By Julia Mendel, Substack, 9/17/26

Julia Mendel is a Ukrainian journalist, former press-secretary to president Zelenskyy and an author of the book The Fight of Our Lives, Ukraine.

Yesterday (9/16) the European Parliament banned me from entering — with no explanation. This happened just a few hours before my speech, and after Volodymyr Zelenskyy sanctioned me on Sunday the 13th. Some say Zelenskyy personally asked them to cancel my speech.

They then tried to block the video transmission. At the last moment we found a technical workaround, and I delivered the speech anyway.

I am sharing it so you can judge the “danger” for yourself — and draw your own conclusions about why Zelenskyy is so afraid of Ukrainians talking about peace.

Honourable Members of the European Parliament,

It is a great honour and a privilege to speak here — in the Parliament of the European Union, in the place where the central ideas of European civilisation are born.

For some of you, what I am about to say may be uncomfortable. It may provoke criticism, or even anger. And yet I stand here in hope. For it is written: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”

For two years I served as Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s press secretary after work as a New York Times freelancer, World Bank consultant, and published mainstream writer—work I was proud of. Today some in the West and Ukraine’s state media call me “pro-Russian” the moment I state a plain fact about the war or disagree with Zelensky’s policy of endless escalation. People in the comfortable West sometimes believe they understand Ukraine and this war better than I do—I who have covered the conflict since 2014, travelled to Donbas many times with Zelensky himself, sat at the negotiations, helped craft the President’s communications, and stayed when the full-scale invasion began in 2022. I was shelled and narrowly survived. I crossed the country helping civilians and reported without rest. No one can seriously call me pro-Russian unless they accept primitive black-and-white narratives of the war.

I have not come here to play political games. I have come with one purpose only: to plead for the people of Ukraine — for my people.

I am going to tell you a truth that is being carefully kept from the world. I am a daughter of Ukraine, and today I am its voice.

I differ from many of the voices you have already heard, because I do not profit from this war. I am not building a career on it. I receive no grants and no advantage from it. Like most Ukrainians — like most Europeans, Americans, and Russians — I only lose from this cruelty. And I understand that if this war continues, it will bring losses and changes that can never be undone.

Ukrainian people and military have shown unrealistic resilience; we have nothing to be ashamed of. But the war has changed all of us and today resilience means to tell the truth and to stand for peace.

I stand here because Ukraine and Europe continue to choose a bad war over a bad peace — escalation over diplomacy, time and again. Yet one day this war will end, and each of us will be remembered by the fruit we bear today.

You are the finest minds of Europe. I have no doubt that you know a great deal about the Russian-Ukrainian war. You know the figures and the statistics. You have seen the photos. You have read the books and the articles, the political positions and the strategies. And yet I stand here to tell you: you know nothing about this war.

My goddaughter Maria will be four in a few weeks. She has never known life without war. Born in Kyiv, she is a bright, spirited girl who speaks beautiful Ukrainian, slipping in the occasional English word. Recently she began wetting herself at nursery. After yet another Russian missile strike she became terrified a rocket would hit her school. My friend spent a long time comforting her and finally managed it in the most terrible way imaginable: the child now falls asleep to the sound of strikes on Russian oil refineries. “Good strikes,” they are called at home. She is four and can hardly grasp the nuances of war. “I am horrified,” her mother told me.

My niece Anna is ten and has never once set foot in a school. She does not know what a classroom full of children looks like. She has moved so many times that she has friends nowhere. Western parents worried when their children spent a year and a half online during the pandemic. My niece knows no other education. Every day she sits alone in the apartment while her parents work. She logs in to lessons, does homework, then cleans, cooks, and waits for them. She cannot wander a city under constant attack. She does not know community or childhood friendship. In winter her days are short and cold: there was no heating and no electricity last winter.

One in three Ukrainian children now has no access to proper education. Ukraine was once famous for its scientists. It was under a Ukrainian that the first human flew into space. We built aircraft and helicopters; our physicists and biologists still contribute to world science. Yet in the frontline there are fourth graders who cannot read. Hear me: there are ten-year-olds who cannot read. The degradation of education and social skills in future generations should frighten us all.

Ukrainians are no lesser than any other people. We too want education and medicine. We too want to create, grow, compete and cooperate. In five or ten years that will be impossible if the war continues. Beneath the missiles, drones and bombs we are losing human capital — not only through death and injury, but through the simple absence of any possibility to live. Years of mere survival degrade mind and body alike.

My mother and father are doctors in frontline Kherson. They spent more than eight months under Russian occupation and still refuse to leave a city under constant shelling. Doctors there are desperately scarce. “If everyone leaves,” they ask, “then is it still Ukraine?” They hold a rare and terrible luxury — the ability to remain when they could go, held by responsibility to community and history.

Tens of thousands of others cannot leave at all, trapped by poverty and the total absence of help. The state offers displaced people less than one hundred dollars a month, and only for a limited time — a sum on which one cannot rent a home or feed a family. In frontline villages people live without any cushion; a thousand dollars is an unimaginable fortune. It could have been different. The strategies we choose today lead Ukraine onto a path of constant poverty and war, which means societal degradation.

In one village in the Kherson region — a village I passed many times on the road to my grandmother — a family was destroyed. The father and mother died, and their daughter, who was twenty-three days old. My own mother had discharged that baby from the hospital. Their son was wounded. In a single blast, in a single instant, a family was erased.

You have heard such tragedies before. What you have not heard is what survival on the frontline actually means: that the vast sums of taxpayers’ money quoted in the media often do little to help the Ukrainians who are simply trying to stay alive; that there is a catastrophic shortage of doctors; that schools are largely unable to function; and that, for many people, the calculation they make every day is simply how to get to work and back home without being caught in the shelling.

