Sanctions, dissent and the dangerous elasticity of wartime power
By Matthew Parish
Tuesday 15 September 2026
On 13 September 2026 President Volodymyr Zelenskyy imposed ten-year sanctions upon Yuliia Mendel, his former press secretary and now one of his more conspicuous critics. Mendel served as Zelenskyy’s first presidential press secretary between 2019 and 2021, when his administration was still young and the full-scale Russian invasion lay in the future. She has since undergone a remarkable political transformation, moving from the President’s inner circle to increasingly vehement criticism of him from abroad. The sanctions freeze assets, restrict economic activity and, unusually, restrict access from within Ukraine to her social-media accounts.
The immediate controversy surrounding Mendel should not obscure the more important issue. Whether one thinks her recent pronouncements sensible, eccentric, irresponsible or downright offensive, the decision raises a question about the architecture of political power in wartime Ukraine that will survive Mendel herself. Sanctions were conceived principally as instruments of national security and foreign policy. When they become a mechanism by which the executive branch imposes severe disabilities upon its own citizens, particularly citizens who are political critics, the distinction between national-security policy and punishment begins to become dangerously indistinct.
The formal basis of the decision is clear. Presidential Decree No. 901/2026 put into effect a decision of the National Security and Defence Council, acting upon proposals submitted by the Security Service of Ukraine. The decision applies personal special economic and other restrictive measures to a number of individuals. The Ukrainian authorities say that the ten Russian and Ukrainian individuals concerned disseminate disinformation and Russian propaganda and support Russia’s aggressive policy towards Ukraine.
There is no particular reason to romanticise Mendel in considering whether this was wise. Her recent public interventions have been extraordinary. In an interview with Tucker Carlson in May she made serious allegations about Zelenskyy and his entourage, including claims concerning corruption and drug use, and assertions about the 2022 Istanbul negotiations that the President’s Office has disputed. Some of the allegations were based upon unnamed sources or were presented without publicly verifiable evidence. Ukrainian critics have accordingly accused her of repeating themes useful to Russian propaganda.
Moreover, the timing is especially politically combustible. Mendel is due to participate on 16 September in an event at the European Parliament organised with the involvement of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, a party whose prominent figures have repeatedly adopted positions sympathetic towards Moscow. Mendel says that she intends to advocate peace and that peace need not be pro-Russian. To many Ukrainians, however, appearing at such an event while Ukraine remains at war will inevitably look very different.
None of this resolves the underlying problem. Indeed, that is precisely the point. Democracies do not require procedural protections principally for people who say agreeable things. The difficult cases arise when somebody says things that are reckless, implausible, offensive, politically damaging or perhaps even beneficial to an enemy. At that point a constitutional democracy has to decide whether such conduct constitutes a crime, participation in enemy activity or merely speech that the government regards as dangerous. Those categories must not quietly collapse into one another.
Mendel herself has described the sanctions as unconstitutional and portrayed them as an attempt to punish advocates of peace. That is her characterisation, rather than an established judicial conclusion, and it should be treated accordingly. Yet the objection points towards a genuine constitutional tension. Sanctions are executive restrictions. Criminal punishment, by contrast, ordinarily requires accusation, evidence, adjudication and an opportunity for the accused to defend herself. If an individual’s conduct genuinely amounts to treason, collaboration or another criminal offence, Ukraine has criminal laws and courts with which to address it. The attraction of sanctions is precisely that they can operate much more rapidly. Their constitutional danger lies in the same characteristic.
Ukraine has compelling reasons for maintaining such extraordinary machinery. It is not a peaceful western European state engaged in an abstract debate about civil liberties. Russia has invaded the country, occupied its territory, killed its citizens and conducted an enormous information war alongside its military campaign. Moscow has spent years cultivating politicians, media personalities, businessmen and opinion-formers inside Ukraine. A state facing an existential enemy cannot reasonably be expected to treat organised hostile influence as though it were merely another contribution to a university debating society.
The Ukrainian sanctions system developed its political legitimacy against precisely this background. Freezing the assets of Russian oligarchs, restricting companies financing aggression, obstructing Russia’s shadow fleet or preventing identifiable Kremlin influence networks from operating freely in Ukraine are readily comprehensible exercises of wartime state power. Indeed, the same package of presidential action this month included measures against Russian shadow-fleet vessels and entities associated with Rostec.
But instruments acquire lives of their own. Once a government discovers an exceptionally efficient administrative mechanism for disabling dangerous people, there is an institutional temptation gradually to enlarge the meaning of “dangerous”. The suspected Russian agent becomes the suspected Russian collaborator; the collaborator becomes the businessman accused of facilitating Russian interests; the political figure accused of advancing Russian narratives follows; eventually the government’s troublesome critic may find himself standing somewhere along the same continuum.
That is why the Mendel decision matters beyond the personality involved. She is not the first former Zelenskyy associate to be subjected to sanctions. In May 2026 sanctions were imposed upon Andriy Bohdan, Zelenskyy’s former chief of staff. The much more politically significant precedent came in February 2025, when former President Petro Poroshenko, Zelenskyy’s principal opponent in the 2019 presidential election, was sanctioned on national-security grounds. The Supreme Court subsequently rejected Poroshenko’s attempt to overturn the measures, but the wider controversy concerning the use of sanctions against Ukrainian political figures has persisted.
