimony – including that of a legitimately informed or expert source – the trust it would deserve.The paradox of this type of conspiratorial discourse is that scepticism, supposedly meant to protect us, ends up turning against the institutions – professional academics, investigative journalists, ministries of European democracies – which, despite their imperfections, remain the best equipped to establish facts, thanks to collective editorial and methodological procedures.Trust is then redirected towards far less verified and regulated sources, such as the official discourse of the Russian state, which has no internal counterbalancing power, on the grounds that these are “non-dominant”, “unofficial” voices – an appeal that seduces minds with low political trust and a desire for independence. A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!Antoine Marie received funding from France's national research fund (ANR) as part of his research.Maxime Audinet received funding from France's national research fund (ANR) as part of his research.