Ex-Press Secretary Blames Zelenskyy For Wanting War To Continue

The Russia-Ukraine war has been ongoing since 2022. This was after the Russian government, led by President Vladimir Putin, carried out a large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy launching a counter-attack.

According to reports, Russia is occupying almost 20% of Ukraine, with hundreds of thousands of people dead or injured.

Almost 8 million Ukrainians out of a 41 million population have been displaced internally, while almost 6-7 million have reportedly fled the country. This has been the biggest and most dangerous war and refugee crisis that Europe has witnessed since World War II.

For four years now, Russia and Ukraine have been at war, and the heaviest price paid in all this has been the common people of Ukraine, who have had their world turned entirely upside down.

With Russia still refusing repeated attempts at a ceasefire, an interview with Iuliia Mendel, the woman who served as President Zelenskyy’s first press secretary, is doing the rounds.

Who Is Iuliia Mendel And What Did She Say?

Iuliia Mendel served as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s first press secretary between 2019 and 2021.

On May 11, conservative American commentator Tucker Carlson uploaded an almost 1.5-hour-long interview with Mendel, titled “Zelensky’s Press Secretary Reveals All: Cocaine, Cover-ups, and the Only Obstacle Preventing Peace” and captioned it saying, “Corruption, drugs and greed: Volodymyr Zelensky’s longtime press secretary on the secret world of the West’s favorite dictator.”

During the interview, Mendel said a lot of controversial things, specifically around Zelenskyy, his leadership and the kind of person he might be behind the scenes.

In her opening statements in the interview, Mendel said, “I supported him, and I supported him in 2022 when Russia made its large-scale invasion. As millions of Ukrainians, I was grateful that he stayed in the country. That’s why it’s so strange and desperate for me to be here and to talk about who he really is.

I don’t have a personal vendetta, but I believe that he is one of the biggest obstacles towards peace today. So I wanted to tell the people who he is.”

She then went on to say that “he’s (Zelenskyy) not a person whom you see on camera. He’s a very different person. He changes masks all the time. He is emotionally uncontrollable.”

When Carlson asked if this meant Zelenskyy was emotionally uncontrollable, Mendel said, “Yeah, he doesn’t control his emotions. Often hysterical, and he thinks that every person is disposable. He doesn’t have the empathy that he plays.

He’s an absolutely insanely great actor, and that brought us a lot of support in 2022, but his acting doesn’t have any substance. And everything that he is saying is so detached from the reality. And the majority of the things that he’s saying, it’s either manipulation or it’s a fact that is being taken from the context. Or it’s pure lies.”

Although Mendel mentioned that “I’m not here to justify Russian invasion. I’m not here to justify Putin. What the Russian army is doing in Ukraine equals crimes against humanity”, she also added that “We just see Putin as an evil, but Zelensky is also an evil. He’s just a hidden one. He plays such a teddy bear on camera, but then when the light goes off, he’s a grizzly bear and he destroys the people.”

She went further, describing a dynamic in which the West had, in her view, constructed and sustained a political myth around Zelenskyy that Western leaders themselves now feel unable to challenge: “It’s almost surreal to recollect that almost every Western leader and Western delegation that were coming to Ukraine before the war, they treated Zelensky as a political novice. They saw he was low educated, unqualified, and low depth. But then overnight he just turned into this great face of democracy.

It feels like the West created the myth, fell into it, and the West keeps ignoring the fact that beneath Zelensky’s heroic rhetoric, he keeps accumulating power. And I’m not afraid to say he keeps hollowing the very same people he claims to save.”

Also, while the allegations of corruption, referring to the scandal involving Ukraine’s former energy minister, have some reporting around it, her statements about Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian delegation agreeing to cede control of Donbas to the Russians during the Istanbul negotiations in 2022 and Zelenskyy’s alleged drug use were not supported by any factual or documentary evidence.

This is not the first time that Mendel has commented about how Ukraine needs a peace deal or ceasefire. In a 2025 Time article, she mentioned a survey conducted during December 2–17, 2024, by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), and how it found that “38% of Ukrainians are willing to accept territorial concessions in exchange for peace.”

She further mentioned the death toll among Ukrainian soldiers varying from 40,000 to 80,000, while civilian deaths reached 12,000 as per the UN in just the Ukraine-controlled regions, with the number unknown in the Russian-occupied regions.