There, on the frontline, people live a different reality. Their lives have become a daily struggle for survival. Ordinary citizens donate money from their own pockets to support the war effort. Women cook for soldiers, collect warm clothes and other necessities, and send them to the front through volunteers. Because there on the frontline there are their sons and husbands. Local communities support the army while at the same time trying to keep themselves, their families and their neighbours alive.

This is the war as it is actually lived by the people on the ground. They endure it, they contribute to it, and they fight against the invading forces despite the corruption and the limited effectiveness of the Ukrainian government.

A third of Ukraine has been turned into hell. Almost twenty percent of our territory is occupied; another ten percent has become a burning front. Think: How long do other 70% can stand with such an open and untreated wound?

And what strategy do we support today? A strategy in which this daily suffering becomes invisible, weightless, set against a grand idea — the destruction of RUSSIA. Let us be honest: a great many people want to destroy Russia more than they want to save Ukraine. With growing zeal we read, several times a month, the fervent articles in mainstream outlets announcing that Russia is about to collapse. We have been reading them for nearly a quarter of a century. The price of that slow-motion collapse is my nation, my country, my state — Ukraine.

Not one of those Western experts, professors, or journalists who write these articles would ever agree to live in such a country, or to let his own homeland pass through such horrors in the name of a great idea. I thought we had already learned the lesson of sacrificing whole peoples to grand ideas.

But I understand you. If my own country’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, accepts the status quo, why should you challenge it?

First came the Istanbul agreements, then the Peace Formula, then the Victory Plan, then the Coalition of the Willing. What most people don’t know is that there were also numerous mediators facilitating contacts, as well as multiple legal interpretations of what is now simplistically reduced to the formula of “cede land or not” — interpretations that could have helped Ukraine retain control with time.

There were agreements you never heard about, mentioned only briefly in public. Those understandings will remain not in the history books, but only in the memory of those who tried to help.

All of these arrangements were rejected by Volodymyr Zelensky — even those in which he had staked his own word and his own promise. He promotes the most maximalist and unachievable way for victory as the only way to peace — and this tells me that he is no eager to make it at all.

Some time ago, JD Vance, now Vice President of the United States, back then a Senator, wrote a remarkable essay in The New York Times, pointing out that the math in Ukraine does not add up. That essay gave many of us hope that someone saw the world through our eyes and understood what we were living through. More than two years have passed since he wrote it — and the math still does not add up. Let us start with the most elementary question of all: how are twenty-five million Ukrainians, half of them pensioners, supposed to defend five hundred million Europeans from a hundred and forty million Russians? Are you not ashamed?

Since it gained independence in 1991, Ukraine has lost over half of its population. Then, fifty-two million people lived there. Today, even by the most optimistic estimates, that figure is around twenty-five million — and the decline is accelerating. Nearly half the population are pensioners, the birth rate is catastrophically low, and the war keeps taking lives and driving away those who simply want to live. Last year alone, almost three times as many people died as were born and in the first half of 2026 the things got worse: four times as many people died as were born. Add to that roughly three hundred thousand official emigrants — and the real figure is surely far higher — and by conservative estimates Ukraine is losing more than six hundred thousand people every year. At that rate, within ten years the population could fall far below twenty million.

These are catastrophic numbers. The war has made Ukraine a place where life and a hopeful future feel increasingly impossible. This is simple arithmetic — arithmetic that shows my country vanishing before your eyes, to the warm applause offered to a man on a red carpet, a man now in his eighth year in power, who always finds a new reason why the war cannot be stopped just yet.

This war has killed the Ukrainian economy and Ukrainian democracy. Let me give you some more of this cynical, cruel arithmetic. The EU extends us loan after loan; our external debt has already reached over 110 percent of GDP; we depend entirely on Western transfers, in what has been called a “donornomics.” As Zelensky’s own former partner — now a fugitive from corruption charges — was recorded saying on anti-corruption wiretaps: “The economy can wait.” We create almost no added value; our exports are strangled by the war, by friction with EU member states, by quotas that are far too small.

You know this perfectly well yourselves. So I ask you: what victory are we even talking about? Europe is now financing Volodymyr Zelensky’s drone production at the cost of an entire nation’s economy. In our country there is no more science, no innovation beyond the military; small businesses are dying, large ones are moving their money out, the middle ones have already left. I say it again: we are the same as you. When I describe this, picture your own country in this condition.

I watch inconvenient Ukrainian voices being ignored — voices that are growing in number — despite persecution, threats, unlawful sanctions, criminal cases, the destruction of reputations, the branding of people as traitors, all because we speak against the war. How did we reach the point where anyone who opposes the war is deemed pro-Russian and anti-democratic? Hear this clearly: peace cannot be pro-Russian. Peace is the only way out of the crisis in which we are all drowning — and the Ukrainian people first of all.

Zelenskyy tells us that he will demand better peace conditions. But the thing is that we are losing the country, the nation. There will be no people to offer those better conditions. And everyone of you here knows that military defeat of Russia is impossible. These games cost too much. For my country and for your future too. There is no better condition for peace than NOW.

Here in Europe, it has become patriotic to keep silent about what is happening inside Ukraine. Borders closed to men have turned life into a cage for countless families. Corruption of colossal scale — a scale you simply cannot imagine — reaching the president’s closest circle, set against total poverty, is about to kill the very motivation to resist Russia.

The hunting of men, the torture in recruitment offices, men beaten to death by conscription officers, and sometimes killed by their own commanders — all of it resembles a brutal gladiatorial spectacle, in which ordinary Ukrainians have a single aim: to survive. Men flee across mountains and rivers; our own services pull out the bodies of those who did not make it. And ahead lies another terrible winter, without heating and without light.

You are told of resilience, of dignity, of an unbreakable spirit. Which of the things I have just described reflects any of that? To ignore this suffering in the name of grand ideas, to conceal it behind beautiful words — that is inhumanity. In dark times, the hardest thing of all is to remain human. And I remind you again: sooner or later, each of us will be known by the fruit we bear today.

