NEW YORK (AP) — A journalist and former aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has a book coming out this fall, one of the first announced releases about Zelenskyy and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
One Signal Publishers announced Wednesday that it had acquired Iuliia Mendel’s “The Fight of Our Lives.” Mendel served as Zelenskyy’s press secretary and spokesperson from 2019-2021 and has been sending dispatches about the war to the Washington Post. According to One Signal, a Simon & Schuster imprint, Mendel will write about everything from Zelenskyy’s meetings with Soviet leader Vladimir Putin to the phone calls with then-President Donald Trump that led to his impeachment for trying to pressure Zelenskyy into investigating Joe Biden.
Mendel also will write on the “massive economic problems facing Ukraine, entrenched corrupt oligarchs in league with Russia, and — in shades of the United States’ recent federal election — the Kremlin’s repeated attacks to discredit Zelenskyy through disinformation and an army of bots and trolls,” One Signal’s announcement reads in part.
Mendel, 35, has written for the Post and The New York Times among others.
“I’ve dreamed all my life of telling the story of Ukraine. It’s a triumphant one.” Mendel said in a statement. “A story not of victims, but of heroes in defense of freedom. Now, as Ukraine, the largest of the post-Soviet republics, stands up for democracy against the Russian army for all to see, I can finally share that story with the world.”
