Iuliia Mendel, who served as press secretary to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy from June 2019 to July 2021, gave a sweeping and damaging interview to American commentator Tucker Carlson on May 11, making a series of allegations about her former boss ranging from drug use and media suppression to deliberate prolongation of the war for financial gain.

The interview, nearly 100 minutes long, was promoted by Carlson's show under the headline "Corruption, drugs and greed: Volodymyr Zelenskiy's longtime press secretary on the secret world of the West's favourite dictator."

Mendel opened by stressing her initial loyalty to Zelenskiy. "I never expected to see myself here talking about my former boss," she said. "I used to work for him for two years, since 2019 till 2021. I was very faithful towards him. I supported him, and I supported him in 2022 when Russia made its large-scale invasion. As millions of Ukrainians, I was grateful that he stayed in the country."

But as IntelliNews has reported, Medel has become an increasingly outspoken critic of her former boss since she resigned from her post in July 2021 in ambiguous circumstances. Publicly, she said she left because she felt the role had become too constrained and that her ability to do genuine communications work was being undermined by the inner circle around Zelenskyy — particularly figures like Andriy Yermak, chief of the presidential office at the time, who resigned recently after being caught up in the Energoatom corruption scandal and who was charged with suspicion of corruption on May 11.

She was a familiar face at public events for much of Zelenskiy's term in office and protectively loyal to her boss. She even got into trouble when on one occasion she manhandled Financial Times correspondent Christopher Miller away from Zelenskiy while he was asking an impromptu question during a walk-around in Kyiv, who complained to her, “That was not cool.”

But after four years of grinding war and a metastasising corruption scandal, she has recently become a vocal critic of the current regime. Last week she alleged that up to $7bn could have flowed from Ukraine’s state coffers into the missile-maker Fire Point, potentially earning Bankova’s insiders vast profits in a blog post.

Mendel reported that Zelenskiy is very angry with her public comments, which the president sees as a personal attack, and had threatened unspecified "punishments." During the interview with Carlson she added that she does not believe she can safely return to Ukraine after giving the interview.

Bankova has yet to issue a public comment on the interview and its contents.

Drugs: "an open secret"

The most widely reported section of the interview concerned allegations about Zelenskiy's drug use. He has long been accused of using cocaine, from his days as a comedian.

When Carlson asked directly whether Zelenskiy used drugs, Mendel replied: "This is an open secret." She was careful to note the limits of her direct knowledge: "The thing is that I've never seen him taking drugs. However, while writing my book, I met a lot of people who confirmed that they saw him taking drugs in different clubs."

She alleged that people who have known Zelenskiy for 20 to 25 years consistently describe cocaine use and claimed that before interviews he had a habit of spending 15 minutes in the bathroom and emerging as a "different person." She said: "All these people are talking about cocaine, yes."

Drug use allegations against Zelenskiy are not new — they first surfaced during the 2019 presidential election campaign, when Zelenskiy defeated Petro Poroshenko. Zelenskiy dismissed the claims as slander at the time; both candidates underwent drug and alcohol tests. None of Mendel's allegations constitute direct eyewitness testimony, and she acknowledged she had not personally seen drug use.

The war: "He thrives on it"

Mendel alleged that Zelenskiy had no genuine incentive to end the war, describing him as financially and politically dependent on its continuation. She alleged that Zelenskiy had promised to hand over the Donbas during the Istanbul negotiations with Russia in 2022 — a claim that, if accurate, would directly contradict the Ukrainian government's public position that territorial concessions are unacceptable. Reportedly Zelenskiy changed his mind after meeting with former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson who flew to Kyiv a few days after the failed 2022 Istanbul peace deal was agreed and persuaded Zelenskiy to “fight on.” She did not provide documentary evidence for this assertion.

On the question of war termination, she argued that peace would strip Zelenskiy of the conditions that sustain his political survival. The conflict, she alleged, has created a system in which a small circle around the president extracts enormous financial benefits from weapons contracts, international aid flows and state procurement — referencing the ongoing Operation Midas investigation by Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau, which has already resulted in the arrest of former Energy Minister German Halushchenko and searches at the premises of former presidential chief of staff Andriy Yermak.

