Europe

• 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.

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This 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.

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Epistemic vigilance is a generally healthy reflex: it keeps us from believing just anyone at their word and from being exploited.

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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.

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This 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.

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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.

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