You can imagine yourselves, your families, your friends in the place of Ukrainians. Please, imagine it. Imagine that it is endless. Imagine that there is no way out but to survive like this — while the media and the anti-corruption agencies report, day after day, on the millions embezzled and the lavish lives of those close to the president and to power.

Putin’s war is unjustified in its brutality and disregard for human life. Zelensky’s record of dismantling reforms, protecting corrupt networks, deceiving his own people, and elevating personal power above the survival of the nation is equally unjustified. One German intellectual said, “addressing both realities is the minimum requirement of intellectual honesty.” So, please, ask yourself honestly: do you truly believe that an endless race to accumulate more weapons will let Ukraine win — with no economy, and a population that shrinks year after year far below Russia’s?

When this war began, we stood for values. Now you stand for names.

Ukraine has helped set a pattern of societal militarisation, and some leaders in the West have embraced it. There are those in the EU today who seem to believe that militarising their economies and societies can provide an answer to political and economic difficulties. But permanent rearmament, coupled with the constant cultivation of an enemy image, creates its own momentum. The more a society is prepared for war, the greater the pressure to justify that preparation. And sooner or later, that logic risks producing the very conflict it claims to prevent.

Here in the EU it is often said that everything possible has been done, and that only Putin is to blame. What Putin did — sending tanks toward Kyiv, occupying parts of our land, including my own homeregion, launching missiles and drones every single day — has no justification. However, we constantly blame only Putin, but we don’t see the log in our own eye. Did the West truly do everything to bring about peace?

What I see is this: threats instead of diplomacy; the wish to destroy Russia no matter how many Ukrainian lives it costs and how far Ukraine is degraded; and the desire to sell as many weapons as possible.

Zelensky agrees to this — for him the economy has become a private pocket. The war lobbyists agree to it, and so do all those who will somehow profit. But how can the majority agree to it? Do you not understand that this war cannot continue at the same intensity for years on end? Sooner or later it will spill beyond Ukraine’s borders.

Did Europe truly do enough to end this war? Everyone who tried to speak with Putin was hounded and branded pro-Russian — from Orbán and Fico to the President of the United States himself. It is hard to believe that in the civilised world such shallow, black-and-white narratives can dominate — above all when the subject is war, the only war in Europe.

Yes, Russia started this war. But it is the war lobbyists who keep it going — those who profit from it. That is not me, and it is not you. So why would you support this slaughter, this war of attrition against Ukrainians? You are legislators. You know that when something truly needs to be done, it is done quietly.

What lies behind the enormous PR campaign for militarisation in Germany? Uncertainty about its own course? How do the Poles feel about the prospect of having to fight? They are buying property in Spain and Italy. Why are the warlike British and French still not standing in the ranks of the Ukrainian army? The question answers itself. Because when it comes to real war — when the choice is between life and death for an idea — many will finally grasp the wrongness of this path of militarisation, on which the Ukrainian people are the first to be sacrificed.

Will your children go to fight?

A Western professor advised a student to go to Ukraine’s front. Seeing war as a Hollywood film, like most Westerners, the student signed a contract. He then found hell and begged to be pulled out. The professor replied: we all make history in our place. It is one more story that shows how, here in the West, people simply do not know what war is.

So I will ask you plainly: are you ready for your children to fight — on a real front? I do not believe that you are. I see how hard Europeans find it to accept even mild discomfort in their own lives. That is precisely why we have half-sanctions. That is precisely why trade with Russia continues.

We are now in the fifth year of full-scale war and the 13th year of war in Europe, and the strategies of pressure on Russia are failing. As we say at home: the hedgehogs pricked themselves and wept — and went on eating the cactus.

It is time to change the strategy. It cannot be otherwise, when the people and the circumstances have changed. The situation in Ukraine grows more critical by the day. So I ask you, the lawmakers: why do you not change the strategy? Someone has to say it plainly — there is no such thing as a diplomacy of threats. It simply does not exist.

Can one be friends with Russia? As a Ukrainian, I see no possibility of immediate friendship after the pain we have endured. But must we go on killing one another? It is one thing not to be friends; it is quite another to keep killing. Russia can be kept in check and prevented from repeating such aggression — not through war, but through reason, diplomacy and humanity. And too many people have renounced exactly those virtues in the course of this war.

Every day I watch Russian oil depots burn. I will be honest: as a Ukrainian, I believe Russians should feel what war is. But as a person who wants peace, I understand that we have only bitten Russia — and all of its fury rains down on the heads of Ukrainians, while the West goes on living on PR and half-measures. If Ukraine endured the most terrible winter imaginable and did not fall — with Western support — then why should Russia fall, a country that did not even have to borrow to wage this war? Consider it: our debt stands at 110 percent of GDP, and Russia did not even need to borrow.

Russia’s collapse is imminent only in the minds of idealists unacquainted with the economic realities of Russia and Ukraine. I am not here to defend Russia or to flatter it — but wishful thinking is a trap, and in my home that trap is measured in thousands of lives. Wishful thinking today is painted in the colours of Ukrainian blood. And every article by a theorist-crusader against Russia — someone who has often never set foot in either Russia or Ukraine and draws his understanding from social media — is a small tragedy, a sign of degradation of our civilisation. For it is nothing but groundless wishing, dressed up to justify a terrible war on this continent and the daily suffering beneath it.

So I stand here and I beg you: stop believing the shallow, black-and-white narratives delivered to you by Zelensky’s envoys and by activists financed by your own leaders. This closed circle of narratives, severed from reality, is not even an exchange of information — it is a rigid vertical of messaging, a kind of self-censorship, as though you wished to hear only what you already want to hear.