Media control: "like Goebbels"

Mendel described a media environment she said had become systematically controlled by the presidential office. She alleged that after a drop in ratings in 2019, Zelenskiy instructed his PR team to improve his image and held up the effectiveness of Nazi Germany's propaganda as a model — a claim that, she said, she personally witnessed. The reference has been widely picked up in Russian state media as propaganda. One of the long-standing complaints by the Kremlin is that the Poroshenko administration came to power thanks to a far-right orchestrated coup d'état and one of its demands has been for the “denazification” of Ukraine – a demand it has dropped in the more recent US-brokered peace talks that produced a 27-point peace plan (27PPP) that is now in limbo.

She alleged that journalists and commentators who criticise Zelenskiy are systematically persecuted, marginalised or cancelled, and that the media space in Ukraine has been effectively captured by oligarchs aligned with the presidential office.

The Swiss Federal Intelligence Service concluded in a 2023 study that Zelenskiy is showing “authoritarian traits” especially in his fight with Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko, who has been a constant Zelenskiy-critic. Zelenskiy is no longer the most popular politician in the country and his grip on power is weakening, The Spectator associate editor Owen Matthews said in a hard-hitting piece last year. Yermak also came in for frequent criticism for the Machiavellian grip he maintains on power in a profile by Politico. Bankova has taken tight control of the government’s media message. But the public have been growing increasingly tired of the endless upbeat state-propaganda, The Kyiv Independent reported at the start of last year.

In one of the bigger media scandals, in early 2024, members of the media outlet Bihus.info were secretly wiretapped with hidden cameras reportedly installed in hotel rooms during a staff retreat. The recordings were later leaked online in what many Ukrainian journalists and media watchdogs described as an intimidation campaign. Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, which is directly under the president’s control, later acknowledged that some of its personnel were involved, and a senior department head was dismissed.

Separately, Mendel referenced the case of opposition politician Viktor Medvedchuk — Zelenskiy's pre-war political nemesis and a close personal friend of Putin’s — who saw the closure of television channels aligned with him in 2021.

Frontlines as punishment

One section of the interview, titled "Zelenskiy's Use of the Frontlines as Punishment," covered Mendel's allegations that Zelenskiy sent political enemies and inconvenient figures to frontline military positions as a form of pressure or retaliation — a practice that, she alleged, is well known within Ukrainian political circles. She did not name specific individuals in the excerpts published.

The public figure vs the private one

Mendel alleged that Zelenskiy presents one persona publicly while behaving differently in private, describing the Ukrainian leader as continuing to perform in what she characterised as an "acting role" while serving as president — a reference to his background as a famous actor and comedian with the Kvartal 95 production company before entering politics. She described him as obsessed with his public image both domestically and internationally.

Pro-Kremlin Carlson

The interview was given to Tucker Carlson — a US commentator who was banned from Ukraine in 2021 and is well known as a Kremlin sympathiser. His programme has been criticised for amplifying pro-Russian narratives.

The primary outlets promoting the Mendel interview include RT, Russian state television's international arm, and a range of pro-Russian commentary sites. That context does not invalidate Mendel's allegations, but the support of RT undermines the impact of the allegations and will be used to sully Mendel’s image and reputation as a result.

Nevertheless, Mendel is a credible witness to the inner workings of the Zelenskiy administration in its first two years. Her claims about events after 2021 are second-hand, and several of her most serious allegations — drug use, Donbas concessions —lacked direct evidence or require corroboration from independent sources.

More broadly, Zelenskiy is under increasing pressure as his popularity wanes in the face of the expanding NABU corruption investigation that has caught up many of his closest associates, who have been accused of siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars of state money. While so far Zelenskiy himself has not been directly implicated in the kickback and embezzling schemes, most of the people in his inner circle have been.

Corruption has overtaken the war with Russia as the greatest perceived threat to Ukraine’s future, according to a new poll from Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) released on May 6 that highlights mounting public frustration over governance despite the country’s wartime unity.

The survey found that 54% of Ukrainians now regard corruption as the main danger facing the country, compared with 39% who identified the war as the greater threat. Two years ago, the figures stood at 48% and 36% respectively, indicating that concern over corruption has widened even as fighting with Russia continues across the front line.