Mendel lives in the US and cited Ukraine's demographic decline in her Strasbourg speech as one of the reasons for returning to diplomacy with Moscow. Responding to an interview she gave to French media, Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Heorhiy Tykhyi accused her of spreading manipulative statements that echo Russian propaganda narratives.
A New Afghanistan?
In her video address in Strasbourg, Mendel said that Ukraine is on the brink of collapse. The Weltwoche website published the full text in German translation the following day. She also pointed to children's poor access to education and a shortage of doctors.
She claimed that Ukraine cannot defeat Russia militarily and that a continued war of attrition is exhausting the country demographically, economically and socially. She therefore regards the preservation of a viable Ukrainian state and nation, not the recapture of occupied territory, as the priority.
She stressed that Russia started the war and called its campaign unjustifiable. At the same time, she criticized Zelensky's leadership and Western countries for what she described as a dysfunctional strategy of escalation instead of diplomacy. She argued that continuing the war benefits the arms industry and other interest groups.
She pointed to Finland, which lost battles against the Soviet Union but preserved its nation, as a possible model. Ukraine, she warned, is already being led down what she called an "Afghanistan path" of corruption, weakening institutions, dependence on Western aid and people leaving the country.
Alongside the "root causes" of the ongoing invasion that the Kremlin cites, the question of territory remains on the table. In April 2025, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that peace would be possible if Ukraine withdrew its troops from the four regions Russia claims as its own.
People in the occupied parts of these regions, in Crimea and in almost all of Luhansk region are subjected to repression, including arbitrary detention and torture documented by the UN human rights office. A decree issued by Russian President Vladimir Putin in November 2025 also provides for strengthening a "pan-Russian civic identity" in the occupied regions.
In 2026, Russia's demands have not changed, although Peskov emphasizes the withdrawal of Ukrainians at least from the Donbas, a region that includes cities such as Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, whose surroundings Ukrainians have been fortifying since 2014.
The Carlson Interview
In late April, Mendel said on social media that "Seven billion dollars could have flowed into a Ukrainian drone company [Fire Point, ed.] backed by friends of Volodymyr Zelensky". According to the same statement, 20% of that sum, or nearly $1.5bn, was allegedly net profit for key figures: Zelensky's inner circle and ministers he personally appointed.
"This is the very same company that Zelensky himself has been hawking nonstop – personally flying it around to foreign investors as Ukraine's great success story", Mendel went on, adding that "[r]ight now in Ukraine, politicians are openly talking about impeaching Zelensky".
Her statements drew on the recordings of businesspeople and politicians in the Ukrainian Midas case, which had just been published. They include conversations between the businessman Tymur Mindich, a former business partner of Zelensky, and Rustem Umerov, then defence minister, about funding for Fire Point.
On 11 May, she gave an interview to the American commentator Tucker Carlson, who had already filmed interviews with Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as recently as 2024. In the interview, Mendel called Zelensky a dictator and repeated claims of drug use, which she described as an "open secret", though she admitted she had never seen him use drugs herself. Her information, she said, came from people who claimed to have witnessed it.
The interview drew criticism. Two days after it was published, the Kyiv Independent noted that Mendel, who served as Zelensky's spokesperson from 2019 to 2021, had published a book about four years earlier in which she portrayed him in a significantly more favorable light. The Interfax-Ukraine news site, meanwhile, pointed out that Mendel accuses Zelensky of obstructing peace negotiations although, according to presidential adviser Dmytro Lytvyn, she never took part in them herself.