The cumulative pattern therefore deserves scrutiny even if each individual decision might be defensible when examined separately. A president who sanctions a Russian oligarch is exercising an orthodox weapon of economic warfare. A president who sanctions an opposition politician occupies more complicated territory. A president who sanctions his own former press secretary after she becomes a vociferous personal critic creates an appearance problem that no invocation of national security can entirely eliminate.
Appearances matter especially because wartime Ukraine is accumulating precedents for the constitutional order that will follow the war. Emergency powers rarely disappear as neatly as they arrived. Institutions become accustomed to them, officials learn their convenience and citizens become habituated to administrative shortcuts that would once have appeared extraordinary. The most important constitutional question facing Ukraine is therefore not simply whether each wartime measure can be justified by the extraordinary circumstances of Russian aggression. It is which habits of government Ukraine wishes to carry into the peace.
There is also an international dimension. Ukraine’s strongest argument for western support has never rested solely upon geopolitics. Kyiv presents its war as part of a broader contest between an authoritarian Russian model and a democratic European one. This claim has considerable force. Ukraine has held competitive elections, possesses a vigorous civil society and continues to sustain remarkably energetic political argument under conditions in which Russian missiles and drones strike its cities almost every day. But precisely because Ukraine’s European identity is part of the moral foundation of western support, restrictions imposed upon political critics attract disproportionate attention.
Moscow will exploit the Mendel affair whatever its merits. Russian propaganda has always sought to portray Ukraine as an authoritarian state controlled by an illegitimate regime. This narrative is grotesque when compared with Russia itself, where meaningful political opposition has been crushed and critics of the Kremlin have been imprisoned, exiled or killed. Nevertheless, the fact that Russian propaganda is hypocritical does not mean Ukraine should provide it with unnecessary material.
There is a further irony. Sanctioning controversial speakers may magnify them. Mendel had already attracted attention through provocative interviews, but presidential sanctions transform her from a former press secretary with increasingly unusual views into an international free-speech controversy. Every allegation she now makes will be accompanied by the observation that the President she criticises has imposed personal sanctions upon her. A measure intended to diminish the reach of a hostile narrative may therefore increase its audience.
The better democratic response to dubious allegations is generally evidence. If Mendel’s assertions concerning the Istanbul negotiations are false, the participants and documentary record should establish that insofar as wartime confidentiality permits. If allegations of corruption are unsupported, they should be challenged as unsupported. If statements reproduce identifiable Russian disinformation, the provenance of that disinformation should be exposed. Ukraine has an exceptionally sophisticated civil society and media environment capable of undertaking precisely this work.
There will nevertheless remain cases in which speech crosses into genuine assistance to the enemy. Wartime democracies cannot pretend otherwise. Intelligence relationships, covert financing, coordinated propaganda and deliberate participation in hostile influence operations may legitimately justify state intervention. Yet the more severe the consequences imposed upon a citizen, the greater should be the demand for demonstrable evidence, procedural safeguards and independent review. Otherwise the state becomes both accuser and judge.
Zelenskyy’s dilemma is in this respect larger than Zelenskyy. Every Ukrainian government that follows him will inherit the machinery constructed during this war. A power used today against someone many Ukrainians dislike may tomorrow be used against someone they admire. Constitutional restraints are built not upon confidence that today’s rulers are wicked but upon recognition that tomorrow’s rulers are unknown.
There is an understandable temptation in wartime to treat criticism of the government, criticism of the war and sympathy for Russia as points upon a single spectrum. They are not. A Ukrainian may favour negotiations without favouring Russian victory. A citizen may criticise Zelenskyy without supporting Vladimir Putin. Someone may make foolish or demonstrably false claims without being a Russian agent. Conversely, somebody presenting himself as an innocent peace campaigner may indeed be participating knowingly in an adversary’s influence operation. The purpose of law and due process is precisely to distinguish these cases.
Mendel’s own rhetoric deserves the same scepticism. Her assertion that Ukraine is becoming a dictatorship is an extravagant description of a country that still contains opposition politicians, independent journalists and exceptionally vigorous public criticism of the government while fighting the largest European war since 1945. The existence of controversial sanctions does not turn Ukraine into Russia. But dismissing the criticism merely because Mendel overstates it would be equally mistaken. Democratic erosion rarely announces itself with a declaration that democracy has ended. It occurs through incremental extensions of powers originally created for exceptional purposes.
This is why Zelenskyy’s decision is more consequential than the fortunes of one former aide. Ukraine is fighting not merely for territory but for the nature of the state that will inhabit that territory. Its extraordinary wartime resilience has derived partly from the fact that Ukrainians regard their political system, for all its imperfections, as fundamentally different from the authoritarian order Russia seeks to impose upon them.
The strongest Ukraine therefore need not be the Ukraine in which the government possesses the greatest possible power to silence people who say irresponsible things. It may instead be the Ukraine confident enough to distinguish an enemy from a critic, propaganda from dissent and criminal collaboration from foolish speech. That distinction is difficult in war. Preserving it is nevertheless one of the things for which the war is being fought.
