12 May, 08:50
The ninety-minute interview that Yulia Mendel gave to Tucker Carlson's channel, published on May 11, immediately became a media event.
The former spokeswoman for Ukraine's president leveled a series of serious accusations against Volodymyr Zelensky - from psychological instability to alleged involvement in corruption schemes - and closed with an address to Putin in Russian. The Presidential Office responded with restraint: communications adviser Dmytro Lytvyn noted that Mendel had not participated in any negotiations and was "long out of touch with reality."
That is technically accurate. But it misses the point entirely.
The Conflict of Interest as a Starting Point
Before analyzing the substance of the interview, the more important question is whether it should have happened at all. Yulia Mendel served as presidential spokeswoman from June 2019 to July 2021. During that period she had access to the internal communications of the Presidential Office, accompanied Zelensky on international trips, and participated in the Normandy Format talks in Paris in December 2019.
Public statements by a former official of that rank - on the channel of a journalist widely associated in Ukraine with pro-Russian narratives - constitute a textbook conflict of interest. Whatever the merits of the accusations themselves, the choice of platform and format forecloses any claim to impartiality. An interview with Carlson is not journalism and not civic conscience. It is an instrument of influence, and Mendel understood that perfectly well.
The question is not whether personal grievance played a role - the attentive reader will find ample evidence of it in the interview itself. The question is why someone with that background ended up in a position where such a move became possible, and - by all appearances - inevitable.
Stalin Was Right
"Cadres decide everything" - the formula Stalin delivered in 1935 - remains analytically sound regardless of its author. Any institution is only as strong as the people entrusted with it. Strategy, communications, decision-making architecture - all of it is secondary to the quality of personnel selection.
Mendel entered her position through patronage - through networks connected to Viktor Pinchuk and associated grant structures. Not through open competition, not through systematic competency assessment, not through any vetting process appropriate to the role. Through a recommendation. This was not an exception in how Zelensky's team was assembled in 2019 - it was the norm. "Familiar" and "convenient" became the selection criteria where professional qualification and institutional - not personal - loyalty should have been the standard.
Three Precedents, One Mechanism
This logic is well-documented in recent political history - and it consistently produces the same result.
In 1963, Harold Macmillan's British cabinet fell as a consequence of the Profumo Affair. Secretary of State for War John Profumo had maintained a relationship with Christine Keeler, who was simultaneously in contact with Soviet naval attaché Yevgeny Ivanov. Keeler was not an agent in any formal sense. But the complete absence of institutional oversight over the minister's social environment made the situation possible - and lethal for the government. The mechanism required no act of treason: the absence of a filter was sufficient.
In 1998, the Clinton administration faced impeachment proceedings over Monica Lewinsky - a White House intern who gained access not through competitive selection but through social connections. Whatever the degree of coordination behind Linda Tripp's subsequent actions and Kenneth Starr's prosecution, the starting point remains unchanged: non-transparent access to the president's inner circle created a vulnerability that was duly exploited.
Soviet intelligence practice systematically exploited the same principle: individuals who entered a target's environment through personal recommendations, without institutional vetting, represented a structural vulnerability regardless of their own intentions. Formal recruitment was often unnecessary - unfiltered access to the inner circle was sufficient in itself.
In all three cases, the mechanism is identical: the absence of a systematic personnel filter in forming the inner circle. Whether the individual acted from personal motives, served as an instrument of someone else's operation, or combined both - the outcome is the same.
The Systemic Picture
Mendel is not an anomaly - she is an illustration. The personnel logic that brought her to the Presidential Office replicated itself across levels and sectors.
The Midas case - a NABU investigation into schemes in the financial sector - demonstrated how individuals without proper institutional vetting gained access to state resources through networks of personal connections. Appointments within Defense Ministry structures that became the subject of major investigations during the full-scale war reproduce the same model: a recommendation in place of a competition, loyalty to a patron in place of fitness for office. Personnel rotation in the energy sector - Energoatom, regional energy companies, state procurement - presents the same picture.
The common denominator throughout is the same: selection by the criterion of "our person" has displaced selection by the criterion of "qualified person." In peacetime, this generates corruption and inefficiency. In wartime, it becomes a question of institutional survival.
A Verdict Without Appeal
Zelensky's reputational difficulties long predate the Carlson interview. But this particular episode has its own analytical value: it shows how a personnel failure of 2019 converts into an information weapon in 2026.
Time-delayed devices require no external intervention at the moment of planting. They are planted automatically - each time the criterion of "convenient" replaces the criterion of "vetted." Carlson, Pinchuk, Mendel's personal grievances - these are triggers, not causes. The cause is systemic: the absence of institutional thinking precisely where it was obligatory.
Stalin understood this logic - and applied it with extreme, criminal consistency. The paradox is that genuine democracy demands no less, but greater institutional rigor in personnel matters - precisely because it lacks repression as a fallback mechanism. Professional selection, transparent criteria, independent vetting are not bureaucratic overhead: they are a condition of the system's survival. An imitation democracy cannot afford them - it is held together by personal loyalty rather than institutional quality. And that is why Mendel's interview is not a mistake, but the logical conclusion of a system in which no room was left for democracy at all.