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It should have been a big news story this week, but it wasn’t. The former press secretary of Ukraine’s pretend president, Vladimir Zelensky, was banned from addressing the European Parliament.

Why? Because Iuliia Mendel was scheduled to deliver damning insights about rampant corruption in the Zelensky regime and how the NATO-backed war in her country is a money-making racket.

How ironic that such testimony is not permitted in the supposed seat of European democracy and values. If free speech challenges the official narrative, then it is banned. The only permitted narrative is that Ukraine is a model of democracy seeking membership of the European Union and NATO but is thwarted by “Russian aggression.” How fragile is the depiction that anyone with a different perspective and facts is bluntly suppressed and smeared as a Russian propagandist?

Remarkably, hardly any Western media reported on the fiasco.

Iuliia Mendel served as Zelensky’s personal media aide from 2019 to 2021, when she resigned, disillusioned by his corruption. She witnessed up close the wheeling and dealing, the manic behavior of Zelensky and his cronies, and his contempt for democracy. She describes her testimony as a “moral duty” to tell fellow Ukrainians and the rest of the world about the real nature of her former boss. That he is a con artist with psychopathic tendencies who does not care a jot about the lives of Ukrainian people. His only concern is to stay in power for as long as possible and enrich himself from the billions of Western taxpayer money that is funneled into his regime.

Zelensky and his regime in Kiev are the “biggest obstacles to peace,” says Mendel, who gave this interview to Weltwoche, after she was prevented from entering the European Parliament. The corruption in Ukraine, she says, depends on the war continuing, and that is why the Kiev regime vetoes any diplomatic effort to end the nearly five-year conflict. Anyone who opposes the war and calls for diplomacy is sanctioned, imprisoned, or shipped off to the front line to die. Zelensky oversees a military junta (that the West calls “democracy”) in which his goons hunt down people on the streets for conscription. To get out of the meat grinder, they have to pay a bribe of up to $20,000.

Mendel first made waves when she was interviewed in May earlier this year by American broadcaster Tucker Carlson. In that interview, she described Zelensky as a drug-abusing dictator who was emotionally unstable, albeit covered up by his acting skills as a former entertainer. The Western political and media backers, of course, play along by turning a blind eye to the charade and lionize him as a “wartime Churchillian hero.”

The whole thing is a despicable racket played on Western taxpayers and the long-suffering Ukrainian people.

For spilling the beans on her former boss, Mendel was immediately put on the Ukrainian state-backed Mirotvorets blacklist as a “Russian propagandist.” Mirotvorets has gained notoriety as a kill list, as several people it has blacklisted have ended up dead. She says she is banned from making public broadcasts to fellow Ukrainians by Western media companies like Meta/Facebook.

Earlier this week, days before she was to address the European Parliament, the Zelensky regime announced sanctions against Mendel. She cannot access Ukrainian assets and cannot reenter the country out of fear that her life is in danger. She worries that her family in Ukraine will be persecuted, sent to the front line as retribution for her alleged “treason”.

The decision to ban her from speaking before the Strasbourg assembly would have been taken by European Parliament President Roberta Metsola. Metsola, as with other senior EU leaders, such as Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Council President António Costa, is a die-hard supporter of Ukraine, funneling billions in aid to the regime.

Mendel comes across as a person of integrity, moral decency, and genuine independence. She categorically rejects the accusation that she is “pro-Russian”. Indeed, in her interviews with Carlson and Weltwoche, Mendel is highly critical of Russia for what she calls a cruel invasion of her country. It seems crystal clear that her abiding concern is to stop the war from destroying her homeland.

However, the war cannot be stopped because the Zelensky regime and its European NATO backers are invested in prolonging it. The corruption of the regime is married to the ideology of Russophobia that is endemic in the European elite.

This perspective was corroborated by two other impeccable sources this week. Like Mendel, these two other figures are also ignored by Western media.

Professor Ivan Katchanovski of Ottawa University was interviewed by Lena Petrova, in which he surveyed the rank corruption and NeoNazi politics of the Kiev regime.

Katchanovski’s ground-breaking research revealed how the Maidan sniper massacre, in which over 100 protesters and police officers were murdered in Kiev in February 2014, was a false-flag operation by NeoNazi elements and their NATO sponsors that precipitated the coup. The coup led to the takeover of the Ukrainian state and security forces by fascist forces, which in turn led to the war with Russia in 2022.

Zelensky, who is nominally Jewish, relies on the NeoNazi forces for his political survival and the continuation of corruption that is rife within the regime. Prof Katchanovski, who is from Ukraine, points out that numerous ministers, aides and top law officials close to Zelensky’s circle have had to resign or flee the country as a result of incessant graft scandals. It defies belief that Zelensky is not also up to his neck in racketeering. Corruption, war, and NeoNazism are all intertwined as a result of NATO’s involvement in the country since its independence in 1991 from the Soviet Union after the latter collapsed.

Another corroborating view is that of eminent American scholar Professor John Mearsheimer. He gave a wide-ranging account this week of a recent visit to Russia during which he met senior government officials, policymakers and diplomats. Mearsheimer said, perhaps surprisingly to some, that during his many conversations he did not detect any deep animosity towards Ukraine or the Ukrainian people among his Russian interlocutors or indeed among ordinary Russians. “Many Russians I met have family in Ukraine… have shared cultural heritage,” he remarked.

Mearsheimer pinpoints the tragic demise of Ukraine and its historic ties with Russia to the policy of NATO trying to bring the newly independent country into the U.S.-led military alliance back in 2008 with the Bucharest Declaration. That policy ensured that the two countries were henceforth on a collision course of conflict, which eventually erupted in 2022. The bigger Western objective was to use Ukraine as a proxy to wage war and destabilize Russia. In short, for the “strategic defeat of Russia.”

In pursuing that imperialist objective, Ukraine has been infected with NeoNazism, corruption, and a de facto dictatorship headed up by a drug-abusing clown who ruthlessly suppresses any opposition. Millions of people have been displaced, killed, and maimed; the society and economy are in abysmal ruins.

But this truth is not to be permitted by the Western ideologues and their controlled media, who persist with their Russophobic fantasies despite the destruction and suffering being unleashed and the very real danger of an all-out war exploding in Europe. The Western elites will indulge all sorts of evils in their pursuit of trying to vanquish Russia. Ukraine has been utterly destroyed by Western imperialist aims. And yet, Russia is blamed as the villain in this horrendous, criminal venture.