Iuliia Mendel was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s press secretary in 2019–2021. She says she “departed on good terms.” Others say her falling out with Zelensky was very bad.
Earlier this month, Mendel gave an extensive interview to Tucker Carlson. She made many explosive remarks, questioning Zelensky’s character and his commitment to democracy and fighting corruption. But her most significant comments were on Ukraine’s NATO aspirations and the negotiations in Istanbul in the early weeks of the war.
Mendel claims to have been present at a 2019 meeting in Paris during which Zelensky, she says, privately promised Putin “that Ukraine will never join NATO.”
And she claims she spoke to people on Ukraine’s negotiating team who told her that the negotiations in Istanbul “were almost done” before the U.S. and the UK discouraged them. This part of Carlson’s interview with Mendel has revived interest in the Istanbul talks, which, if they had succeeded, would have prevented catastrophic levels of death and destruction.
Some Russia–Ukraine war specialists I spoke to questioned Mendel’s reliability because of her falling out with Zelensky, because she was no longer in office, because of her history of making lurid claims, and because of the vagueness and innuendo in the Carlson interview. Others found her testimony credible and consistent with the known facts. Either way, it is important to distinguish—as Mendel often did—between what she heard first-hand and what she heard from others.
Mendel makes clear that she was not present for the talks in Istanbul and received her information from those who were. But her account of events is corroborated by participants in the diplomacy. In his new book, The Russo-Ukrainian War: Follies of Empire, Richard Sakwa observes that “seven out of the eight members of the [Ukrainian] delegation confirm that a detailed peace deal had been agreed in Istanbul.” The eighth didn’t because he couldn’t: Denis Kireev was assassinated by Ukrainian intelligence upon returning to Kiev from talks in Belarus.
David Arakhamia, head of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party in the Ukrainian parliament, was one of two heads of Ukraine’s negotiating team. Arakhamia has confirmed the existence of some kind of agreement that he claims to have initialed. He added that Russia was “prepared to end the war if we agreed to… neutrality, and committed that we would not join NATO.” Arakhamia evaluated the talks to have been a success, scoring them as achieving their goals “by 8 points out of 10.”
Oleksiy Arestovych, then-Advisor to the Office of the President of Ukraine and a member of the Ukrainian negotiating team in Istanbul, says that the talks in Istanbul were successful and could have worked. He grades the talks even more optimistically than Arakhamia, saying that the Istanbul agreement was 90 percent prepared and that what remained was “the question of the amount of Ukrainian armed forces in peacetime.” He says that, upon returning from Istanbul, the Ukrainian negotiating team “opened the champagne bottle.”
Oleksandr Chalyi, former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and a member of the negotiating team, says that the delegations “concluded the so-called Istanbul Communique. And we were very close in the middle of April, in the end of April to finalize our war with some peaceful settlement.” He adds that Putin “demonstrated a genuine effort to find a realistic compromise and achieve peace.” Putin, he says, “tried everything possible to conclude [an] agreement with Ukraine” and “really wanted to reach some peaceful settlement.” Chalyi says the two negotiating teams “managed to find a very real compromise” and that Putin made the “personal decision to accept the text of this communiqué.”
Consistent with these accounts, Mendel says that the Istanbul negotiations “were almost done.” But, she says, the talks were stopped when the U.S. and UK put an end to them. She tells the previously reported story of Britain’s then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson traveling to Kiev and urging the Ukrainians to continue fighting. Mendel adds the claim, without support or attribution, that Johnson also wooed Zelensky with promises of “influence” and “fame” as a great war hero.
Though that detail can be questioned, the basic plot is well-established. Ukrainska Pravda reported that on April 9, 2022, Johnson went to Kiev to tell Zelensky that Putin “should be pressured, not negotiated with” and that, even if Ukraine was ready to sign some agreements with Russia, “the West was not.” Arakhamia has confirmed the report, saying, “When we returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kiev and said that we would not sign anything with them at all, and let’s just fight.”
Less reported than Johnson’s trip to Kiev is a previous long-distance call during which Johnson, Sakwa writes, told Zelensky that the U.K. “would not stand as a guarantor power and urged Zelensky to refuse the deal.” Far from going rogue, according to Sakwa, opposition to Ukraine’s making a deal “was the position adopted 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 roadblock to a negotiated settlement has been testified to by virtually all involved parties. Israel’s then-Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, at the invitation of Zelensky, acted as a mediator. Bennet says that “there was a good chance of reaching a ceasefire,” but the West “blocked it.” According to Bennett, “a ceasefire was within reach at the time, with both sides prepared to make significant concessions. However, Great Britain and the USA, in particular, ended the process and opted for a continuation of the war.”
Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was also asked to mediate by Zelensky. He seconds Bennett’s account: “The Ukrainians did not agree to peace because they were not allowed to. They first had to ask the Americans about everything they discussed…. Everything else was decided in Washington. That was fatal.”
Turkey was host to the talks, and Turkish officials confirm this account. Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu says that the talks were on course to end the war, but that “there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue, let the war continue and Russia get weaker.” The deputy chairman of Turkey’s governing party, Numan Kurtulmus, says “the United States sees the prolongation of the war as its interest…. There are those who want this war to continue…. Putin [and] Zelensky [were] going to sign, but someone didn’t want to.”
Subscribe Today
Get daily emails in your inbox
Jean-Daniel Ruch, the Swiss ambassador to Turkey during the talks, was in Turkey at the time to consult on the idea of neutrality for Ukraine. He, too, says “the West pulled the plug on the negotiations that were on the edge of leading to a ceasefire…. we had a ceasefire close at hand, and then it’s the Americans, with their British allies, who said no.”
Even Victoria Nuland—America’s former undersecretary of state for political affairs and the Obama State Department’s point person on Ukraine policy—says that the Istanbul negotiations fell apart when “people outside Ukraine” questioned the agreement.
Iuliia Mendel’s second-hand testimony adds to the overwhelming evidence that a promising diplomatic path to end the war was blocked by the U.S., UK, and other Western nations.
