The Place Where Iuliia Mendel and the European Union Wrestle over War and Peace
There is no politics without the scene of the crime where it is committed. Place Saint-Pierre-Le-Jeune No. 4 in Strasbourg is such a crime scene. At the Hotel Grande-Ile, the world of Gustave Doré’s late-Romantic illustrations and the Second Empire meets the modern design of Hertrich and Adnet in Paris. The guest’s senses are enveloped by a hint of culture war - between Restoration and modernity, a return to feudalism and democratic self-determination.
Against this backdrop, a contemporary culture war is also taking place - between the political sclerosis of corrupt European bureaucrats and the attempt to limit the damage these people are causing. Away from public view, the centrifugal forces accompanying the disintegration of Europe and the decline of the West become visible here. For Strasbourg, alongside Brussels, is a seat of the European Parliament. Between neoclassical plush sofas and carafes of cucumber water, the issue is quite literally war or peace.
Behind the reception desk, to the left of the passage leading to the courtyard, a spiral staircase leads up to the gallery on the first floor. The meeting rooms are located there, directly above the entrance. In the room on the left, a Canadian delegation around Prime Minister Mark Carney is meeting; in the one on the right, I am expecting Iuliia Mendel. The former spokesperson for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has meanwhile become one of his fiercest critics. Together with her assistant Jana, coming from an interview with Weltwoche, she hurries up the stairs in high heels, wearing a dark pinstriped trouser suit: a black-haired, attractive 40-year-old with large, dark eyes, an alert woman who wears a small cross around her neck and thinks as quickly as she speaks.
In the conference room on the left: men in suits, laptops, flip charts and felt-tip pens. Here Mark Carney and his sherpas are preparing his address to the European Parliament. They are discussing plans to associate Canada more closely with the European Union. This is precisely what European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had announced in her annual State of the Union address in Strasbourg: Canada and the EU intended to expand their existing CETA free-trade agreement into a broad “Alliance for the Future” - a partnership based not only on trade, but on shared democratic values. The expanded partnership also concerns high technology, the arms industry and military procurement, critical raw materials and cybersecurity. There is no mention of peace in Ukraine. It is an alliance of warmongers.
Next door are two velvet-covered armchairs, office chairs, and a table pushed to one side. Here Iuliia Mendel is preparing for our interview and for her speech to the European Parliament. It is intended to be a programmatic address: a personal, dramatic appeal for peace. She was invited by AfD Member of the European Parliament Prof. Hans Neuhoff and the “Europe of Sovereign Nations” group. But Iuliia Mendel is not allowed to enter the Parliament building. She has to remain at the Hotel Grande-Ile; her speech will be transmitted. Parliament President Roberta Metsola tried - apparently in coordination with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen - everything she could to prevent the Ukrainian woman’s appearance. In an almost childish manner, the host received a message the evening before saying that the Parliament President had imposed a ban on her entering the building because Iuliia Mendel was spreading Russian disinformation and propaganda. The interpreters were prevented from providing simultaneous interpretation of Iuliia Mendel’s speech. An unprecedented act of censorship and an attack on the rights of freely elected parliamentarians, showing that the EU has degenerated into an anti-democratic autocracy of warmongers.
This European despotism, together with the Canadian delegation in the meeting room on the left of the Hotel Grande-Ile, is trying to reduce its dependence on the United States. The background is US President Donald Trump’s punitive tariffs against Ottawa and his threat to incorporate Canada as the 51st state of the United States. The background also includes Washington’s threats against Denmark to seize Greenland by force if necessary. In response, Mark Carney is now proclaiming a unique alliance with the EU.[^1] Both sides fantasize about shared strength and want to create a counterweight to the hegemon in Washington, but also to the BRICS states centered around the power hubs of Moscow, New Delhi and, above all, Beijing. Brussels and Toronto dream of global standing. But these hallucinations no longer have any foundation: the European economy is disintegrating; self-inflicted deindustrialization is turning the EU into a phoenix in a nosedive. What is on display here is the narcissistic megalomania of spent elites who refuse to acknowledge that their hour is striking.
