Soup 399

VATNIK SOUP

In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce Iuliia Mendel, a Ukrainian journalist and press secretary. She’s best known for serving as Zelenskyy’s spokesperson during the early years of his presidency and then, years later, turning into a Kremlin-aligned, fierce critic of him.

Early life

Born in 1986 in Zaporizhzhia (Zaporizhzhia Oblast), officially registered in Henichesk (Kherson Oblast), Iuliia grew up in Kherson (Kherson Oblast) — yes, that Kherson, where Russia now hunts and murders civilians for fun in a “human safari”.

Mendel studied philology at Taras Shevchenko National University, Kyiv. Before entering politics, she worked as a journalist and contributor for various Ukrainian and international media, including the New York Times and Politico.

Zelenskyy’s spokesperson: unwavering support for Ukraine and its President

In June 2019, shortly after Volodymyr Zelenskyy won the Ukrainian presidential election in a landslide, Mendel was appointed as his press secretary. She won the job in an open competition with 4,000 applicants and quickly became one of the most visible faces of Zelenskyy’s administration.

Remember, she was appointed once he’d already won. Now she pretends that she helped him get into power.

Her tenure was marked by controversy, awkward public incidents and communication blunders that made headlines in Ukraine, such as mentioning a “President of Canada”, confusing Latvia and Lithuania or physically pushing a journalist away from Zelenskyy.

Ironically, Mendel now complains that freedom of speech in Ukraine has been “greatly restricted”. But in 2019, when she was Zelenskyy’s press secretary, Index on Censorship recorded her as the source of press-freedom violations.

And in fact, even months after leaving her position, she still agreed with the restrictions on pro-Russian media, calling them entirely reasonable and justified (video: December 9, 2021 interview)

Mendel resigned as presidential press secretary in July 2021. Officially, the administration described the departure as a transition to other roles, but Ukrainian media reported mounting tensions and poor performance.

While still formally Zelenskyy’s press secretary, Mendel unveiled her book Кожен із нас — Президент (“Each of Us Is President”). In it, she praised Zelenskyy’s electoral “revolution” and contrasted it with Maidan’s “dirty tents” and “unhygienic cold nights” — a dismissive description of the Revolution of Dignity. Ukrainians were outraged, with historian Radko Mokryk commenting that it was during those “unhygienic and cold nights” that he met “the best people of the country”.

In early 2022, she apparently refused an opportunity to appear on the cover of Playboy, but not without writing an op-ed about it, declaring that “Playboy Shows That Patriotism in Ukrainian is Naturally Sexy”.

Iuliia’s second book, The Fight of Our Lives, published in September 2022, again gave a mostly positive picture of Zelenskyy: an imperfect leader, but one who stood up to Russia and defended Ukraine.

Suddenly, she remembers a different version of events

And now, years later, while not having had any privileged access to any new insider information for years, she is telling a very different story, one very helpful to the Kremlin — which spends billions every year on information warfare to manufacture passivity towards its genocidal invasion of Ukraine, so that it can keep murdering Ukrainians with fewer sanctions or resistance.

Mendel basically just repackages Kremlin disinformation narratives as unverifiable hearsay. One thing should be absolutely clear: her appraisal of Zelenskyy was positive before, during and even after she had worked with him. It was only years later, with no contact with him anymore, that she suddenly decided to viciously hate him, while claiming her past work with him as somehow giving her credibility for that opinion.

Tucker Carlson interview: goes full vatnik

Mendel fully entered the vatnik propaganda network this year with her Tucker Carlson interview of May 11. A few days earlier, at the Moscow May 9 parade — generously permitted by Zelenskyy — everyone saw how weak Russia is. Of course, Iuliia pushed the opposite: Russia is strong and Ukraine must surrender. How convenient.

In her interview with Tucker, she portrays Zelenskyy as corrupt and keeping the war going for his own benefit. Did Iuliia suddenly remember a completely different version of events than what she wrote in her books? She now even blames him for conscription, which he did not introduce and in fact had even tried to end before the full-scale invasion.

Tucker Carlson is openly “rooting for Russia”. When he invites someone on his show, it’s to help Russia conquer Ukraine and murder Ukrainians — not to criticize Zelenskyy so that Ukrainians replace him with someone who’ll resist Russia and protect Ukrainian lives even better. Neither Putin nor Tucker suddenly went on a well-intentioned, pro-democracy, anti-drug, anti-corruption crusade: Tucker and Mendel’s goal is not to push for peace, but to help Russia succeed in its war by conquering Ukrainian territory.

In the interview itself, expect the usual falsehoods, fake narratives and irrelevant smears. Mendel also completely twists basic things like the daily minute of silence to honor victims of the war or the constitutional lack of elections while martial law is in effect.

And Mendel did not end up on Tucker Carlson by accident: she approached him herself. She is “Writing a bold new exposé on the real story behind the scenes in Ukraine”, and Tucker’s show is a good means of self-promotion. But at whose expense? She lives abroad and is now making a business model out of betraying her country. She has the nerve to claim to be making a “sacrifice”, but of course she’s not the one tortured to death under Russian occupation.

Russian state media loves it

Needless to say, Russian state media had a field day with the anti-Zelenskyy Tucker Carlson interview. Ironically, Iuliia once wore an RT costume for Halloween, saying it was the “scariest” she could find. Well, congratulations, Iuliia, now you’re their star, doing for them for free the best anti-Ukraine propaganda work they could ever dream of.

As a reminder, RT was founded by Vladimir Putin and is led by Margarita Simonyan. They are directly involved in war crimes such as torture of POWs as well, while Simonyan calls for bombing Ukraine’s power infrastructure so that Ukrainians freeze to death in the winter, when she is not hoping for a famine.

Amazingly, Mendel has now shifted to the insane logic that the worse the things Russia does, the more she blames Ukraine for not “de-escalating”, completely shifting the responsibility and causality here.

Since going full vatnik, she’s posting non-stop against Ukraine, with Russian state media systematically picking up her every tweet and making a big story out of it within hours.

Peak absurdity is reached when Russian state media uses Mendel’s interview as proof that… the Russian state has murdered even more Ukrainians than Ukraine claims. RT, of course, gloats every time that their colleagues from a different branch of the Russian state successfully murder Ukrainian civilians. The sort of thing past Iuliia used to be critical of, like any sane human being not collaborating with RT is.

But even her actual words are not quite enough for Russian propaganda, at least not yet. The interview was immediately amplified through standard Kremlin disinformation methods such as fake Western newspaper covers, then recycled again by disinformation spreaders in each country. Doppelgänger, CopyCop, typosquatting websites, etc.: they’ve done this a million times before. Trolls, bots and fake AI-generated websites spreading for years the exact same irrelevant smears that Mendel is now so eagerly spreading for them for free.

Being used this transparently by the propaganda arm of a state murdering Ukrainians every day, gloating about murdering Ukrainians every day, and using her interview to gloat even more about how many Ukrainians they murder every day, to hinder Western aid to Ukraine so that they can keep murdering Ukrainians every day, apparently did not give Mendel second thoughts.

Instead, she doubled down.

Doubles down, deeper into the vatnik network

In August, she gave another major interview to Le Journal du Dimanche — part of Vincent Bolloré’s French media empire, which he recently put at the service of Xenia Fedorova, previously head of… RT France. Yes, Iuliia’s scary Halloween costume again.

In a Spectator op-ed on September 15, 2026, Mendel blamed Zelenskyy again. Mendel acknowledges Russian war crimes and responsibility for the war but then chooses to blame it on Zelenskyy anyway later on in the same op-ed — peak dishonesty verging on the nonsensical, frankly something that should have been picked up at the editor level already. Zelenskyy can’t end a war he didn’t start — Russia can.

On September 16, 2026, Mendel headlined an AfD-organized event at the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Yes, that AfD — the party whose members wave Russian flags and decorate their offices with Putin-fan merch and mugs bearing the logo of the Russian Army — the terrorist army that murders Ukrainians every day.

The event also featured Swiss vatnik Roger Köppel, who on 24 February 2022 published “Putin, the misunderstood”, and offered a very friendly platform to Simonyan, head of RT (remember the Halloween costume?), to blame the whole war on… Europeans.

After Strasbourg, Mendel gave yet another long interview — this time to German journalist Patrik Baab — repeating claims about the failed 2022 peace talks and Boris Johnson. Patrik Baab is a German Russia-friendly journalist who illegally travelled via Russia to occupied Donbas during the Kremlin’s sham annexation referendums in 2022. Of course, Russian state media loved it again: within a day, Russian state agency TASS was already repackaging her remarks.

The usual bullshit: “I didn’t meet him [Johnson] in April 2022 [in Kiev]. I wasn’t there, but Ukrainians who were there told me that Boris Johnson intervened and influenced Zelenskyy, saying he could become a hero and could continue this war.”

In fact, Lavrov had already rejected any peace deal days before Boris Johnson visited Kyiv. But chronology and facts never matter in the vatnik parallel universe.

And then on September 25, 2026, she even returned to Tucker Carlson in an episode titled “Zelensky’s Press Secretary Returns From Exile With a Message for the Tyrant.” Of course, the tyrant here means Zelenskyy, not the one actually trying to destroy her country — Putin.

The whole vatnik network supports her now. On Kremlintarian Scott Horton’s pro-war outlet, even Mearsheimer chimed in. The American Conservative published her too. Yes, the same dimwits who, back in 2015 — when everyone already knew exactly who Putin was — published an article by Horton’s predecessor, Justin Raimondo, titled “Better Putin Than Weimar Russia”, subtitled “The current Russian regime is preferable to the reactionary chaos that would accompany its collapse.” Sic. And of course they also praise vatnik Marine Le Pen now.

Conclusion

Kherson, where Iuliia grew up, is now liberated — something she hoped for and then celebrated in 2022. Was that wrong? Would Iuliia rather live under Russian occupation, where journalists can end up tortured to death?

Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, years before Zelenskyy even entered politics. Whatever his shortcomings, none could possibly justify Russia’s war of aggression — or Ukrainians surrendering to the torture, terror and atrocities of Russian occupation.

And unlike Russians living under Putin, Ukrainians are perfectly capable of protesting their own president — and have done so on numerous occasions. In July 2025, thousands protested Zelenskyy’s attempt to undermine Ukraine’s independent anti-corruption agencies, ultimately forcing him to reverse course. In July 2026, thousands protested his dismissal of Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. Under Russian occupation, however, they would lose that freedom, along with so many others. A Ukrainian in free Ukraine can protest Zelenskyy. Can a Ukrainian under Russian occupation freely protest Putin?

Mendel herself called Russia “a terrorist state” in 2023. It still is. Yet today, she spends far more energy attacking the Ukrainian president than the regime invading and terrorising her country. In 2019, she publicly apologised for using the spelling of the invader, “Kiev”, instead of “Kyiv”, and later publicly corrected others who used “Kiev”. Now she’s using “Kiev” again herself.

And notice whom she’s addressing. She’s not campaigning among Ukrainians to protest Zelenskyy. She’s certainly not urging Russians to protest Putin and actually end this war. Instead, she’s increasingly addressing English-speaking Western audiences, arguing against continued support for Ukraine and attacking some of its most effective military operations — particularly deep strikes inside Russia. Less Western support means fewer air defences, more vulnerable Ukrainian civilians and more opportunities for Russian attacks. It’s hard to know why Mendel is doing this, but the effect of her messaging is clear: it helps Putin wage his war against Ukraine.

Russian propaganda portrays Zelenskyy as an incompetent, corrupt drug addict squandering Western aid on luxury cars and mansions. If that caricature were true, Moscow would hardly need to work so hard to sell it: they would just buy him. The reality is that Zelenskyy stands in the way of Russia occupying and looting more Ukrainian territory. Whatever his flaws, he is no corrupt servant of Putin like Viktor Yanukovych was.

Does that mean Zelenskyy is perfect? Of course not. He has made mistakes, like any wartime leader under immense pressure. And one early mistake may very well have been hiring someone as devoid of ethics as Iuliia Mendel, who’s willing to sell out her own country in order to sell more copies of her gossip book.

https://vatniksoup.com