She further wrote, “even a temporary truce could allow us to fortify defenses we were unable to build before the invasion. Under constant Russian shelling, establishing robust lines has been near impossible. A cease-fire would provide a chance to strengthen our borders, bolster our forces, and prepare for what may come. If Russia resumes aggression, at least we would be standing on solid ground rather than on crumbling foundations.”

In another interview with France24 from January 2025, she said, “I don’t think that it is realistic to exchange so many lives of Ukrainians and actually to put under existence the Ukrainian nation for [the] illusion that NATO will invite us at some point.”

This was after the Ukrainian president, in an interview with British journalist Piers Morgan, mentioned that he was open to negotiations with Putin.

Mendel, in her interview, added, “Russia is occupying around 20 percent of Ukraine, but it’s actively shelling around eight or nine regions of Ukraine every day, hugely with artillery, with a drone safari on civilians, with aerial- guided bombs, with missiles, with everything that Russia has.. You cannot imagine what it means living in those territories.”

Read More: Fake Friendly Fridays: In Conversation With Vladimir Putin Discussing The Ukraine Invasion And NATO’s Weird Stance In The War

Ukraine’s Response

The Ukrainian government’s reaction was as expected: to dismiss the comments made by Mendel and claim that she had no involvement in any important area.

Dmytro Lytvyn, presidential communications adviser, told journalists at the Presidential Office: “This lady did not participate in negotiations, did not participate in decision-making, has not been herself for a long time, and who tells her what or whether it actually happened — it is unserious to comment on.”

That phrasing, “has not been herself for a long time,” was widely noted as an ad hominem attack rather than a factual rebuttal, and drew criticism on its own terms from Ukrainian journalists who pointed out that dismissing a critic’s mental state is not the same as addressing her arguments.

On the other side, as per The New Voice Of Ukraine report, local journalists and media are claiming that Mendel’s statements are “trash” and “frankly harmful” to Ukraine.

Volodymyr Anfimov, a strategic communications specialist and host, commented that the “most important and terrible thing” of the interview was Mendel sending “a signal to an external audience (and amplified the White House administration’s thesis) that it is precisely Ukraine, in the person of President Zelenskyy, that does not want to end the war.”

Communications specialist Mariia Popova, the current chief operating officer of the Ukrainian Armorers Council, said that she “cannot imagine how it was possible to do what Mendel did.”

Popova added, “And I cannot imagine how, after this, she can be hired for any job with even minimal access to confidential information. I leave the possible consequences for the state for another discussion.”

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha, in a Facebook post, also commented on Mendel’s interview. In the post, written in Ukrainian and translated to English, he wrote, “It is disgusting when, for the sake of ‘glory’, such characters are ready to humiliate their own state and cower before Russian propaganda. After all, this person is not the first to join the club of henchmen of Russian propaganda and narratives. But this is a one-way ticket. History will put everything in its place, give fair assessments, and show the true role of everyone.”

While there are surely legitimate concerns about Zelenskyy’s governance, it is also true that Russia has its own interests in regard to the war in Ukraine.

The news about corruption scandals, the rollback of anti-corruption institutions, the concentration of power, the delayed elections, and questions about inner-circle accountability in relation to Zelenskyy definitely deserve attention.

At the same time, Russian propaganda related to the war and especially Zelenskyy and his leadership are also very real things.

Ivan Krastev, the Bulgarian political scientist and one of Europe’s leading analysts of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, in a 2025 Russia Matters essay, wrote, “Mr. Putin will agree to a ceasefire only if it serves his war objectives: to destabilise President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s power in Ukraine, trigger internal strife and deepen divisions within the Western alliance.”

The war is said to have started due to Russia’s fear of Ukraine joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). In late 2021, Russia placed troops on Ukraine’s borders and demanded that NATO ban the country from ever joining the alliance.

Since then, Russia has reportedly carried out extremely high levels of destruction in Ukraine and as per the United Nations Human Rights Office, acts of human rights violations, civilian attacks, and even been accused of genocide.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) even carried out an investigation against Russia for war crimes against Ukrainians and issued arrest warrants for Putin and five other Russian officials.