In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an American editor and publisher, Katrina vanden Heuvel (@KatrinaNation). She's best-known for blaming "NATO expansion" and the US on the Russo-Ukrainian War, and for running the pro-Russian magazine The Nation.
1/23
Vanden Heuvel is the daughter of Jean Stein, an heiress and author, and William vanden Heuvel, an attorney, former US ambassador and member of JFK's administration. While studying at Princeton, she met a charismatic Professor of politics, Stephen F. Cohen, fell in love...
2/23
...and never looked back. One can safely assume that Stephen's worldview, especially on USSR & Russia, heavily influenced vanden Heuvel's.
Eventually in 1984 she became the assistant editor of foreign affairs at The Nation, a progressive magazine focusing on cultural...
3/23
...news and politics. In 1989, she became its editor-at-large, responsible for the magazine's coverage of the USSR. In 1995, when she was promoted as the chief editor, The Nation was bleeding money at a rate of 500 000 USD per year, so Vanden Heuvel bought the magazine with..4/23
a few other investors. During the 80s, she and Cohen had close relations with the Soviet leadership, and they were invited to the 1989 May Day parade in Red Square by the former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. In 2009 she and Cohen traveled to Moscow to...
5/23
...receive Russia’s Order of Friendship award from Sergey Lavrov.
Like so many intellectuals and scholars, she's in the "Putin's brutal invasion must be condemned, BUT the real cause was actually the US & NATO". Her husband was involved in at least 160 Nation articles,...
6/23
...and a joke began circulating around the Nation's office: “We tried to fact check Steve's pieces but we couldn’t find any facts to check.”
In Jul 2014, she claimed on television that Moscow was "calling for a cease fire" in a "civil war" in Ukraine.
7/23
As we now know, the whole "civil war" was orchestrated and funded by the Kremlin. During that time, the "prime ministers" in the puppet states of DPR and LPR were both Russian citizens, and the whole break-away was of course orchestrated by Russia.
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In Apr 2015, after Russia had annexed Crimea, vanden Heuvel and Cohen organized a panel at the World Russia Forum. The panelists included RT & Sputnik commentator Ray McGovern who attended RT's 10th anniversary party in Moscow with Jill Stein and Michael Flynn,...
9/23
...and sang beautifully at the UNSC hearing, and now-deceased journalist Robert Parry, best-known for his propaganda mill Consortium News. As a cherry on top, vanden Heuvel offered floor to Charles Bausman, a far-right pro-Russian propagandist best-known for his propaganda..10/23
...website Russia Insider and for his articles like "It's Time to Drop the Jew Taboo". Bausman was involved in the Jan 6th insurrection and fled to Moscow soon after the event.
In 2017, The Nation published a disinformation article that argued that DNC hack wasn't...
11/23
...actually a hack, but a leak. The article wasn't properly fact-checked and contained disinformation from William Craddick, a man who allegedly created the ridiculous "PizzaGate" conspiracy theory, but was published anyway since it was very much in line with the ...
12/23
...magazine's editorial view on Russia. For example in regard to 2016 Russian election interference, the Nation relied heavily on reporting of pro-Russian propagandist and Grayzone blogger, Aaron Maté.
In 2018, Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), a "journalism watchdog",...
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..commissioned an article on The Nation's pro-Russia bias from Duncan Campbell, but this story was quietly killed by CJR in 2020. It also turned out that CJR and vanden Heuvel were deeply tied together. The story was eventually published by...
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...@BylineTimes in Feb 2023: bylinetimes.com/2023/02/04/rus…
In Sep 2020 interview with the two, Cohen laid much of the blame for the Ukraine-Russia conflict on the US and the intelligence services, blaming them for "wildly hyping" the Russia threat.
15/23
Vanden Heuvel suggested that "because mainstream media (MSM) is so focused on Putin and Russiagate", there is a major misunderstanding of Russia. Cohen also stated that "If you believe [the easing of hostilities] in détente, all you’ve got is Trump". Her "mainstream media...16/23
... has failed us" narrative has followed her narrative for a long time, even after she got her weekly column for the WaPo.
In a Democracy Now! interview she stated the "parameters for a peace agreement" are in Russia controlling both Donetsk and Luhansk.
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We can probably assume that in this scenario, Putin would also keep Crimea. As we can retrospectively say, back then this would've been a disastrous starting point for Ukraine in regard to "high-level diplomacy" and peace negotiations.
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In her May 2022 column for the WaPo, she once again smeared MSM for silencing people who talk, among other topics, about "Ukrainian neo-Nazi forces" in Ukraine. In her Nov 2022 column she quoted Aaron Maté, a propagandist who has denied al-Assad's involvement in Douma...
19/23
...chemical attacks and has been pushing pro-Russian propaganda for years now.
The biggest problem with vanden Heuvel's (and Cohen's) narrative is that they never consider the pre-war operations and involvement of Putin's regime. 1999 FSB apartment bombings, 2nd Chechen..
20/23
..War, poisoning of Viktor Yuschenko and meddling with the 2004 elections in Ukraine, murder of Anna Politkovskaya and other journalists, Russo-Georgian War, Skripali poisonings, down shooting of MH17, annexation of Crimea, barbaric bombings in Syria...
21/23
Instead of addressing these atrocities, she puts all the blame on the US and NATO and their "new Cold War". What makes vanden Heuvel think that if peace was negotiated, Putin would hold on to his end of the agreement rather than continuing his genocidal attack later on?
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Oh, and it's an open secret that, based on former Nation contributors, vanden Heuvel's Washington Post column has been ghostwritten for years. Not sure if @KarenAttiah, WaPo's op-ed editor was aware of this.
23/23
Ping: @seth_hettena @dcampbell_iptv
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NATO expansion:
The Revolution of Dignity:
The Grayzone:
She also called late John McCain an "armchair warrior" back in 2017.
McCain served as fighter pilot in Vietnam, was shot down and tortured by his captors, leaving him with permanent injuries.
What a class act!
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