Iuliia Mendel
@IuliiaMendel • 183,629 subscribers
Ex-spokesperson for President Zelenskyy. Insider view. Writing a bold new exposé on the real story behind the scenes in Ukraine.
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In Ukraine, being poor often means being dead. Sometimes it feels like things can’t get any worse. Then you hear a story that makes you wonder if men in Ukraine still have any rights left at all. A man almost out of draft age — he turns 60 in three months — was taken straight from his own mother’s funeral by conscription officers and sent to the front. This war must be over to preserve Ukraine.
Iuliia Mendel11,071 görüntüleme • 12 saat önce
I don’t know if Zelenskyy watches the news, but the mood in France, Italy and Albania is not good. Large protests are underway, sometimes turning into clashes with police. In southern Italy roads are set to be blocked for the next two days. People are protesting bad education, poverty, soaring fuel prices and actual shortages of diesel and gasoline in some regions. Against this backdrop, six months before elections in France and Italy, Volodymyr Zelenskyy is asking for another €70 billion to fund an endless war that Ukraine is losing. The previous €90 billion were already extracted with huge difficulty. Hungary and Slovakia have already said they will not take part in this new financing. This is not about whether I support Zelenskyy. The economy in Ukraine is nearly stopped — by Russian strikes and by the incompetence of a wartime government. The Constitution is on pause, as one of Zelenskyy’s own friends has said. The war is taking more lives and more land, and the only answer we hear is “give Ukraine more money”. Money that Europeans no longer want to give and can no longer afford to give. Every third euro in Ukraine is now Western borrowing. To save the country we need a deal and a chance to rebuild. I do not believe Ukraine can remain an equal partner while it is this dependent on the West, or that this strategy has any long-term future. It breaks my heart that this war is destroying so much in Ukraine and causing such degradation. It also breaks my heart that European countries, including France, Italy and Albania, are going through such hard times. That is why I say again: let’s end the only war in Europe so that all of us can start building a future.
Iuliia Mendel131,514 görüntüleme • 6 gün önce
On the day of my speech, I was barred from entering the European Parliament. I directly attribute this to Zelenskyy’s sanctions. But the speech will go ahead anyway, because I know that I represent a huge segment of society that longs for peace and wants to be heard.
Iuliia Mendel715,159 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
More and more Ukrainian men are posting the moment they cross into the EU and call it freedom. The legal exit has been shut for years, so the route left to them runs through rivers, forests and night checkpoints. At home a man can be taken off a bus, stopped on the street, or held in a recruitment center with no clear way back. Abroad he is no longer state property. Zelensky’s authorities have made leaving a crime and staying a risk, and men are choosing the border because the country no longer offers them a third option.
Iuliia Mendel227,227 görüntüleme • 22 gün önce
Yesterday 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.
Iuliia Mendel386,345 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
Russia struck Epicenter’s last remaining large logistics center in Khmelnytskyi ten times in a single day. Around 85% of the goods stored there burned. Employees survived. This was effectively the company’s final major warehouse complex after the earlier destruction of its largest hubs in Kyiv and the Kyiv region. Logistics is broken, losses are enormous, and the salaries and jobs of thousands of people are now at risk. Epicenter is the largest national chain of shopping centers.
Iuliia Mendel83,877 görüntüleme • 10 gün önce
Another video from Kyiv. A man is grabbed on the street and dragged off by force. He is screaming that they didn’t even look at his documents. This is how Ukrainian men live now. You can be walking, and suddenly you are not a person anymore. Just a body they need. Zelenskyy’s government stopped pretending there are rules. Documents don’t matter, human rights don’t matter either. When the state takes you without even looking at your papers, it is not mobilization. It is hunting. And every man knows that tomorrow he could be the next prey.
Iuliia Mendel36,972 görüntüleme • 5 gün önce
At the very beginning of the war, someone asked me: “Can Ukraine win?” I still get asked that question today. But do you know what I want to ask in return? What exactly are we going to call victory? Millions of Ukrainians have been forced to leave their homes. Cities have been destroyed. Businesses wiped out. Years of life lost. Mothers bury their sons. Children grow up without fathers. Women spend years waiting for husbands who will never come home. Some have lost their legs. Others, their eyesight. Others, their mental health. Even if the Ukrainian army reaches the Kremlin tomorrow. Even if the Ukrainian flag is raised over it. Tell me, would that be victory? Would that flag bring mothers’ sons back? Bring dead children back to life? Restore broken families? Give back the years stolen from people? Bring back the children who were never born, the weddings that never took place? Because you can win a war on the map and still lose forever the very thing a state exists to protect: human lives. The most terrifying question today is not whether Ukraine can win. It is this: What will be left of Ukraine and its people by the time that victory, if it ever comes, can finally be declared?
Iuliia Mendel21,701 görüntüleme • 3 gün önce
A Ukrainian serviceman describes how mobilized men are taken to the front: locked in a cage on the truck, delivered like cargo, forced to fight. That is a human-rights violation in plain sight. Everyone knows the quiet truth: many Ukrainian men would run if they could. The country has been turned into a cage — an autocracy where life is reduced to survival, speech is punished, and corruption kills any will to fight. Listen to how people are being driven to the line. This war has to be stopped.
Iuliia Mendel201,365 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
What cynicism. Zelenskyy brought a teddy bear to the graves of children who could still be alive if he had not escalated this war and had agreed to peace on realistic terms instead of maximalist demands. A teddy bear—while companies linked to his circle extract billions from the war. Disgusting.
