Putin’s Expansionist Gaze

Secure Freedom Radio is made possible by listeners like you.

Herman Pirchner, Katherine Zimmerman, Qanta Ahmed, Bill Gertz

HERMAN PIRCHNER, founding President of the American Foreign Policy Council

• Putin claims the right to use force in “New Russia,” even as a deal to remove occupying forces from Eastern Ukraine is being brokered
• Echoes of World War II—Putin purportedly protecting ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine
• How long would ordinary Ukrainian and Russian troops be willing to fight each other?

KATHERINE ZIMMERMAN, senior analyst at AEI and Al Qaeda Team Lead at AEI’s Critical Threats Project:

• The significance of the video posted by Al Qaeda depicting a large public gathering of Al Qaeda leaders and fighters in Yemen
• Did American intelligence know about the gathering? Why were there no drone strikes?
• Al Qaeda is spreading, despite President Obama’s rhetoric on the terrorist group

QANTA AHMED, author of “In the Land of Invisible Women,” and featured interviewee in the film “Honor Diaries”

• Debate over religious or cultural justification for female genital mutilation (FGM)
• Increasing rates of FGM in the Muslim diaspora communities in the West
• FGM, honor killings, child marriage, and gender inequality among particular Muslim cultures

BILL GERTZ, Senior Editor at the Washington Free Beacon:

• Multiple low altitude flyovers of a U.S. Navy warship in the Black sea by a Russian fighter jet—referred to by the US only as “unprofessional”
• Russia’s military build-up along Ukraine’s Eastern border
• Russia’s denial of the “Open Skies” treaty which allows approved U.S. military over-flights throughout Russian airspace. Gertz has evidence that the US’s reason for the cancellation of a flight was untrue.
• The Obama Administration’s refusal to provide Ukraine with lethal, non-lethal or force multiplying aid