They tell you: Putin will not yield. We must press him harder! It sounds so brave. In practice it is absurd — a feast in the time of plague. This war has taken hundreds of thousands of lives and destroyed millions of families; it is an attempt to survive inside a meat grinder. Putin must be approached in other ways — not with blind force. This endless spectacle of death should never have been normalised.

Only a strong leader can end this war. The hearts of millions are filled with gratitude to Donald Trump for the courage to question a status quo under which the Ukrainian people are condemned. And yet he met extraordinary resistance — first from Volodymyr Zelensky, whose associates profit from this war through their drone companies, and then from European leaders. These are not the right terms for peace, some European leaders decided collectively — not one of whom would ever, in his own life, agree to let his own country and his own family pass through what Ukraine is passing through.

When Zelensky ran for president, he said he would go down on his knees before Putin so that Putin would not bring Ukraine to its knees. He said that every life mattered, that the lives of people were what counted most. And that if he did not manage to finish the war he would give the position to someone else who would. Today he changes the terms of peace by the week: now it is accession to NATO, now the return of Crimea, now the borders of 1991, now membership of the European Union — as though all of this were achievable in a single stroke — now the refusal to concede Donbas. This war is not about territory.

The Russian-Ukrainian war is bloody and senseless. By this point, immense killing and destruction are being wrought over nothing. If it is about keeping Ukraine out of NATO — that question has been taken off the table already. If it is about defending democracy — our democracy is now so fragile that it barely differs from any autocratic regime: severely limited freedom of speech, weakened institutions, violations of basic constitutional rights, political persecution, and lives that matter as little as they do under any autocracy. If it is about removing Zelensky from power — he has been its principal beneficiary: on the verge of losing power back in 2021, he found in the war the means to thrive, earning from every aspect of it, amassing almost unlimited power at home, and basking in international fame. And if it is about winning back the territories Russia has conquered — then Ukraine is merely losing more of them, not recovering them. This war has no reason and no justification to continue, except to benefit a few small groups. And because of it, Ukraine stands on the edge of extinction.

I call for a return to diplomacy and to politics. I call on leaders not to fear the attacks of social media. I stand here for one reason alone: because someone must speak for the Ukrainian people, and someone must fight for them — not for ruins, not for territory, not for medals, but for human beings. Rise above these primitive attacks. Be strategists. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Every time you speak of this cursed war, remember that inside the cage of a new European autocracy sit millions of people who pray, every single day, for the war to end. The present strategy does not work.

Ukraine is now in so terrible a state that it cannot survive without help. And I too, once, called for that help — for military aid. But now I watch it disappear into convenient hands, while our skies are still not closed, while ninety-three percent of our shelters are not fully ready to protect anyone, and while poverty and decay drive millions to seek their fortunes abroad. So let us remember that it is possible to earn a living from something other than a handful of politicians’ war. Let us change the strategy, achieve peace, and invest in my country. Let us build factories there, restore infrastructure, create jobs, and fill the budget with taxes.

66% of Ukrainians want peace as soon as possible, according to a latest Gallup poll. Another 11% could not answer, likely out of fear of expressing their true opinion.

Growing anti-war sentiment is filling the internet and the courts, because in Ukraine people can be convicted, sanctioned, or branded as traitors simply for calling for peace or criticizing the leadership. The Ukrainian internet is full of voices of disagreement with the status quo—from volunteers, bloggers, and ordinary people. Meanwhile, television controlled by Zelenskyy’s office presents the war as an unchanging daily reality that will never end.

Anyone whose voice gains significant views must protect themselves. Most often, people either leave the country or change their public position. You all saw the horrific footage of the Russian missile striking the children’s hospital Okhmatdyt in Kyiv in July 2024. What you may not know is that afterward, a number of well-known Ukrainian bloggers—both Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking, with audiences in the millions—came out with a message to stop the war. I quote: “We do not need the borders of 1991, because people only want peace and quiet.”

All of these bloggers were summoned for talks with the security services, where they were told this was Russian propaganda. Online, claims spread that the bloggers had been paid. Almost all of them fell silent afterward, and one was forced to leave the country.

For Zelensky, the word of truth is a threat. As a PR professional, he knows the power of words. Just three days before this speech, Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed unconstitutional sanctions against me. He claims it was for spreading “Russian propaganda.” In practice he sanctions anyone who says what he does not want to hear. Many of his own former team members have already been hit with the same punishment for opposing the war and speaking out against corruption.

The number of treason accusations in the country has also surged.

In 2015, a total of 73 people were convicted for all crimes against the foundations of national security in Ukraine. Since 2022, more than 3,500 suspicions have been announced, and 1,048 people have been convicted of high treason. Those are the 2025 figures; this year the numbers should be higher. Many of these cases involve people simply speaking about peace. Do the images from books and films about the Soviet Union not come to life for you?

So the moment I say that territorial compromises are necessary—a phrase voiced by some of the most sensible people on the planet—I would be signing my own treason charge and my own 15-year or life sentence. Therefore I will not say it. But I will remind you that in 2023 the New York Times published an op-ed titled “Ukraine Doesn’t Need All Its Territory to Defeat Putin,” written by Pulitzer Prize winner Serge Schmemann.

Schmemann started an important discussion that we failed to continue. We ignored the call to engage with and hear his arguments: “Recovered territory is not the only measure of victory in this war,” he wrote at the time.

Remember Finland. Who today would say that Finland lost its war? It lost some battles — but it won its nation and its future. Ukraine can become another Finland. Ukraine can become a frontier between the West and Russia.

But the present strategy is pushing us down a very different road. Remember the country into whose war trillions of dollars were poured over twenty years — a country that sank into corruption, whose institutions weakened, until at last Kabul fell to the Taliban. You are moving Ukraine down that very same road. Our institutions are buckling under corruption and a self-assured autocracy; our people are fleeing and losing their faith; and Russia keeps advancing. Why are you doing this? We lose territory and we lose people every single day, without pause — and with them, our chance at a future.