Iuliia Mendel89,781 görüntüleme • 16 gün önce
Thank you, Mr. President Donald J. Trump for being the real leader and pursuing the road of peace for Ukrainians. Attritional war has favored Russia for historical reasons that do not vanish because we dislike them. Its army can lose battles. The capacity of Russian society to endure exhaustion has repeatedly conferred an advantage on Russian governments, including the present one. Right now, Russia has stockpiled up to 700 ballistic missiles, thousands of cruise missiles and over 6,200 Geran drones, according to Ukrainian intelligence. Production is exceeding plans by 110–120%. Russia is capable of spending lives and material for as long as it judges the political object worth the spending, and it remains prepared to do so. Ukraine does not have the same depth. Pretending otherwise is not solidarity, but a way of expending someone else’s remaining years.
Iuliia Mendel15,780 görüntüleme • 3 gün önce
Some Ukrainians refuse to be Europe’s shield. Listen to this Ukrainian woman — she says it plainly: Europe pays with money, we pay with lives. Zelenskyу’s government is ready to stake millions of Ukrainian lives just to keep receiving money and prove to Europe that a Ukrainian is the most profitable investment in its security. Cheap, resilient, and expected to thank them for the weapons that let him die a little later. Their children study and plan futures. Ours are already counted as future mobilization stock. Ministers’ families are safe. Ordinary people are the commodity.
Iuliia Mendel24,652 görüntüleme • 5 gün önce
To prevent this speech, Zelensky imposed sanctions on me. On the day of the speech itself—16 September—I was barred from entering the European Parliament. I am posting it here so you can judge for yourselves just how “dangerous” it is. If censorship is the only answer, the argument has already been lost. This speech matters because, despite Zelensky’s and the EU’s censorship, the first pleading Ukrainian voice calling for peace was finally heard. Thank you AfD im EU-Parlament Prof. Dr. Hans Neuhoff
Iuliia Mendel124,367 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
Putin has radically reimagined the meaning of this parade. Once a commemoration of victory over fascism in World War II, it is no longer about the past. Today, it stands as a symbol of his vision for the future. Troops from China, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, and other nations — countries with little historical connection to WWII — now march in Moscow together. For Putin, the parade is no longer about remembrance. This is a display of unity among autocratic regimes, bound by rigid hierarchies and a shared defiance of modern democratic values. #Russia
Iuliia Mendel1,956,273 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce
Ukrainian border guards in the middle of the Dniester river beat a man with a paddle as he swims toward Moldova so he doesn’t make it. Then the Moldovans detain the same guards for illegally crossing the border. Ukrainian men are now forced to risk rivers and their lives just to leave their own country, while the state uses force to stop them. Zelenskyy’s government has failed to end the war or stop the open human rights violations — the hunting of men, the denial of the right to leave, the beatings and detentions of their own citizens. War degrades both body and mind, and the longer the fighting continues, the deeper this degradation will go.
Iuliia Mendel19,247 görüntüleme • 6 gün önce
The idea of NATO died in Ukraine. The Alliance was created to protect people, yet Ukrainians are now dying merely for the idea of a hypothetical accession sometime years from now. Maybe—if we do everything right and don’t die out before then. When people ask me what Ukraine can do to end the war, one answer is: stop lying to its own people, and stop setting unattainable maximalist goals in this war. Second: stop escalating the rhetoric. It’s easy to talk on camera about invincibility when you have a hundred bodyguards, a bunker against a nuclear strike, and can fly abroad whenever it’s useful or whenever you feel like it. This covers NATO, the 1991 borders, and how we will bomb Russia. And then—whoosh—into the bunker. Meanwhile the people swallow all of this, pick up arms and legs from everywhere, and pray every day for this hell to end. There is no diplomacy of threats. And this rhetoric is the first sign that the Ukrainian leader does not need peace. Third: stop stealing, because it weakens the nation in both war and peace. Corruption is our defeat. Fourth: repeal the decree banning negotiations with Putin. It makes any talks with him illegal. Waiting for Putin’s death is a cute idea—for a children’s comic. Because the math shows there will be no one left to wait. There are already almost 20 million of us, out of 52. Invincibility is only a political slogan. In the end, we are all human. Our bodies break, and now our souls are breaking too—from this damned war and from the authorities’ inhuman treatment. Ukraine needs peace. And Ukraine can still start doing something to achieve it.
Iuliia Mendel57,782 görüntüleme • 20 gün önce
Forced mobilization in Ukraine took another ugly form. In Kharkiv, during a street roundup, a soldier from a military recruitment patrol shoved a 74-year-old woman onto the pavement. She was left with a fractured hip and a broken collarbone. No one helped her, no one called an ambulance; the men got into their van and drove off. Their version is that the grandmother attacked them and that they were only defending themselves. Watch the video and try to picture how an old woman was supposed to have attacked several fit men in uniform. This is what impunity looks like when it has settled in. Zelensky’s power says nothing and does nothing, and that silence is its own kind of approval. And the corruption of billions of dollars annually that such mobilization generates is a "good bonus" for this silence.
Iuliia Mendel34,310 görüntüleme • 15 gün önce
Zelenskyy has just told Ukrainians not to worry about food shortages. His argument is that Russia has wrecked Ukraine’s ability to export grain, so more grain will stay inside the country and bread will become cheaper. In his telling, that means Ukraine will not face a food crisis. He said this after people raised alarm that Russian strikes have destroyed warehouses and badly damaged the systems that move food and fuel around the country. This way of turning a disaster into a supposed economic blessing has become a familiar feature of Zelenskyy’s rule.
Iuliia Mendel85,132 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce