MICHAEL WALSH AMERICAN FREE PRESS. Is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s former press secretary a turncoat, as some claim, or is the outspoken and impassioned Yuliia Mendel a born-again realist?

Whatever, the talking heads of the European Parliament, which bankrolled, armed and staked its fragile reputation on Ukraine’s success in the conflict with Russia, imposed a gag order on her.

​It was unedifying to see such a rising star in Ukrainian politics being denied entry to the assembly of EU parliamentarians where she had been slated to address her audience.

One thing that explains Mendel facing closed doors was her determination, in or out of parliament, to fervently state the case for peace talks.

The European Union will have none of that sort of talk within its walls. Yet, when Mendel had been a close and supportive devotee of her former boss, all doors and ears were open to her.

Despite her apparent youth, Mendel was born in 1986; her rise to prominence follows a sharp trajectory. In 2019, at the age of 33, she became Zelensky’s press secretary; in other words, the international voice of Ukraine.

A fierce defender of her boss, the shield maiden earned a reputation as a pugilist by physically assaulting fellow journalists who aggressively questioned her boss.

The engaging personality is the author of two memoirs. ‘Each of us is President’ and ‘The Fight of our Lives’.

Both titles leave one in no doubt as to where Mendel’s heart is. But has the journalist-turned peace activist had a change of heart?  Seemingly so, for Yuliia Mendel in 2025 broke ranks by calling for peace negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow.

As she saw it, Ukraine was ‘losing its nation’ by continuing to resist the seemingly omnipotent Russian Federation.

During her interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson in May 2025, Mendel fired a broadside at the character of her former boss and his government.

Unsurprisingly, her fiery opinions went down like a lead balloon in Ukraine. Mendel’s rebelliousness was muffled in Western media and condemned by politicians and journalists in her homeland.

Competent? Mendel was the first Ukrainian journalist to win the prestigious World Press Institute program.

Could the candid journalist who has contributed to The New York Times, Politico Europe, Forbes, Vice and similar mastheads be silenced?

Unlikely. Recent events show the unrivalled Yuliia Mendel, whilst appearing to eschew a political career, has broken numerous taboos by influencing fast-changing events that contradict the Kyiv government and its European sponsors with a cry for peace at any price.

By the time of her interview with Carlson, Mendel had changed horses midstream. Seemingly overnight, she had become a viper-tongued critic of Volodymyr Zelensky.

Pulling few, if any, punches, she described her former boss as ‘the main obstacle to peace.’

Adding that the Kyiv regime was wholly corrupt, she accused ‘dictator’ Zelensky of prolonging the war for his own benefit.

Not one to mince her words, she accused Zelensky of being corrupt, on drugs, erecting a bureaucratic Berlin Wall to prevent dissidents from escaping Ukraine and sending his opponents to the conflict’s frontlines.  

Former Communist and journalist George Orwell once remarked that ‘the English never see the writing on the wall until their backs are up against it.’

Has Yuliia Mendel, like many others, finally seen the writing on the wall?

The question is, has the fiery maverick’s time come at a time when informed opinion in the European Union believes the war is anyway lost?

The conflict will soon end on the terms set not by Washington nor by Brussels or Kyiv but by the Kremlin citadel. By playing the long game, the wily Russian President Vladimir Putin now appears to hold a handful of ace cards.

Since the genesis of the conflict in February 2022, Russia’s head of state, whose party this weekend again topped the polls in the Russian elections, has emptied the arsenals of the NATO Western Alliance.

Having simultaneously bankrupted his adversaries’ economies whilst crippling his tormentors by successfully turning sanctions against them, Putin has finally arrived at a point of endemic war weariness in Ukraine and throughout the nations making up the NATO alliance.

Russia’s head of state claims that the EU’s precariously embedded political elite are responsible for deep suffering throughout the Europeans Union.

Putin predicts that in time, his morally compromised rivals will be removed by elections which will be won by the more pragmatic, ​less Russophobic conservative right.

Judging from ongoing events such as the triumphant emergence in Germany of the Alternative for Germany party, he could be on a winner.  And, as is said, the winner takes all.

Whatever one’s views or prejudices, it is now universally seen as game over. Yet another luckless war that Washington, to a more restrained extent, realizes that the hapless conflict will again end with humiliation for the NATO Alliance and Western so-called values.

‘Russia is predicted to herald in world peace and flourish in the face of good fortune.’ Everything melts away like ice, yet the glories of Vladimir, the glory of Russia, are the only things that will remain. Russia will not only survive; it will dominate the world.’ ~ Vangelia Pandeva Dimitrova (Vanga) 1911 – 1996.

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