So let me be perfectly clear. Everyone who is willing to fight Russia with Ukrainian blood while ignoring the suffering of ordinary people — is acting against Ukraine and against democratic values. To defend Zelensky’s policies today is to defend a status quo that is an Afghanistan path for Ukraine and a historical shame for the West.

If you truly want to fight Russia, go to the front. Do not censor the Ukrainians who call for peace. To sit comfortably in the West and attack those who demand an end to the slaughter does not make you a hero. It makes you a hypocrite.

There is no justification — none — for such a monstrous loss of life and of human capital. No idea, however grand, and no strategy, however clever, can be worth a nation bled of half its people, a generation of children who cannot read, families erased in a single blast, and a future extinguished before it could begin. When the accounting is finally done, it will not be measured in territory gained or lost, nor in weapons delivered, nor in the applause of red carpets. It will be measured in lives — in the children who never learned, the parents who never returned, the country that was allowed to disappear while the world looked away and called it resolve. History will not ask how loudly we cheered. It will ask what we saved.

For it is written: “Ye shall know them by their fruits. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.” So let each of us look, honestly, at the fruit we are bearing today. And let us choose — while there is still time to choose — to bear the fruit of peace.

I call on all European politicians today to unite around the cause of peace, to help bring this terrible Russian-Ukrainian war to an end and to return stability and security to our continent. This, not warmongering and moral posturing, is the way to successful future and the call of our generation of politicians.

At the end let me thank Alternative for Germany, and especially Tino Chrupalla for coming all the way from Berlin to take part in the event, and personally Doctor Hans Neuhoff for having me here and promoting the very idea of discussing roads towards peace in Europe. This is the rightest thing anyone today can do.

Thank you.

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By Brian McDonald, Substack, 9/21/26

It’s just after 1.15pm on Monday in Moscow and the dullest State Duma election campaign in modern Russian historyhas almost concluded, producing a parliament whose importance may only become apparent later.

Despite the Ukraine conflict and economic pressures, the preliminary official share of Putin’s United Russia stands roughly eight percentage points above its 2021 result, while official turnout is heading for its highest level since 2011.

The Communists, meanwhile, have fallen from almost 19% to around 14%. The reasons include the loss of their protest role, the fact they have recoiled from cooperation with non-systemic players, much of their core support literally dying off, an increasingly elderly leadership, the failure to embrace modern techniques and a very boring campaign.

System-liberal party New People’s roughly 8% represents growth, but fourth place will disappoint those who had hoped disaffected Yabloko voters could propel it into second, after the pro-Western liberals were kicked off the federal list last month, with various legal pretexts found to justify their exclusion. Sergey Kirienko’s group is seen as the least hostile to the West of Russia’s main political parties and is less enthusiastic about the Ukraine conflict than its peers.

The far-right LDPR can take more satisfaction from approximately 9%, up from 7.6%, in its first parliamentary election without legendary firebrand Vladimir Zhirinovsky, which means his party has survived him, although parliamentary entertainment has plainly suffered.

Until a sharp change as the last votes were counted, Monday looked like a disaster for the left-nationalist Fair Russia, which was short of the five per cent threshold needed for its party list to enter the Duma. However, lo and behold, they just managed to scrap past the trapdoor, which will raise some eyebrows after a lackluster campaign in which the mysterious illness of their leader, Sergey Mironov, didn’t help their cause.

The broader parliamentary ideological offer is thin, as market liberalism and political liberalism have been treated as foreign infections by all parties, except perhaps New People, without much clarity about what should replace them domestically.

Of course, a compliant parliament can spare the authorities the inconvenience of discussing that question.

With confrontation with Western Europe deepening, the Kremlin has little incentive to encourage the Duma to become a platform for independent political debate, but this politically colourless chamber’s five-year term could feasibly encompass a transition of power in Russia, should one occur.

Which means a parliament accustomed to approving decisions could then have a major role in endorsing whatever arrangements emerge, and the significance of this really shouldn’t be underestimated.

Nevertheless, such an outcome will depend on a wide range of different factors, with the next presidential election currently set for 2030.

And it’s entirely possible that Putin’s name will again be on the ballot, seeking a sixth term, which would potentially keep him in the Kremlin beyond his 82nd birthday, health and other issues allowing.

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By Jennifer Kavanaugh, Responsible Statecraft, 9/9/26

Trying to pin the blame for the depletion of U.S. military stockpiles on something other than the war in Iran, President Donald Trump fell back on a usual scapegoat last week: Ukraine. “The Biden administration gave far more munitions away to Ukraine, at no cost to them whatsoever, than we have used in Iran,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

This is a familiar refrain. Trump loves to remind his audience that because of him, Americans are “not spending on Ukraine anymore” and instead, Europe is footing the bill. In truth, most people in the United States don’t think about Ukraine much these days. But since Trump himself brought it up, it’s worth asking: What exactly is going on with U.S. military support to Ukraine?

The answer might surprise you. Despite Trump’s rhetoric, the United States remains deeply embroiled in Ukraine’s ongoing conflict with Russia in ways that create national security risks and run counter to Trump’s own foreign policy goals.

It is true that Trump has reduced U.S. support to Ukraine compared to its high mark under his predecessor, Joe Biden. First, his administration has stopped the use of Presidential Drawdown Authority to transfer weapons from U.S. stocks directly to Ukraine. The Biden administration used this mechanism to give Ukraine almost $35 billion in weapons free of charge. Second, the Trump administration has not requested additional funds for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), which uses U.S. financing to purchase new weapons for Ukraine.

But Trump has not cut off all assistance to Ukraine. Several important channels remain. First, there are about $13 billion in outstanding USAI contracts as of June 2026, down from $20 billion in January 2025. These contracts, signed by Biden and now implemented by Trump, will procure weapons for Ukraine through about 2028. Weapons in the pipeline include longer-lead time systems like NASAMs, Patriot missiles and components (Ukraine is reportedly receiving at 10-20 PAC-3s per month under these contracts), counter-drone systems, artillery rockets, and ammunition.

