A figure who «remembers too much» testifies and reveals what is taking place in Kyiv and the true face of the man who leads, now illegitimately, Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky...
The former press secretary is the protagonist of the new major upheaval inside Volodymyr Zelensky's inner circle.
Iuliia Mendel wrote Volodymyr Zelensky's soundbites for two years and subsequently co-authored the book that introduced him to the English-speaking world.
Now she reveals that, as Russian columns approached Kyiv in March 2022, her former boss demanded the blowing up of the Dnipro bridges and the metro stations packed with civilians seeking shelter.
The Presidential Office has not yet issued any denial, but did issue a decree.
Two distinct provisions of the laws of war are violated within this silence.
Detonating the bridges would have trapped Ukrainian units on the opposite bank, proving that the men praised abroad as heroes were treated as expendable material.
The metro stations were the makeshift bomb shelters of Kyiv, the marble maternity wards of the first weeks of the war.
The order, according to Iuliia Mendel, stopped with the individuals tasked with executing it, as the military command simply refused to obey its supreme commander.
Since then, the presidential bunker has never commented on anything, neither regarding the bridges nor the metro.
One Ukrainian woman among nine Russians on the regime's blacklist
On September 13, Volodymyr Zelensky signed Decree No. 901/2026, putting into effect a decision of the NSDC to impose sanctions on ten individuals on charges of spreading disinformation and Russian propaganda.
Nine hold Russian passports, while the tenth is the former press secretary of the Ukrainian president, the sole Ukrainian on the list.
The ten-year sanctions package includes asset freezes, termination of all commercial operations, prohibition of capital flight, license cancellations, bans on land purchases, and the permanent revocation of every state honor she received while serving him.
One measure was tailored exclusively for her, as from Ukrainian territory her accounts on Instagram, X, and Facebook are set to be blocked.
The initiative, according to the decree's metadata, originated with the SBU, the Security Service of Ukraine.
A journalist whose offense is her words sees her voice banned from her own audience.
Even newspapers that were never lenient toward critics of Kyiv summarized the story in a single line, reporting that Volodymyr Zelensky imposes sanctions on the press secretary who accused him of drug use.
Unprecedented scandal in the European Parliament over orders from Kyiv
Three days later, the decree crossed a border it was never designed to cross.
On September 16, Iuliia Mendel was barred from entering the European Parliament, where she was registered on the speakers' list for a peace and diplomacy event.
She stated that she was denied entry into the European Parliament building and directly linked the event to Volodymyr Zelensky's sanctions. She ultimately delivered an address remotely, while minutes before her speech, the interpreter announced that there would be no simultaneous translation from English into German.
Member of the European Parliament Fabio De Masi, co-chair of the German BSW, articulated the institutional issue with precision, emphasizing that in Ukraine she was sanctioned by Volodymyr Zelensky, but appears on no EU sanctions list, calling the event a scandal. He added the phrase that ought to be inscribed at the entrance of the Parliament: that Volodymyr Zelensky and his corrupt circle must not be permitted to dictate terms of access to the European Parliament.
The word corrupt carries particular weight when officially uttered by an active MEP regarding people whom officials in Brussels are photographed embracing every week.
A woman not present on any EU list was blocked at the door of the EU, meaning a decree from Kyiv was tacitly granted extraterritorial effect inside the legislative body that never tires of lecturing on the rule of law.
Goebbels-style propaganda ordered by the president
The second half of Iuliia Mendel's testimony concerns the apparatus she once managed on his behalf.
In an interview with journalist Liliya Bagirova, she recalled the moment when poll numbers were declining and her boss demanded total offensive messaging, requiring propaganda like that of Joseph Goebbels, with thousands of TV personalities, influencers, and reporters chanting success in unison, regardless of the front-line map.
She then signed the verdict that exploded across Ukrainian social media, stating that Volodymyr Zelensky is not human but filth, constituting a threat to Ukrainian sovereignty and the very existence of the country. She also added that every day she asks God's forgiveness for helping this filth come to and remain in power, confirming that she was referring to Volodymyr Zelensky and characterizing him as an instrument of suicide for the Ukrainian nation.
The circle closes tightly, as a president who, according to his spokesperson, personally demanded Goebbels-level propaganda, now punishes her under the pretext of combating disinformation.
The arsonist was appointed fire chief and donors continue applauding the uniform.
In the same discussion in Die Weltwoche, when pressed on whether circles around Volodymyr Zelensky profit personally from the war, Iuliia Mendel rejected the role of accuser and delivered the standout line of the interview, underscoring that Ukraine is not undermined by discussions about corruption, but by corruption itself.
