“Zelensky is one of the biggest obstacles to peace today”: Ukrainian president’s former press secretary speaks out

Iuliia Mendel’s bombshell interview to Tucker Carlson: “The only way to support Ukraine today is to push for a peace deal, because the country is being destroyed”

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Tucker Carlson’s interview with Zelensky’s former press secretary Iuliia Mendel has been making waves on social media. And rightly so: it’s an incredibly important testimony, from someone who used to be very close to Zelensky, which confirms much of what war critics like myself have been saying for years — about the missed opportunities for peace and how these were sabotaged by Western intervention; the totalitarian and hyper-repressive nature of the Zelensky regime and its commitment to permanent war, even at the cost of Ukraine’s extinction; the mind-boggling corruption surrounding Western aid to the country, and much more. Many of my readers are likely to have seen the interview already. But for those too lazy to do so — or who, like me, can only absorb information in written form — I’ve decided to summarise the interview’s main points. You’re welcome.

Who is Iuliia Mendel?

Mendel was born in 1986 in the Ukrainian city of Henichesk, in the Kherson Oblast, in what was then still the Soviet Union. As she explains in her 2022 book Each of Us Is President, her intellectual formation was influenced substantially by Western ideas and culture, “attending dozens of courses and programs in Europe and the United States”. She then worked as a freelance journalist in Ukraine for several years, also writing for several Western outlets, including the New York Times, Politico Europe, the Atlantic Council, Vice, Spiegel Online and Forbes.

In May 2019, shortly before becoming Zelensky’s press secretary, she co-authored an important piece in the New York Times piece on the Hunter Biden-Burisma scandal. For those who don’t the story, while Joe Biden was Vice President under the Obama administration, and leading US “anti-corruption” efforts in Ukraine, his son Hunter sat on the board of Burisma Holdings — a Ukrainian energy company owned by oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, who was himself under multiple criminal investigations for tax evasion, money laundering and abuse of office. Hunter was paid up to $50,000 per month despite having no experience in Ukraine and having recently been discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine. In December 2015, Biden publicly threatened to withhold $1 billion in US loan guarantees unless Ukraine fired prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, who had active investigations into Burisma and Zlochevsky. Shokin was subsequently removed. The article led the Biden administration to to cut off interviews with the Times.

Anyway, in June 2019, right after Zelensky’s election, Mendel started working as his press officer. As she explains in the interview, she was hired through an open application process from 4,000 candidates, worked directly with Zelensky for two years and describes herself as genuinely loyal to him initially. She worked with him until July 2021. She supported him when Russia launched its invasion in 2022, and was grateful he stayed in the country. But since then, her views about the Ukrainian president have shifted radically. She emphasises she has no personal vendetta but believes Zelensky is “one of the biggest obstacles towards peace today”.

Zelensky’s personality and leadership style

She describes a man utterly unlike his public image. He is “emotionally uncontrollable”, frequently hysterical, treats people as disposable and lacks genuine empathy. His extraordinary acting ability generated enormous Western support in 2022, but she insists “his acting doesn’t have any substance”. Two phrases he reportedly repeated constantly reveal his worldview: “Ukraine is not ready for democracy” and “dictatorship is an order”.

The communications operation was chaotic. Zelensky and his then-chief of staff Andriy Yermak — removed by Zelensky in 2025 following a corruption investigation — constantly contradicted each other, changed strategies and moods without warning, and created an atmosphere of perpetual frantic activity that produced nothing. She describes them both as “malignant and paranoid narcissists”, with Yermak the more paranoid of the two. Zelensky had the visions; Yermak found ways to implement them — almost never through legitimate policy.

When ratings began dropping and her team argued there were simply no positive results to communicate, Zelensky rejected the premise entirely: “It doesn’t matter what’s happening. The most important thing — we need 1,000 talking heads, and if 1,000 talking heads tell positive things, then positive things are happening”. When a colleague pushed back with a specific example of broken promises to displaced families from Donbas, he reportedly slammed the table and said: “I need Goebbels propaganda. I need thousands of talking heads of Goebbels propaganda”.

