In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce an American journalist and former policy adviser, James Carden. He’s best-known for his collaboration with Stephen Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel, and for his pro-Kremlin takes on the war in Ukraine.

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Carden was a close associate of Stephen Cohen, an American scholar known for his strong support of Russia and Vladimir Putin. Carden was often defending any criticism Cohen’s pro-Putin writings received, calling them “scurrilous” and “hysterical”.

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In 2017, Carden questioned the involvement of the al-Assad regime in the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack. In his article, he relied on a report by Theodore Postol, who worked together with Maram “Syrian Girl” Susli to debunk al-Assad’s involvement in chemical attacks in...

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...Ghouta, Douma and Khan Shaykhun. OPCW investigations concluded that a large majority of the attacks were in fact carried out by the al-Assad regime. Along with Carden, the Russians denied the allegations, calling the reports “one-sided” and “distorted”.

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In 2017, Carden appeared on RT as a commentator and suggested that Washington Post has started a “project of promoting a new Cold War with the Russian Federation”. The concept of “new Cold War” is something that’s been heavily pushed by pro-Kremlin intellectuals like...

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Stephen Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel, and it basically stems down to the narrative that the US “neocons” are “sabotaging” the relations to Russia, which apparently should be treated with silk gloves, even though they’ve completely ditched democracy for...

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...totalitarianism and at the same time plan to invade most of their neighbors. When @cjcmichel called him out on his BS, Carden took the high road and called him a “sniveling shit” in LinkedIn DM’s. He also demanded to see if Casey was “brave as BATMAN [sic]”.

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Carden’s version of 2014 Revolution of Dignity is pretty much the same as the Kremlin’s. By his words, “the Ukrainian far right escalated the violence in the Maidan and drove then-President Yanukovych into exile, ” oversimplifying absolutely everything about the event.

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He has also blamed pretty much everyone else but Putin for the conflict in Ukraine. He’s written that former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko “ratcheted up the violence” against the “breakaway provinces” of Luhansk and Donetsk. None of his writings mention any Russian...
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involvement among the “separatists”, and James put a strong emphasis on Poroshenko’s cabinet members with “far-right affiliations”. He even went as far as blaming Obama for this, asking the question “What if Mr. Obama had not announced a new round of sanctions against...

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Russia on July 16?" Now, it’s worth mentioning that these sanctions were imposed after Russia annexed Crimea, but according to him they “blocked” the “off-ramp” for Putin. By his hypothesis, even the MH17 down shooting could’ve been avoided if Obama hadn’t sanctioned Russia.
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This maneuver would get pretty high score at the Mental Gymnastics World Championships.

In June 2022, Carden interviewed Irish MEP Clare Daly on Ukraine. It’s a solid pro-Kremlin propaganda piece where both of them agree with each other and enforce each others points of...

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...views. James describes Daly is a “courageous and outspoken” and a “stalwart opponent of the trans-Atlantic militarist consensus”.

In February 2023, he published an article on The American Conservative, where he blames Ukraine being a “binational kleptocracy”.

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This of course was a legacy of the extreme corruption of the Soviet times, which the Ukrainians came to protest in both 2004 and in 2014. Yet, probably due to his pro-Kremlin stance, Carden completely fails to see why the Revolution of Dignity actually happened: ...

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...it was not the “US neocons orchetrating a coup”, but the Ukrainian people who were tired of this corruption of both Yanukovych and his party, and the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs. After the war ends, it will be Ukraine’s next big battle.

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By Carden’s view Victoria Nuland “helped orchestrate” the “overthrow” of Yanukovych, and this directly led to the 13 000 deaths in the East of Ukraine. By Carden’s words, she went “so far as to hand out cookies to anti-government protesters”.

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Now that Stephen Cohen has passed away and Katrina vanden Heuvel has been ousted from her position at The Nation, Carden’s lost his biggest megaphone. He’s now looking for new outlets to publish on, and his latest hit piece...

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on the famous Eurasia Review attacked Jeffrey Goldberg and Anne Applebaum of the Atlantic. His op-ed title “I Saved You Trouble Of Reading Latest Ukraine Propaganda By Two Of America’s Biggest Neocons” already tells you what the article is about, but here are some of the...
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highlights: Carden criticizes Zelenskyy for closing down three TV channels heavily affiliated with Viktor Medvedchuk. Putin and Medvedchuk are close allies, and Putin is godfather to Viktor’s daughter. After Medvedchuk was captured, Putin traded him for the Azovstal...

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..defenders of the Azov Brigade. In the same article, Carden still exaggerates the influence of far-right elements in Ukraine, not-so-subtly blaming them, along with the US and Poroshenko, for the 2014 events in Donbas.He also demonstrates his lack of critical thinking by..
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...claiming that the ratio for Ukraine-Russia casualties is 7:1. This information can only come from two false sources: the doctored leaks from Donbass Devushka, or from serial liar, Douglas Macgregor, who has been dead wrong since the war started.

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James also likes to take all the agency away from Ukraine, suggesting that it’s the US and the “neocons” who’s forcing “terrified teenagers and young men” to fight in muddy trenches in “conditions along the Somme”, again stripping Ukraine of its agency and free will.

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In his latest article “What the 68-year-old Austria treaty could tell us about Ukraine today” from 15 May 2023, he defends Austria’s “neutrality”, naturally forgetting to mention that Austria is riddled with Russian spies and dirty money:

https://x.com/P_Kallioniemi/status/1622546510398255108

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In addition to contributing to the Kremlin-funded Russia Direct, Carden used to be an editor of The National Interest, an American international relations magazine, but was booted for being, as one of their editors told, “too pro-Putin, even for us.”

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