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Hi, this is Sharon, driving solo across country to move back to my childhood home in Enfield, Connecticut, after living 41 years in southern Arizona.

This podcast was recorded at 12.26 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, August 14th, 2025.

Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I will still be driving eastward, visiting friends and family along the way. Enjoy the show.

I hope it's a wonderful trip and a wonderful transition. Congratulations. She's going to need a new wardrobe. It's going to be a different climate. Just a bit. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover politics. I'm Greg Myrie. I cover national security. And we also have NPR Berlin correspondent Rob Schmitz here. Welcome to the podcast, Rob. Thanks for having me, guys. Today on the show, President Trump and

Russian President Vladimir Putin are meeting in Alaska about the war in Ukraine. This will be the

first time Putin has met one-on-one with an American president on American soil in nearly 20 years.

Curiously, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will not be there.

Greg, you are currently in Kiev. What do you make of the fact that Zelenskyy is not included?

Well, the Ukrainians are clearly not happy about that, but they're pretty much keeping their

powder dry. They're not complaining publicly. You know, they felt they'd done a lot of work in the past

few months to repair the relationship with Trump after that fiasco in the White House in February

when Trump and Zelensky got into the big back and forth with Vice President J.D. Vance

as well. So the Ukrainians had been saying yes to Trump a lot,

to a minerals deal, to his proposal for a month-long ceasefire. So they were basically trying to be

agreeable with Trump and saying Putin was the problem in this war here. But now Trump is going to have this one-on-one with Putin and

the Ukrainians won't be there. Their big fear is that out of this meeting will come some

proposal, some idea, and that Ukraine will be pressured to accept it, to make some concessions

after the summit, perhaps because Putin will find some

partial gestures, some limited ceasefire, some way to get Trump to buy into his ideas.

...