These continuing deliveries are not new awards, but they are still taxpayer-funded military aid to Ukraine that will add up to about $20 billion in aid over the 4 years of Trump’s term. Weapons produced under these contracts come off overburdened U.S. production lines. This has a high opportunity cost given the limits of U.S. defense industrial capacity. Without obligations to Ukraine, industrial resources could shift to different weapons or systems that the United States needs more.

If the Trump administration were serious about ending U.S. spending on the Ukraine war, it could still recoup these funds and reallocate the money to support U.S. defense production needs. It has instead allowed the aid to continue.

There has also been some new funding approved since Biden left office. Congress included about $800 million of USAI funding in the 2026 and 2027 NDAAs. We can expect more in future bills as well.

And the State Department has continued to send military aid of its own. A portion of this aid goes through the Ukraine’s Ministry of Interior, including drones, armored vehicles, guns, grenade launchers, and similar equipment. Since this equipment ends up with Ukraine’s National Guard and border police it is often counted as non-military and intended for things like counterdrug operations, but today these personnel serve as combat units.

The State Department has also approved $3 billion of new arms sales to Ukraine in 2025 and 2026 that will be at least partially funded from foreign military financing (FMF), which means U.S. dollars supporting foreign government purchases of U.S. weapons. Some of these funds may come from money allocated but not spent under President Biden, but much of the funding will be new, coming from the State Department’s budget.

The bottom line is that U.S. weapons transfers to Ukraine continue under Trump, amounting to, on average, as much at $5 billion per year. But this is no longer the most important, or expensive, type of support that the United States gives to Ukraine.

What Ukraine needs much more than weapons, and what the United States continues to provide in increasing amounts, is intelligence, logistics, and operational support. The details of this support are classified, but public reporting offers some insight.

For example, the United States gives Ukraine real-time targeting information, including on the movement of Russian troops and the location of key command centers. This information has been important to Ukraine’s mid-range strike campaign on Russian logistics as well as its deep strikes against military and energy targets inside of Russia. In addition, U.S. reconnaissance and surveillance assets in countries on the NATO border (including routine E-3 flights) are integrated with Ukraine’s air defense network, improving the accuracy and speed of Ukraine’s response.

Beyond intelligence, the United States also provides logistical and maintenance support, including forward and remote assistance to repair American-made equipment, necessary spare parts to keep older systems running, and training. It also facilitates the expensive transfer of European purchases of U.S. weapons.

The cost of the intelligence, logistics, and other operational support the United States provides to Ukraine does not show up anywhere as an itemized bill, even as U.S. assistance increases. But we can use available public information to draw some conclusions about the expenses incurred.

The 2024 defense supplemental bill, for instance, allocated about $15 billion to “military training, intelligence sharing, increased presence, and other support activities.” In theory, these funds are intended to cover activities conducted in support of Ukraine that would not occur if the United States remained uninvolved in that conflict. Some portion of this money will go to the salaries of military personnel who would be paid no matter where they work.

Since about a third of each military service’s budget is personnel costs, we could estimate the cost of extra activities conducted for Ukraine, excluding baseline manpower, at about $10 billion over the course of a year or so. If Trump has truly expanded intelligence sharing with Ukraine, this price tag may have increased over time.

The money included in the bill is likely only a portion of the actual burden the U.S. military and intelligence community have shouldered to support Ukraine’s war. Many intelligence activities, like tasking and analyzing satellite data and collecting signals intelligence, might be covered in classified national security budgets. Starting in 2023, in fact, the classified intelligence budget increased by 10%, a large jump over the 2022 total. The increase was justified by intelligence community leaders as resulting from shifts in the national security landscape, including especially concern about China’s rise and spillover from conflict in Ukraine. Since the total increase in funding was about $10 billion, we can guess that Ukraine-related expenditures might amount to $3-$5 billion per year, or about one-third to one-half of the total increase.

All told, then, U.S. taxpayers are still spending roughly $20 billion per year on Ukraine. Today, assistance to Ukraine comes primarily in the form of direct operational support, not weapons. But the shift in type of aid increases the risk of U.S. support to Ukraine to average Americans.

First, assisting Ukraine in striking energy targets inside of Russia has a perverse effect on the Trump administration’s efforts to keep gas prices low. As Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent acknowledged, Ukraine’s strikes inside Russia push global oil prices up, imposing higher costs of living on Americans.

Second, U.S. intelligence support deepens U.S. involvement in Ukraine’s war, making it an all-but-direct combatant. Russian assistance to Iran, both in terms of weapons and intelligence sharing, is a reaction to the comparable U.S. role in Ukraine, and it leaves U.S. servicemembers in the Middle East and elsewhere less safe. Growing U.S. participation in Ukraine also increases the risk that miscalculation leads to a direct U.S.-Russia confrontation, a nightmarish possibility given the degraded state of U.S. military readiness.

Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. He has instead deepened U.S. entanglement in ways that create real risks and new fiscal costs for the United States. American interests would be best served if the United States were to walk away entirely, but if Trump instead opts for the status quo, he should at least be honest about it.

By Dr. Matt Bivens, Substack, 8/23/26

Matt Bivens is a former journalist who reported from Russia for years. He is currently a practicing doctor.

Two out of every three Ukrainians favors immediate negotiations to end the war with Russia.

What would achieving peace entail?

The Russian demands are clear. They want:

-the territories they have occupied, including Crimea and the east (which are historically and ethnically Russian, and which the government in Kyiv had waged war upon for eight years prior to the Russian invasion);

-the CIA, the Ukrainian Neo-Nazi right, and NATO all out of power in Ukraine, to be replaced by a more tolerant and less anti-Russian government (note that the Russians are not insisting on control over that future government, they just want us out);

-a broad, international discussion about reforming or ending NATO itself (so that this pro-war, anti-Russian alliance could be replaced with something new, some sort of security infrastructure that would allow Russia to work with, and not against, the West).