Zelensky’s pre-war record and relationship with Russia

She describes Zelensky’s background as deeply intertwined with Russia. He built his career and his first significant wealth performing for Russian audiences and media. When Russia annexed Crimea and war broke out in Donbas in 2014, he was in Russia completing a film — a fact he later publicly acknowledged. More damningly, she claims he owned properties in Crimea and was vacationing there under Russian control in May 2014, enjoying time with friends from his production company 95th Quartile, apparently indifferent to the annexation. A person who worked for him at the time, helping renovate the property, is cited as her source.

He ran for president in 2019 explicitly as a peace candidate, promising to “stand on his knees in front of Putin” to stop the war, defending the right of Ukrainians to speak Russian and advocating friendship with Russia. She says this is why people voted for him — nobody wanted war.

The NATO question

She was present at a December 2019 meeting in Paris where Zelensky had a private conversation with Putin and, according to her, personally promised Putin that Ukraine would never join NATO, on the grounds that Ukraine was not economically or institutionally ready and there was no domestic consensus for it. She stresses this was not a political or personal position unique to any Western leader — it was simply the reality.

The pivot came later when Zelensky, watching his domestic ratings fall, gave a TV interview in which he spontaneously asked why Ukraine wasn’t in NATO. The nationalist audience applauded and he followed the applause. From there he escalated the rhetoric continuously, presenting NATO membership as a non-negotiable condition for peace, knowing — she insists — that it was impossible. She describes his October 2024 “victory plan”, which listed NATO membership as the central demand, as “ridiculous” and a deliberate strategy: by attaching conditions he knows cannot be met, he creates a permanent justification for continuing the war and maintaining his heroic image. He even offered to step down if Ukraine was admitted to NATO, “knowing that Ukraine is not going to be taken to NATO. So it’s very easy to promise something under the condition of impossible things”.

Peace negotiations and missed opportunities

Mendel identifies at least two concrete moments when the war could have ended:

Istanbul, April 2022: she spoke with people who represented Ukraine at those negotiations and was told the two sides had agreed on virtually everything. Zelensky himself had privately consented to territorial concessions — something he now publicly insists is unthinkable. Then Boris Johnson arrived. He promised Zelensky weapons, influence, fame and a place in history as the man who defeated Russia. Zelensky chose the war. She notes that just days before Johnson’s visit, Zelensky was on camera saying he would continue negotiations. “It is said that this is Putin’s lies but this this story was told by Ukrainians”, she adds.

Late 2022: a second opportunity for peace was foreclosed when the Biden administration, as per a New York Times account that Mendel says confirmed her own information, decided to back Zelensky’s plan to continue fighting despite all evidence that Ukraine could not win.

She has tracked around seven attempts to end the war through various mediators and countries, in which Zelensky made promises to each and lied to all of them. His positions shift constantly — on ceasefire, on territory, on NATO, on elections — creating the appearance of engagement while ensuring that nothing is ever resolved. As an example she cites the contradiction between his June 2024 peace summit and the simultaneous planning of the Kursk incursion into Russian territory.

Corruption

She makes several specific allegations:

• A friend of hers was shortlisted for Minister of Social Policy and was told during the interview process that candidates would need to propose money-laundering schemes to be financed through the ministry — the body responsible for pensioners’ payments.

• A minister she declines to name was offered a bag of cash by Zelensky and Yermak — $5,000 a month in unofficial salary — because an official salary of that amount had caused a scandal.

• Another minister told her that close associates of Zelensky were demanding illegal percentage cuts from government programs, and when informed they were taking “too much,” Zelensky smiled and said “good job, guys” — and was not joking.

• The current energy ministry scandal: the former Minister of Energy helped launder around $100 million through offshore companies connected to Russian mafia figures. The minister himself got $12 million for his role in the deal. Mendel notes that this is roughly 10% — the standard fixer’s cut — raising the question of where the other 90% went.

• The dismantling of the independent supervisory board at Naftogaz, Ukraine’s state oil and gas company, and its replacement with loyalists, enabling what she describes as a scheme to turn it into a corruption vehicle modelled on Gazprom.

