The speech Iuliia Mendel was supposed to deliver at the European Parliament on September 16 before she was barred from appearing, was less a peace plan than an indictment of the assumptions underpinning Ukraine’s current war strategy.

There are no proposed ceasefire lines, no detailed security architecture and no explicit demand that Kyiv surrender the remaining Ukrainian-held parts of Donbas. Instead, the former press secretary to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy made  a more fundamental argument in a talk she was forced to deliever online instead: Ukraine cannot defeat Russia militarily, the country is being hollowed out while trying, and the priority should now be preserving the Ukrainian nation rather than recovering every kilometre of occupied territory.

“Ukraine and Europe continue to choose a bad war over a bad peace — escalation over diplomacy, time and again,” Mendel would have said in the speech, a copy of which was obtained by IntelliNews.

She never got the chance to make the argument in person.

As IntelliNews reported earlier on September 16, Mendel was stopped by security as she tried to enter the parliament building in Strasbourg for an event organised by Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD), three days after Zelenskiy imposed ten-year sanctions on his former aide.

Mendel eventually planned to deliver the speech remotely, but told IntelliNews that the European Parliament had also prohibited a live video transmission into the building, leaving her unable to take questions.

The confrontation has given added significance to the text of the speech itself: the case Mendel had intended to put directly to European lawmakers about why she believes the war should end now. Its central claim is blunt.

“Everyone of you here knows that military defeat of Russia is impossible,” Mendel says. “These games cost too much. For my country and for your future too. There is no better condition for peace than NOW.”

The arithmetic of attrition

Much of the speech avoids high politics altogether and concentrates instead on what Mendel calls the arithmetic of Ukraine’s decline.

Her goddaughter Maria is almost four and has never known life without war. After repeated Russian missile attacks, the child became terrified that a rocket would strike her nursery and began wetting herself, Mendel says.

Her ten-year-old niece has never physically attended school and knows education only through a computer screen.

Mendel's parents are doctors in frontline Kherson who endured more than eight months of Russian occupation and remain in the city despite continued shelling.

“If everyone leaves,” she quotes them asking, “then is it still Ukraine?”

These personal stories lead into the speech's broader argument: that measuring progress primarily in terms of battlefield positions obscures the deterioration of the country behind the front.

“A third of Ukraine has been turned into hell,” Mendel says, describing almost 20% of the country as occupied and another roughly 10% as lying in the war zone.

She puts Ukraine's current population at about 25mn, compared with 52mn at independence, and argues that emigration, low births and excess deaths are pushing the country towards a demographic crisis from which it may not recover.

“The war has made Ukraine a place where life and a hopeful future feel increasingly impossible,” she says. “This is simple arithmetic — arithmetic that shows my country vanishing before your eyes.”

Some of the statistics and allegations in Mendel's speech are contested or would require independent verification. But the demographic direction she describes is widely recognised as one of Ukraine's most serious long-term challenges. The same is is true for the economy.

Mendel says the war has left Ukraine dependent on foreign transfers - what former NBU governor Kyrylo Shevchenko called “donornomics" - burdened with debt and increasingly without the civilian investment, innovation and businesses needed to generate future growth.

“What victory are we even talking about?” she asks.

For Mendel, therefore, the question is not whether Russia was responsible for starting the full-scale invasion. She repeatedly says that it was.

“Putin’s war is unjustified in its brutality and disregard for human life,” she says. Later the text is even more straightforward: “Yes, Russia started this war.” But her question is different: at what point does continuing a justified defence become more damaging to the survival of the country than accepting an unsatisfactory settlement?

Donbas and the peace talks

That question has become more immediate as US President Donald Trump's envoys have revived attempts to negotiate an end to the war, but have made little progress. 

Following visits to Moscow and Kyiv earlier this month, Jared Kushner said the territorial question remained the hardest unresolved obstacle.

Russia continues to demand Ukrainian withdrawal from the remainder of Donbas that Moscow claims but has not captured, while Kyiv has refused to hand over territory still under Ukrainian control. Reuters reported after the latest US mission that Donbas remains the central unresolved point between the sides.

Kushner told the Yalta European Strategy conference on September 11 that Vladimir Putin had outlined the territorial line Moscow wants and that the remaining elements of an agreement could be much easier to resolve if Kyiv accepted it. If Ukraine withdrew to Putin's proposed line, "then the deal is done," Kushner said. Zelenskiy refused. 

That does not mean Russia's territorial demand is the only obstacle to peace. Analysts including the Institute for the Study of War argue that Moscow's stated objectives extend beyond Donbas, while Kyiv maintains that surrendering the so-called Fortress Belt" could leave the rest of the country more vulnerable to renewed attack.

Nor is it accurate to say that Zelenskiy has simply rejected diplomacy. After the latest US visit he described some of the American proposals as “decent ideas” and said Kyiv was prepared to continue talks. He said again last week that he was willing to meet Putin and prposed an energy ceasefire for the winter, while maintaining that territorial questions require negotiation at leadership level. But this is precisely the fault line Mendel's speech attacks.

She says successive Ukrainian negotiating positions have become increasingly maximalist and argues that seeking better terms later ignores the possibility that Ukraine itself may be weaker by the time later arrives.

“Zelenskyy tells us that he will demand better peace conditions,” she says. “But the thing is that we are losing the country, the nation. There will be no people to offer those better conditions.”

The concession she refuses to make

The most revealing passage of the speech comes when Mendel approaches the issue of territorial compromise — and deliberately stops short of endorsing it.

“So the moment I say that territorial compromises are necessary... I would be signing my own treason charge and my own 15-year or life sentence,” she says. “Therefore I will not say it.”

