Hello, I'm Adam Wren.

And I'm Eli Stokels.

It's Friday, August 15th.

And this is the Playbook podcast.

Here with me this morning is Politico White House and Foreign Affairs ace correspondent,

Eli Stokeles.

Good morning, Eli.

Good morning, Adam. Let's get right to

what's driving the day. There's one gigantic story that's overshadowing everything else today.

In Alaska, President Donald Trump is set to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

For the better part of a week, the White House has been tempering

expectations, with the latest chatter being that this will be the prelude to a second

meeting with Putin at which real progress could be made on a ceasefire agreement in Russia's

war on Ukraine. Eli, just set the stage for us here. What are the stakes at this

meeting? And keeping in mind sort of the White House expectation setting, what does success look like

here? If you step back, the president announced this a week ago. So yes, he's been trying to

end this war in Ukraine and it's claiming that he could end it immediately

upon taking office and now we're six months in and not much has happened. So in some ways,

this has maybe been a long time coming, but this is a summit that came together in a week,

which is warp speed for these sorts of things. They usually take weeks of planning and agreement

and here Trump agreed to it. And then

it's been a scramble to find a location and to figure out the logistics. But this is the way Trump

...