Former Zelenskyy press secretary: West blocked possible peace

Iuliia Mendel was the press secretary of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019-2021. She says she “left on good terms”. Others say his falling out with Zelensky was very serious.

Earlier this month, Mendel gave a detailed presentation interview to Tucker Carlson. She made numerous explosive remarks, questioning Zelensky’s character and his commitment to democracy and the fight against corruption. But his most significant comments concerned Ukraine’s NATO aspirations and the Istanbul negotiations in the first weeks of the war.

Mendel claims to have been present at a 2019 meeting in Paris in which Zelensky, she says, privately promised Putin “that Ukraine would never join NATO.”

And she claims to have spoken to members of Ukraine’s negotiating team who told her that the Istanbul negotiations “were almost over” before the US and UK discouraged them. This part of Carlson’s interview with Mendel revived interest in the Istanbul talks, which, if successful, would have avoided catastrophic levels of death and destruction.

Some experts on the Russia-Ukraine war I spoke with questioned Mendel’s reliability because of her falling out with Zelensky, the fact that she was no longer in power, her history of making lurid statements, and the vagueness and innuendo of the Carlson interview. Others found his testimony credible and consistent with the known facts. Regardless, it is important to distinguish – as Mendel often did – between what she heard firsthand and what she heard from others.

Mendel makes it clear that she was not present at the Istanbul talks and received her information from those who were there. But his account of events is corroborated by participants in the diplomacy. In his new book, The Russo-Ukrainian War: the follies of the EmpireRichard Sakwa observes that “seven of the eight members of the [Ukrainian] The delegation confirms that a detailed peace agreement has been concluded in Istanbul. The eighth did not do it because he could not: Denis Kireev was assassinated by Ukrainian secret services while returning to kyiv after negotiations in Belarus.

David Arakhamia, head of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party in Ukraine’s parliament, was one of two leaders of Ukraine’s negotiating team. Arakhamia confirmed the existence of some sort of agreement that he claims to have initialed. He added that Russia was “ready to end the war if we accepted…neutrality and committed not to join NATO.” Arakhamia considered the talks a success, mark them as having achieved their objectives “by 8 points out of 10”.

Oleksiy Arestovych, then advisor to the Ukrainian president’s office and member of the Ukrainian negotiating team in Istanbul, said that the Istanbul talks were successful and could have worked. He assesses the negotiations even more optimistically than Arakhamia, saying that the Istanbul agreement was 90 percent prepared and that what remained was “the question of the volume of Ukrainian armed forces in peacetime.” He said that upon returning from Istanbul, the Ukrainian negotiating team “opened the bottle of champagne”.

Oleksandr Chalyi, former deputy foreign minister and member of the negotiating team, said that the delegations “concluded the so-called Istanbul Communiqué. And we were very close, in mid-April, late April, to finalizing our war with a peaceful settlement.” He added that Putin “showed a genuine effort to find a realistic compromise and achieve peace.” Putin, he said, “did everything possible to conclude [an] agreement with Ukraine” and “really wanted to reach a peaceful settlement.” Chalyi says the two negotiating teams “managed to find a very real compromise” and that Putin made “a personal decision to accept the text of this communiqué.”

Consistent with these accounts, Mendel asserts that the Istanbul negotiations “were almost complete.” But, she says, the negotiations broke down when the United States and the United Kingdom called a halt to them. It tells the previously reported story of Boris Johnson, then British Prime Minister, traveling to kyiv and urging Ukrainians to continue the fight. Mendel adds, without support or attribution, that Johnson also wooed Zelensky with promises of “influence” and “fame” as a great war hero.

Although this detail can be questioned, the basic plot is well established. Ukrainian Pravda reported that on April 9, 2022, Johnson traveled to kyiv to tell Zelensky that Putin “should be pressured, not negotiated” and that while Ukraine was ready to sign deals with Russia, “the West was not.” Arakhamia has confirmed “When we came back from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to kyiv and said we would not sign anything at all with them and we are fighting.”

Less publicized than Johnson’s trip to kyiv is an earlier long-distance call in which Johnson, Sakwa writes, told Zelensky that the UK “would not present itself as a guarantor power and urged Zelensky to refuse the deal.” Far from being rogue, according to Sakwa, opposition to Ukraine reaching a deal “was the position taken by Western leaders (Johnson, Biden, Scholz, Macron and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi) in a collective phone call. [they held] on March 29, the day of the Istanbul talks.

The Western obstacle to a negotiated settlement has been attested to by virtually all parties involved. Naftali Bennett, then Israeli Prime Minister, acted as mediator at Zelensky’s invitation. Bennett said that “there was a good chance of reaching a ceasefire,” but that the West “blocked it.” According to Bennet“A ceasefire was then within reach, with both sides prepared to make significant concessions. However, Britain and the United States, in particular, ended the process and opted for continuation of the war.”

Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was also tapped by Zelensky as a mediator. He supports Bennett’s account: “The Ukrainians did not accept peace because they were not allowed to. They first had to question the Americans about everything they were discussing….Everything else was decided in Washington. That was fatal.”

Turkey was the host of the talks, and Turkish officials confirm this version. Foreign Minister Mevlüt Cavusoglu said that talks were on track to end the war, but that “There are those within NATO member states who want the war to continue, to continue and for Russia to weaken. » The vice-president of Turkey’s ruling party, Numan Kurtulmus, said “The United States considers that the prolongation of the war is in its interest… There are those who want this war to continue… Putin [and] Zelensky [were] I was going to sign, but someone didn’t want to.

Jean-Daniel Ruch, the Swiss ambassador to Turkey during the negotiations, was in Türkiye at the time to discuss the idea of ​​neutrality for Ukraine. He too, said “The West ended negotiations that were on the verge of a ceasefire…we had a ceasefire within reach, and then it was the Americans, with their British allies, who said no.”

Even Victoria Nuland, a former U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs and Obama State Department spokesperson for Ukraine policy, says the Istanbul negotiations failed when “people outside of Ukraine” questioned the deal.

Iuliia Mendel’s testimony adds to overwhelming evidence that a promising diplomatic path to ending the war has been blocked by the United States, the United Kingdom and other Western countries.