Bankova is particulalry intollerant of those that go off-message, quick to accuse them of treason. Mendel avoids formally advocating territorial concessions while making clear that she believes the question should at least be openly debated.

Immediately afterwards comes the closest thing the speech contains to a model for a post-war Ukraine.

“Remember Finland,” she says. “Who today would say that Finland lost its war? It lost some battles — but it won its nation and its future. Ukraine can become another Finland. Ukraine can become a frontier between the West and Russia.”

The analogy refers to Finland's wars with the Soviet Union, after which Helsinki ceded roughly a tenth of its territory but retained sovereignty, rebuilt successfully and adopted neutrality during the Cold War.

It is not an exact historical parallel, and Mendel does not explain what a modern equivalent would entail. Finland's security environment was different, and Ukraine would need credible guarantees that Russia would respect whatever settlement emerged.

That is the largest unanswered question in the speech. Mendel makes a detailed case for why the war should stop, but provides no corresponding blueprint for ensuring that it does not simply begin again.

Finland or Afghanistan

If Finland represents her preferred historical analogy, Afghanistan is the bête noire.

“Remember the country into whose war trillions of dollars were poured over twenty years — a country that sank into corruption, whose institutions weakened, until at last Kabul fell to the Taliban,” she says.

“You are moving Ukraine down that very same road. Our institutions are buckling under corruption and a self-assured autocracy; our people are fleeing and losing their faith; and Russia keeps advancing.” And she makes the comparison explicit.

“To defend Zelensky's policies today is to defend a status quo that is an Afghanistan path for Ukraine and a historical shame for the West.”

The analogy is polemical. Ukraine is not Afghanistan: it has functioning state institutions, a large and experienced army, an increasingly sophisticated domestic defence industry and a formal path towards EU membership.

But Mendel's narrower point is more difficult to dismiss: outside financing and weapons cannot by themselves compensate indefinitely for population loss, weak growth, corruption and public exhaustion.

And opinion inside Ukraine has changed markedly as the war has dragged on.

Mendel cites polling showing that 66% of Ukrainians now favour seeking an end to the war as soon as possible. Her broader point is that advocating negotiations no longer represents a marginal position and should not automatically be equated with supporting Russia.

“Peace cannot be pro-Russian,” she says. “Peace is the only way out of the crisis in which we are all drowning — and the Ukrainian people first of all.”

A direct challenge to Brussels

The speech is aimed almost as much at Europe as it is at Zelenskiy.

Mendel accuses Western policymakers of turning continued military resistance into a moral absolute while being insulated from its human consequences.

She questions Europe's rearmament drive and argues that the constant presentation of Russia as an existential enemy risks acquiring its own momentum.

“The more a society is prepared for war, the greater the pressure to justify that preparation,” she says. “And sooner or later, that logic risks producing the very conflict it claims to prevent.”

That directly contradicts the prevailing argument in Brussels, Warsaw and other European capitals that rapid rearmament is necessary precisely to deter a Russian attack and prevent another war.

The due day of delievery of Mendel's speech was particularly  poignant on September 16, which is almost certaintly why the AfD invited her to speek on that date. 

Earlier in the day European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen used her annual State of the Union speech to reiterate Europe's commitment to Ukraine, announce new European security mechanisms and call for significantly stronger European defence capabilities. "Defence spending in Europe is up 80%," von der Leyen told delegates in the EU parliament. She has been one of the most notible Russia hauks as the war drags into its fifth year. 

Hours later Mendel was due to argue in the same institution that the logic of continued war and rearmament is itself helping to destroy the country Europe says it is defending - and destroying Europe too thanks to the unintended bounce back effect of sanctions on the European Union. 

That pain is now having a consequential impact on European, and especially German, domestic politics. Her choice of an AfD-sponsored event is politically important. The German party has consistently challenged the mainstream European position on Russia and Ukraine. Mendel herself acknowledged to IntelliNews that she could be criticised for her choice of platform, while insisting that this did not justify preventing her from speaking.

“I might be wrong in many things – in choosing platforms for example. I'm not perfect,” she said after she was barred. “But banning me? They really just don’t want to hear Ukrainians.”

The speech's strongest argument — and its missing piece

Mendel's case is ultimately less that Russia deserves concessions than that Ukraine cannot afford an indefinite war of attrition. She does not deny Russian aggression. She does not argue that occupied Ukrainian territories legitimately belong to Moscow. She does not present Putin as trustworthy. Instead she changes the metric.

The metre of this war is now much more simple: the success of Ukrainian policy, she argues, should be judged simply by whether a viable Ukrainian nation exists at the end of it. And that is now an open question.

But the distinction also exposes the unresolved weakness in her own case. If Ukraine accepts territorial losses but Russia uses the settlement merely to regroup and attack again, then stopping the war now may postpone rather than prevent the destruction Mendel fears.

If, however, continued fighting cannot realistically restore Ukraine's borders and progressively leaves it with fewer people, more debt, a damaged economy and shrinking territory, then insisting on victory before negotiation carries risks of its own.

The speech offers no way to know which of those futures is more likely. But her attempt to give the speech was an attempt to open this debate - and attempt that was denied by Bankova, by many accounts. It was not the meat of the speech that was important; it was simply insisting that Europe and Ukraine should be allowed to ask the question.

“There is no justification — none — for such a monstrous loss of life and of human capital,” Mendel says near the end, who framed her ban as a question of freedom of speech in the rules-based order of the EU that is supposed to be core to the European project - and just got slapped in the face by the poltics of an elite-driven narrative.

“When the accounting is finally done, it will not be measured in territory gained or lost, nor in weapons delivered, nor in the applause of red carpets. It will be measured in lives,”

Her final formulation is the clearest summary of the speech that never happened: