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.