On Saturday, April 12, 2025, about thirty activists from "For Ukraine, for their freedom and ours!" and partner associations disrupted Xenia Fedorova's book signing at the Fayard publishing house stand in the Grand Palais. For over an hour, waving Ukrainian flags and chanting slogans, they publicly reminded readers of what the former RT France president's book omits: the deported Ukrainian children, the killed journalists, and the war propaganda broadcast for years on French television.

The action followed a joint statement issued the previous day by six associations, distributed via the Diderot Committee, which had gone unanswered by the festival organizers, the Île-de-France region, the Ministry of Culture, and the Paris City Hall. This institutional silence made the intervention all the more necessary: in a festival where none of the more than 300 scheduled events addressed Russian aggression against Ukraine, allowing Xenia Fedorova to occupy the media space alone would have carried political significance. Giving an unchallenged platform to the former head of a state propaganda outlet would, implicitly, validate the narrative she presents.

The action was covered by Le Monde . “ It seemed impossible to us that Ms. Fedorova could speak without another voice being heard ,” said Pierre Raiman, co-founder of Pour l'Ukraine . This principle guided the entire mobilization: when the relevant institutions fail to react, it falls to civil society to ensure that the victims of war—the deported children, the bombed civilians, the imprisoned journalists—are not conspicuously absent from a debate that others have chosen to occupy in their place.