Three illustrative maps of Ukraine. Left: Russian-held territory in orange as of August 2026, according to the Congressional Research Service. Middle: How the country voted in the 2010 elections, with blue territories supporting the candidate who favored neutrality instead of joining NATO. Right: Languages of Ukraine spoken at home as surveyed in 2001 and 2009, with yellow areas in the West speaking Ukrainian, red areas in the East speaking Russian, and orange in the middle speaking a mix of the two.

There’s a deal to be made

Events made clear long ago that Russia will win this war.

Honestly, it was clear on day one, just from looking at the map:

This can be ground out on the battlefield over time, at enormous suffering and terrible risk. (In addition to the 4 1/2 years of this war we’ve already endured, to say nothing of the eight years of Ukrainian civil war before that.)

But in the end, Russia will hold what it chooses to hold, possibly to include Odesa (which it is closing in upon militarily, but also not yet staking claim to), and, if things get bad enough, even Kyiv itself.

At that point, we’d go back to using the familiar spellings “Odessa” and “Kiev”. Ukraine would be left a land-locked, war-wrecked, rump state. We in the West would spare as much thought for the people there as we do now for, say, the women of Afghanistan, over whose freedoms we used to so anxiously wring our hands.

But victory for Russia would be nearly as miserable as defeat for Ukraine. It would be bought at terrible cost, and Russia’s major goal — a NATO-free future — would remain elusive.

And that’s good news. Because it means there is a deal to be made: Peace in Ukraine, in return for renouncing America’s CIA-led regime-change adventures and winding down NATO.

We should insist upon urgent peace talks on exactly those terms.

We should do so on the humanitarian grounds; because of the growing risk of nuclear war; because NATO is reckless and long past its expiration date; and because ordinary Russians, Ukrainians, and Americans have a shared interest in ending the crazed partnership between the CIA and the Ukrainian fascist movement.

In this five-part series, we’ll review all of these excellent reasons to start emergent and serious peace talks, with an agenda based on Russia’s opening terms.

The humanitarian grounds 

More than 2 million young Ukrainians and Russians may have been killed or grievously injured fighting this war. It’s an astonishing toll of misery and death.

Two million young men, killed or maimed, in just a few years.

Most Western leaders bring this up only to gloat about the Russian losses, usually followed by demands that we get more, and younger, Ukrainians to the front lines, to kill more Russians (and Eastern Ukrainians) or die trying.

A rare exception — and wow, is this a shameful commentary on the reflexive sociopathy baked into our politics — has been Donald Trump. The President has been virtually alone in citing the military war dead as by itself an unspeakable tragedy.

“The numbers of dead soldiers that have been killed in the last month are numbers that are staggering,” Trump said in an interview with TIME Magazine at the end of 2024. “Both Russians and Ukrainians, and the amounts are fairly equal. You know, I know they like to say they weren’t [comparable death tolls on both sides], but they’re fairly equal. But the numbers of dead young soldiers lying on fields all over the place are staggering. It’s crazy what’s taking place. It’s crazy.”

Otherwise, American and European political elites have tended to echo Mitt Romney, who so cheerfully raved, “We’re losing no lives in Ukraine!”, and who called the tsunami of money we’ve sent there ($195 billion and counting) “about the best national defense spending I think we’ve ever done!”

There are other humanitarian costs.

Civilian casualties are steadily rising, with each month breaking the previous month’s record. In the past two weeks, it looks like about 60 Ukrainian civilians have been killed by Russian attacks; and about 30 Russian civilians killed by Ukrainian attacks.

In the past week, we’ve seen Kyiv bombarded by more than 200 missiles and drones that struck more than 30 apartment buildings, a kindergarten, a school and a children’s hospital, and that killed at least 16 people. That’s for Kyiv alone.

Moscow, meanwhile, saw an even heavier wave of drone attacks, more than 600 in the past few days, although most were successfully shot down by air defenses. There was only one civilian death in Moscow documented.

The United Nations confirms at least 16,431 Ukrainian civilians (including 803 children) have been killed since Russia’s February 2022 invasion. The death toll on the Russian side has been far smaller, with estimates ranging somewhere around 1,000 civilians.

Tens of thousands more have been injured (including nearly 3,000 Ukrainian children).

Millions remain displaced.

Millions of homes are destroyed.

Each side is now openly attacking the other’s energy infrastructure (with the Russians more successful). The city of Kyiv is making lists of who will need evacuated this winter purely for lack of heat.

Both sides are also now blowing up Black Sea shipping, and since both sides export huge agricultural harvests via that sea, and Russia exports huge amounts of fertilizer needed for agriculture elsewhere, this threatens starvation across Africa and Asia.

A peace deal could avert all of this: The military and civilian deaths and injuries, the terrible looming winter of Ukrainian cold and worldwide hunger.

By Pavel Devyatkin, Responsible Statecraft, 9/15/26

Last week, the war in Ukraine reached deep inside the Russian Arctic.

On September 9, Ukrainian drones struck two gas processing plants in the Yamalo-Nenets region, located about 1,900 miles from the Ukrainian border. This is Ukraine’s deepest strike on Russia since the war began. Arctic energy infrastructure in the Yamal region produces around 80% of Russia’s natural gas.

Russian military analysts believe the Ukrainian drones were launched from Sumy, northern Ukraine, and reached all the way into Yamal with the help of Starlink. Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces announced, “Until today, this was considered an absolutely safe rear.”

