From New Delhi, the Ukraine war increasingly looks like a fiscal problem masquerading as a military one.
Yulia Mendel, President Volodymyr Zelensky's own press secretary from 2019-2021, said on X on September 27 that Ukraine is facing a double financial chasm: $52.6 billion needed for the 2027 budget, of which only $20 billion is confirmed, plus an additional $27 billion defense shortfall for 2026 disclosed in late August. Her summary: "The Ukrainian government has no real plan" except hoping “someone else will keep paying for a war they refuse to end.”
Mendel's critique is significant because it comes from inside the original Zelensky project, not from Moscow. She served during his peacemaker phase, when in Paris in 2019 he allegedly told Vladimir Putin Ukraine would not join NATO. Now she calls his current strategy "national suicide" and says Kyiv has been sanctioned by its own leader for saying so, Zelensky placed sanctions, including an asset freeze, on Mendel this month after she planned to speak at the European Parliament.
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Her deeper charges echo India's own cautionary tales of donornomics. Ukraine's external debt is now over 110% of GDP. EU and IMF donors, she argues, are withholding funds because "there are no reforms" on taxation, governance and corruption. Meanwhile, she calculates, Ukraine could fund 360,000 voluntary contract soldiers with $10,000 bonuses for $3.6 billion, money she alleges existed but was "stolen," with forced mobilization generating $5 billion a year in bribes.
For India, which has kept strategic autonomy and refused to underwrite the war, the lesson is stark. As Mendel wrote in ‘The Spectator’ on September 15: there is a "vast difference between the public relations campaign and the reality." Kyiv sold a winning narrative all summer, then in September said it needed 300 interceptor missiles to survive winter, then said it needs tens of billions to survive the budget.
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When a war economy produces no science, no small business, only drone factories funded by European loans, as Mendel argues, it ceases to be about victory. It becomes, in her words, "an instrument of the nation's suicide" with a PR team.
India's interest is not in who wins the narrative, but who pays the bill. Europe is reconsidering.
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