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Issued on: 05/02/2025 -
Issued on: 05/02/2025 -
FRANCE 24 spoke to Iuliia Mendel, who was the spokesperson for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky from 2019 to 2021. She is the author of "The Fight of Our Lives: My Time with Zelenskyy, Ukraine's Battle for Democracy, and What It Means for the World". In an interview with British journalist Piers Morgan on Tuesday, the Ukrainian president said he was ready to negotiate directly with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. Mendel called this a "very realistic approach", saying that "continuing this war of attrition actually is making us weaker". Mendel added that the "majority of the people [in Ukraine] definitely agree [on the need for a] ceasefire".
In the Piers Morgan interview on Tuesday, Zelensky estimated Ukrainian casualties in the nearly three-year-old war against Russia at 45,100, with the number of injured at 390,000.
"We perhaps cannot win this war just militarily and we need to think about our people," Mendel said of Zelensky's apparent willingness to go to the negotiating table.
Mendel cautioned that "negotiations [with Russia] will be very difficult". Among these difficulties: Russian President Vladimir Putin's red lines in any peace talks include prohibiting Ukraine from ever joining NATO.
The 'illusion' of NATO membership?
Is Ukraine ready to give up on NATO membership? "We have been negotiating the invitation to NATO for the last three years," Mendel noted. However, she admitted that "there is definitely an opposition from many members from NATO", calling this "understandable because NATO is afraid to escalate the war further".
She added: "I don't think that it is realistic to exchange so many lives of Ukrainians and actually to put under existence the Ukrainian nation for [the] illusion that NATO will invite us at some point."
"Russia is occupying around 20 percent of Ukraine, but it's actively shelling around eight or nine regions of Ukraine every day, hugely with artillery, with a drone safari on civilians, with aerial- guided bombs, with missiles, with everything that Russia has," Mendel noted. "You cannot imagine what it means living in those territories."
Mendel said that those Ukrainians who are living under shelling are the most eager for a ceasefire. "I'm talking here to different people, including from those regions that I mentioned that are under shelling. And I hear only one thought there: that people are eager to have [a] ceasefire under any circumstances."
The "majority of the people [in Ukraine] definitely agree [on the need for a] ceasefire," she concluded.
By: Marc Perelman
Play (11:57 min)
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