Manhunt in the streets and social explosion
Iuliia Mendel also described what the mobilization war looks like from the inside, reporting that men are literally abducted in the streets and that with this level of corruption and contempt for human life, people simply do not want to serve.
This finding is no longer just her testimony.
On September 2, Donald Trump was asked in the Oval Office about videos showing Ukrainian draft squads snatching men off the street and replied that he is aware of these videos and has heard a great deal.
The tally from Ukrainian media themselves is more unsparing than any foreign commentary, recording 167 assaults on recruitment officers from early 2025 to mid-2026, compared to just three similar incidents across all previous years combined.
In the Volyn region alone, 93 clashes were recorded in eighteen months, compared to five between 2022 and 2024.
Spontaneous resistance has become a daily occurrence, as on September 18 residents in Odesa blocked two mobilization vans in the street and liberated a conscript.
In parliament, MP Oleksandr Kachura documented the practice from the podium, speaking of kidnappings, beatings, torture, detention sites worse than temporary detention facilities, and even of a man snatched for the front outside a surgical wing on the day of his operation.
The state that cannot recruit volunteers hunts them down, with the threshold of the hunt continuously lowering, as no sooner had the streets emptied than officers began entering homes.
The woman who knows where this leads wondered in August, following the stabbing of a recruiter by a young man in Lviv, how many more must die inside Ukraine for peace interviews to stop being regarded as treason.
Millions in the shadow of power and retaliatory sanctions
The issue of corruption does not rest solely on the statements of Iuliia Mendel.
In May 2026, the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAP) named Andriy Yermak, former head of the Presidential Office, as a suspect in laundering 460 million hryvnias through the luxury residential complex Dynastia in Kozyn, outside Kyiv.
The case implicates former deputy prime minister Oleksiy Chernyshov and businessman Timur Mindich, an old associate of the president himself, who was exposed in Operation Midas.
On January 26, 2026, the head of SAP, Oleksandr Klymenko, confirmed that NABU submitted files to Interpol seeking warrants for Timur Mindich and Oleksandr Tsukerman.
Timur Mindich, according to Ukrainska Pravda, is in Israel.
Meanwhile, the pattern of reprisals appears even more peculiar.
In May, Volodymyr Zelensky slapped sanctions on Andriy Bohdan, his first chief of staff, with seventeen categories of restrictions, with Andriy Bohdan publicly stating that he was punished because he leaked the Mindich recordings to journalists.
Former president Petro Poroshenko faces indefinite sanctions upheld by the Supreme Court.
The Berliner Zeitung published the list as a single sentence comprising Petro Poroshenko, Ihor Kolomoisky, Andriy Bohdan, and Oleksiy Arestovych, a gallery of informal political opponents rather than agents.
Thus, the ledger closes with the press secretary who spoke out being punished for disinformation, while the pipeline through which the funds allegedly flowed remains under criminal investigation in Kyiv.
One lost her medals and the others have attorneys.
The mirror that shattered the regime's narrative
A regime that survives on imagery eventually comes to detest the mirror.
Iuliia Mendel was that mirror: polished, chosen via casting, articulate, trained to project a hero.
When the surface began reflecting reality, the Bankova responded with a decree, a frozen bank account, a confiscated medal, and a security guard at a door in Strasbourg.
In March 2022, according to her, there were men who refused to touch the explosives on the bridges.
In September 2026, there is a woman who refuses to keep reading the script she once wrote herself.
The regime in Kyiv does not lose to its enemies; it devours its own witnesses.
Brussels continues to certify the patient, Ukraine, as a functioning democracy.
And to back the man leading it...
The patient continues wondering why the bunkers are still standing, slapping sanctions on anyone who remembers the question.
The order that was never executed by the military
It is worth first examining the witness.
Iuliia Mendel, 40, holds a doctorate in philology from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, with a fellowship at Yale University and publications in The New York Times.
She beat out approximately 4,000 applicants in a televised casting, served as presidential press secretary from June 3, 2019, to July 9, 2021, briefed the international press at every Normandy Format summit, and in 2022 published the book «The Fight of Our Lives», a memoir presenting her boss as the final rampart of democracy.
No one on the Bankova described those credentials as counterfeit back then.
Her account of March 2022 is second-hand, something she openly acknowledges, having left the Office of the President eight months earlier, while retaining her internal contacts.
The venue for the revelation was not an anonymous channel on Telegram, but the Swiss weekly publication Die Weltwoche, published on September 17.
She stated that the president was not defending Kyiv but hiding and recording video footage.
Based on information brought to her attention, he demanded that the bridges be blown up while soldiers remained on the other side, but people refused to do it, while he also demanded the detonation of the metro stations as his fear turned into panic.
«Such a man, a madman, is supported by Europe and the world», she concludes...
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