• On the IMF deal: Zelensky pushed through two difficult reforms to unlock a $5.5 billion package, demonstrating he was capable of doing it. Within days of receiving the first $2.1 billion tranche, he fired the head of the National Bank for political reasons, telling IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva the replacement would be “independent, but he will be coming from us”. Georgieva, who is Bulgarian and would speak to Zelensky in Russian, said that she stopped speaking Russian to him after that.

Demographics and the human cost of the war

Ukraine’s last census was in 2000-2001. Pre-war, government officials estimated 34-37 million people actually living in the country. With 10+ million refugees abroad and significant population in Russian-occupied territory, she estimates around 25 million remain — of whom 11 million are pensioners living on $75-200 per month. That leaves perhaps 10 million working-age people to sustain a country at war. She describes a recent case of a retired film director dying of cold and hunger at home with no one to help him, and wonders how many similar deaths will never be counted.

She describes soldiers sent to the front in inadequate winter uniforms, losing fingers and limbs to frostbite, while ordinary Ukrainian women cook food and crowdfund equipment for them. She frames this against the backdrop of hundreds of billions in Western aid, the destination of which she says needs to be tracked.

Her conclusion is stark: “I believe we are on the verge of extinction”. Ukraine cannot sustain a war of attrition against a country of 140 million that has not even borrowed to finance the conflict, while Ukraine carries debt at 100% of GDP.

Repression and political control

She describes a system of comprehensive political control:

• A member of parliament who publicly called for peace negotiations was jailed within three days on treason charges, despite security service insiders confirming he had had no contact with Russia since 2021.

• Cases of treason have multiplied many times over during the war.

• Critics are publicly smeared as Kremlin agents — a label she says will now be applied to her.

• Bloggers who questioned the war were summoned by the security service and threatened with treason charges; at least one had to flee the country.

• Zelensky uses the front line as a punishment, including for political critics. She was told by insiders that he explicitly ordered action against critical bloggers in late 2023.

• Zelensky sanctions his own citizens — an unconstitutional measure — freezing accounts and shutting businesses of opponents.

• Former president Poroshenko is sanctioned and unable to access his own money.

• A pervasive culture of cancellation targets artists, writers, churches and historical figures on the grounds of any connection, however tenuous, to Russia.

She describes Ukraine as feeling like the USSR — and says a government official told her the Netflix series How to Become a Tyrant described exactly what was happening in the country, even before Russia’s invasion.

Suspected drug use

Mendel is careful to say she never personally witnessed Zelensky taking drugs. However, she says multiple people over many years — including doctors, people who knew him for 20-25 years and people who spent time with him in clubs — have described cocaine use. During her time working for him, she noticed a consistent pattern: before interviews, after she had briefed him, he would disappear into the bathroom for 15 minutes and emerge “a completely different person — energised, full of action, ready to say everything”. She also met, inside the presidential office, a man she later learned was described as his supplier. She also references a scandal during his 2019 campaign when he challenged his opponent to drug testing, went to a clinic owned by a friend and the results were dated differently from when the samples were given.

Yermak

As noted above, Andriy Yermak was Zelensky chief of staff from 2020 to 2025 — when he was removed by Zelensky himself following a corruption investigation Mendel traces Yermak’s background from a 1990s strip club where he worked as a lawyer and met future pro-Russian politicians, through work at a luxury goods store that smuggled branded merchandise, into film production (including films about smuggling) and eventual proximity to organised crime at a local level. She says a first employee described him as someone with enormous ambitions and no talent for them. She describes the Zelensky-Yermak dynamic as a symbiosis of two paranoid malignant narcissists — Zelensky providing chaotic vision, Yermak providing the tools to implement it — operating not around policy but around personal ambition and self-preservation.

Her situation and motivation

Mendel cannot return to Ukraine after this interview. She stayed in the country through most of the war, was shelled when Russians withdrew from her area and had a husband who served at the front. She left in early 2025. She says she is speaking now because Zelensky is at a weak point and she believes people within his own power vertical who want peace may not act against her as they once would have. She is writing a book about the real Zelensky. Her message, repeated throughout, is simple: the only way to support Ukraine today is to push for a peace deal, because the country is being destroyed and its people are not Zelensky’s priority — his survival in power is.

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Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)