Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was ready to cede Donbas at the talks in Istanbul in 2022, said Yulia Mendel, the former press secretary of the Ukrainian leader (2019-2021), in an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson, citing “people who represented Ukraine“ at these talks.
“I spoke with people who represented Ukraine at the talks in Istanbul in 2022. Then they almost reached an agreement. "The most important thing is that Zelensky personally agreed to give up Donbass, and at that moment I was shocked," she said.
According to her, he was ready to agree to this in order to end the conflict. “And now he stands in front of millions of viewers and says: “I cannot give up Donbas“, she said.
In response to Mendel's comments, Dmitry Lytvyn, an advisor to the head of the Ukrainian presidential office, said that she had not participated in either the negotiations or the decision-making process and that “she has been out of the loop for a long time“, LIGA.net quoted him as saying.
He said that commenting on such statements was “frivolous“.
Mendel served as Zelensky's spokesperson from 2019 to 2021 and left the administration before the war began.
According to official documents and analyses of the Istanbul Communiqué from the spring of 2022, the negotiators deliberately left the issue of the borders and status of Donbas and Crimea for future direct meetings between Zelensky and Putin, instead of agreeing to a preliminary concession of territories.
In recent years, Yulia Mendel has changed her public stance and become highly critical of the government of Volodymyr Zelensky, actively calling for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations with Russia, even if this involves territorial compromises.