An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that RT had accused France of supporting terrorism in Syria. RT was quoting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

On right, Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of Kremlin-funded RT television network, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, celebrated RT’s 10th anniversary in December 2015. (Mikhail Klimentyev/AP)

At long last, RT has arrived on French television.

The Kremlin-funded news agency aired its first broadcast Monday, with a segment that quoted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad accusing the French government of "supporting terrorism" in Syria and featuring a far-right local politician who waxed poetic about a world where France "regained its independence" from NATO.

For an agency accused of spreading disinformation in the 2016 U.S. election, these are predictable messages, especially in a Western democracy that is no stranger to nativist populism.

The question is how many people in France and across Europe — where the extreme right has made significant gains in recent elections — will see these new nightly broadcasts.

For the moment in France, not many.

RT — formerly known as "Russia Today" — can be seen only via its website or with a subscription to the broadband arm of Iliad, a French telecommunications service provider. The channel will not be readily available in most French households, unlike France's four major news channels, which run 24/7.

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This may soon change, as France's two biggest telecommunications providers, Orange and SFR, are in negotiations with RT, the conglomerates confirmed to the French press this week. If the parties reach an agreement, RT could find wider audiences. The network has sizable ambitions: a reported launch budget of some $24 million, as well as the goal of hiring 150 employees by the end of next year.

"RT is not a journalistic outlet — it's an information weapon," said Ben Nimmo, a research fellow with the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab and an expert on disinformation and hybrid warfare. "Its purpose is to build an audience to be used for information warfare if necessary."

Nimmo said that Margarita Simonyan, RT's editor in chief, has regularly described her organization as an "information weapon" and in the Russian press has compared it to Russia's Defense Ministry.

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As Simonyan said in a 2013 interview: "It's a weapon like any other. Do you understand? And to say, why do we need it — it's about the same as saying: 'Why do we need the Ministry of Defense, if there is no war?' "

A year earlier, while discussing the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia, Simonyan recounted: "The Defense Ministry was fighting with Georgia. But we were fighting the information war, and what's more, against the whole Western world."

RT technically has been in France since 2015, although not on television until now. The organization has operated a platform for digital journalism that was the object of much anxiety in the 2017 French presidential election, which saw the Kremlin-backed Marine Le Pen, a right-wing extremist, face off against the centrist Emmanuel Macron, who ultimately won in a landslide.

At a news conference in May, just weeks after his victory, Macron stood next to Russian President Vladimir Putin and called RT and Sputnik "organs of influence and propaganda that spread counterfeit truths about me."

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"I have always had an exemplary relationship with foreign journalists," Macron said, "but they have to be journalists." To date, RT journalists are not accredited to attend French government events, such as regular Elysee Palace news conferences.

In the United States, RT — which intelligence agencies labeled as "Russia's state-run propaganda machine" in a January report — registered last month as a "foreign agent" with the Justice Department. The following week, the congressional Radio-Television Correspondents' Gallery revoked RT's credentials to cover Capitol Hill.

Xenia Fedorova, the chief executive of RT France, rejects what she considers the unfair exclusion the network already has suffered in France. "RT stands for news that is not covered by the mainstream media," she told the Reuters news agency this week. "We will keep the platform open to perspectives and opinions that are either not covered or silenced."

Fedorova did not respond when the Washington Post attempted to contact her.

Since the U.S. presidential election, Western concerns over the international expansion of the Russian media outlet often have proved largely unwarranted.

On RT's British channel, for instance, a controversial program anchored by the Scottish National Party's Alex Salmond generated a flurry of media attention when it debuted in November — as well as an almost immediate investigation by Ofcom, the British broadcasting watchdog, as to whether the program "breached our rules on due accuracy."

But the numbers spoke for themselves: Only 16,000 viewers tuned in to see the first edition of Salmond, according to Britain's Broadcasters' Audience Research Board. Statistics from the same week showed the Salmond show had 8,000 fewer viewers than "Whale Adventure with Nigel Marven."

RT's German branch, RT Deutsch, has relied on digital distribution channels to reach its viewers since it was founded in 2014. It now has 120,000 subscribers on YouTube and more than 350,000 followers on Facebook, although it is unclear what percentage of that audience is in Germany.

RT Deutsch often invites right-wing and left-wing experts or politicians on air who are less likely to be featured in more-established German media outlets. Whereas some of its German coverage resembles typical news documentaries or interviews, it also has developed a provocative style and recently accused some of its German competitors of circulating "Fake News."

While studies commissioned by RT often appear to inflate the size of the audiences reached, especially in the United States, it is unclear how much traction the network has. In the past, the Nielsen ratings, an industry standard for ascertaining audience size, have not listed RT.

In France, broadcast regulators told reporters that they would be "constantly monitoring" the Kremlin-backed newcomer.

"It would be very problematic to ban something like that, because you then open the door to lots of other censorship concerns," said the Atlantic Council's Nimmo. "But awareness is key."

Rick Noack in Berlin contributed to this report.