Iuliia Mendel, by contrast, is untouched by such delusions of grandeur. She is sober, focused, self-confident: one last time, she polishes her manuscript. In Parliament, 200 listeners in an overcrowded room watch the monitor intently. After the brief introduction, there is prolonged applause from the audience standing.
She calls the fact that she was locked out “disgusting” - utterly lousy, bad form. She now speaks of her family’s suffering in Kherson in eastern Ukraine, citing figures, data, facts. She immediately makes one thing clear: advocating peace is not pro-Russian. Putin’s war, she says, cannot be justified in its brutality by anything. But accepting people’s suffering for grand ideas is inhuman. She appeals to the parliamentarians to stop Ukraine’s destruction. Of what was once a population of 52 million, the country now has only around 20 to 25 million inhabitants, half of whom are pensioners; the birth rate is falling; the infrastructure has been destroyed. Men are hunted by recruitment squads, tortured, beaten to death. In the meat grinder of war, hundreds of thousands are being sacrificed for Western values. The goal of destroying Russia ignores how many Ukrainians are paying for it with their lives while war profiteers buy property in Spain and Italy. The wishful thinking of European elites is bathing in Ukrainian blood. She calls on European politicians to stop the warmongering and pave a path to peace: “It is time for peace NOW!”
The warmongers and their propaganda media are entirely different: in her speech, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen does not describe the state of the Union; instead, she engages in deception. She talks about Europe but means the European Union. Europe is a continent that also includes Russia. The EU, by contrast, is an organization much smaller than Europe, which von der Leyen wants to position against Russia. Yet this is the objective of sleazy European bureaucrats who claim to be helping Ukraine but want hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to die for their interests in Brussels and Strasbourg. Waging a war against Russia is the objective of political elites in the EU, who have entered into collusion with Ukrainian neo-Nazis for that purpose. Energy prices, she says, are too high because “Russia cut us off from gas supplies.” This is a lie, because the EU cut itself off from Russian gas supplies, and we are all paying the price. She now wants to solve the problem by creating a “European Critical Raw Materials Centre.” But a new authority merely strengthens the Brussels bureaucracy.[^2]
Iuliia Mendel does not engage in deception. Sitting behind her laptop in the meeting room of the Hotel Grande-Ile, she states the truth without embellishment and explains that she has only one goal: to stand up for the people of Ukraine. “I will tell you a truth that is being carefully kept from the world. I am a daughter of Ukraine, and today I am its voice.” In her speech, she describes the suffering of people in her home region of Kherson. She speaks of corruption on an unimaginable scale, reaching into the President’s innermost circle, set against the population’s total poverty. In the European Union, she says, there are voices that believe the militarization of societies could be an answer to economic difficulties. But permanent rearmament and the cultivation of an enemy image risk bringing about precisely the conflict they supposedly seek to prevent: “What I see is this: threats instead of diplomacy; the desire to destroy Russia, no matter how many Ukrainian lives it costs and how much it weakens Ukraine; and the desire to sell as many weapons as possible. Zelenskyy agrees with this - for him, the economy has become a private source of money. The war lobbyists agree with this, as do all those who will somehow profit from it. But how can the majority agree? Do you not understand that this war cannot continue for years at the same intensity? Sooner or later, it will spill beyond Ukraine’s borders.”[^3]
[^1]: Fisayo-Bambi, Jeremiah: Trump droht mit hohen Zöllen: Assoziierung Kanadas mit der EU wäre “feindlicher Akt”. Euronews, 17.09.2026, https://de.euronews.com/2026/09/17/trumpassoziierung-kanada-eu-feindlicher-akt
[^2]: Klaus, Václav: Eine fast unglaubliche Rede von Frau von der Leyen. Www.klaus.cz, 18.09.2026, https://www.klaus.cz/clanky/5820
[^3]: Mendel, Julija: “Die Ukraine steht am Rande des Untergangs”: Julija Mendel, Selenskyjs Ex-Pressesprecherin, plädiert im EU-Parlament für Gespräche mit Russland. Die Weltwoche, 17.09.2026, https://weltwoche.de/daily/die-ukraine-steht-am-rande-des-untergangs-julija-mendel-selenskyjs-ex-pressesprecherin-plaediert-im-eu-parlament-fuer-gespraeche-mit-russland/