The attack also shook European energy markets, as Europe buys large volumes of gas from the Yamal region. President Donald Trump later told Ukraine to stop attacking Russia’s diesel infrastructure, saying fuel shortages due to the strikes were “hurting the world,” without explicitly acknowledging the fact that the spike in global energy prices is largely driven by the Iran war.

This is the second time the Arctic has been drawn into the Ukraine war. Back in June 2025, Ukrainian drones, smuggled into Russia by truck, hit the Olenya air base on the Kola Peninsula, targeting Russia’s long-range strategic bombers that Moscow had considered safe because of their remote Arctic location.

No guardrails for deescalation

What makes these strikes especially dangerous is the lack of mechanisms to manage the next incident. Tensions between nuclear powers are already escalating in the Arctic. A confrontation in this region could quickly escalate into something much bigger.

Both the U.S. and Russia deploy strategic bombers and submarines north of the Arctic Circle. Russia uses the Arctic as a testing site for nuclear-powered cruise missiles and underwater drones.

Last week, anonymous Western officials told Reuters that, in April 2026, U.S., British, and Norwegian forces confronted Russian submersible vehicles that seemed to be practicing how to sabotage critical cables near Svalbard. The Russian Embassy in Oslo has dismissed the report as information warfare meant to justify NATO’s militarization of the Arctic.

Previously, the Arctic was the setting for confidence-building measures, force-posture information sharing, multilateral scientific cooperation, and programs that reduced the risks of miscalculation. Today, we are at dangerously low levels of trust, preventing such cooperative efforts. The region faces growing military activity and almost no mechanism to stop a stray drone or submarine maneuver from spiraling into an escalation neither side intends.

After the 2025 strike on Russia’s strategic bombers, George Beebe of the Quincy Institute noted with alarm that Western commentators celebrated the attack, largely ignoring the risks it posed to nuclear stability. An attack on the aviation leg of Russia’s nuclear triad deserves far more sober reflection than the applause it received.

Arctic security dilemma

Against the background of the worsening conflict in Ukraine is a spiraling West-Russia confrontation. The current trajectory is a classic security dilemma: NATO builds up in the Arctic because of a perceived Russian threat, Russia builds up because of a perceived NATO threat, and round and round it goes. With every move, each side sees proof of the other’s hostility.

Following the accession of Finland and Sweden into NATO in 2023 and 2024, seven of the eight Arctic states (all but Russia) are members of the alliance. In February 2026, NATO launched Arctic Sentry, conjoining the alliance’s activities — including Denmark’s Arctic Endurance and Norway’s Cold Response — under a coherent operational framework coordinated through Joint Force Command in Norfolk, Virginia.

Arctic Sentry was announced a month after Trump raised tensions in the alliance with his threats to annex Greenland. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte announced the mission as he lobbied Trump to drop the push to acquire the island.

European allies hoped that Arctic Sentry and talks with Washington would let NATO move on from the Greenland dispute and refocus on what they call Europe’s security priority: Russia and the war in Ukraine. Trump, meanwhile, continues to seek the acquisition of the Arctic island even as Europe invests $232 million to support Greenland.

Finland convened European leaders in Helsinki this week to discuss the “race with Russians and the Chinese for use and control of the Arctic.” The Finnish prime minister said “Europe has to be so strong that it won’t cross Russia’s mind to challenge us here in the north.”

Now, NATO exercises, such as Cold Response 26, are folded into the Arctic Sentry framework. This year’s exercise in Norway involved 30,000 troops from fourteen nations rehearsing a counterattack against an “enemy to the east.”

Russian officials have announced that Moscow will take measures to counter NATO in the Arctic. In parallel, Russia and China are increasing their Arctic security cooperation. In 2024, Russian and Chinese bombers conducted joint drills for the first time within Alaska’s Air Defense Identification Zone, in international airspace. The U.S. responded by sending more troops and artillery to Alaska’s remote corners.

That same year, the Chinese Coast Guard conducted its first-ever Arctic Ocean patrol alongside Russia’s Border Service.

Restarting dialogue

To its credit, U.S. European Command (EUCOM) announced the restoration of military-to-military dialogue with Russia earlier this year. Norway also plans to discuss maritime security issues with Russia under the framework of the Agreement on the Prevention of Incidents at Sea (INCSEA).

With so much activity up north, it is reassuring to see some Arctic states gradually resume dialogue with Russia. Going forward, a circumpolar dialogue and channels for the other NATO member states that operate in the Arctic will be necessary.

The Ukraine war has impacted Russian-Chinese relations in the Arctic. From Russia’s point of view, turning to China has been a practical step in the face of diplomatic isolation, but it’s not necessarily Moscow’s first choice. Before 2022, Russia actively participated alongside its Western counterparts in maritime safety institutions like the Arctic Coast Guard Forum.

After the war started, the Western Arctic states condemned Russia’s military actions and suspended cooperation. Vladimir Kulishov, head of Russia’s Border Service, explained that Moscow felt compelled to find new partners as a result. Russia invited China’s Coast Guard first as an observer to a Russian-led exercise, and later as a signatory to an official memorandum on maritime security cooperation.

The Western policy of isolating Russia has essentially left Moscow with little alternative but to pursue coordination with China. This has granted Beijing a strategic foothold in the Arctic — something the Pentagon regards as a top security threat. Previously, China had access to the Arctic mostly through Russia’s tolerance rather than its partnership.

The recent escalations are a warning that the guardrails and old rules are gone. If we want to prevent the region from turning into a permanent battlefield, all Arctic states need to get serious about risk reduction.

The Ukraine war severed decades of productive Arctic cooperation. As the search for peace in Ukraine now resumes, all Arctic states should enhance diplomatic channels, especially military-to-military dialogue like the channels that EUCOM and the Norwegian armed forces are pursuing with Russia. Multilateral cooperation between Arctic states’ coast guards is also crucial.

The new status quo — a state of ever-increasing tensions between nuclear-armed powers — is simply too risky to bear.