A Kremlin envoy will travel to Florida to discuss a U.S.-proposed plan to end the war in Ukraine, a U.S. official said Thursday, part of the back-and-forth diplomacy as the Trump administration pushes for a potential deal.
Kirill Dmitriev, who heads Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, is set to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump's envoy, Steve Witkoff, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner in Miami on Saturday, according to an American official who spoke on condition of anonymity to preview a meeting that hasn't yet been publicly announced.
The official said Witkoff and Kushner will sit down with Dmitriev, after meetings with Ukrainian and European officials in Berlin earlier this week, in which they discussed U.S. security guarantees for Kyiv, territorial concessions and other aspects of the American-authored plan aimed at ending the war.
Asked about the meeting in Miami, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday that Moscow was preparing for contacts with the U.S. to learn about the results of the meetings in Berlin, but he didn't give further details.
Trump has unleashed an extensive diplomatic push to end nearly four years of fighting following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that began on Feb. 24, 2022, but Washington’s efforts have run into sharply conflicting demands by Moscow and Kyiv.
Russian President Vladimir Putin warned on Wednesday that Moscow would seek to extend its gains in Ukraine if Kyiv and its Western allies reject the Kremlin’s demands in peace talks.
Putin wants all the areas in four key regions captured by his forces, as well as the Crimean Peninsula, which was illegally annexed in 2014, to be recognized as Russian territory. He also has demanded that Ukraine withdraw from some areas in eastern Ukraine that Moscow’s forces haven't captured yet, which Ukraine has rejected.
The Kremlin also insists that Ukraine abandon its bid to join NATO and warns that Moscow won’t accept the deployment of any troops from NATO members and will view them as a “legitimate target.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, asked Thursday about his comments last week that were interpreted as him renouncing Ukraine’s NATO bid, and if he was willing to change Ukraine's constitution to remove the reference to joining NATO, said he saw no reason to do that.
“My words cannot be interpreted in any other way,” Zelenskyy said. “Our position remains unchanged.” While the United States doesn't see Ukraine in NATO “for now,” he said. “Politicians change.”
Zelenskyy said Ukrainian officials were expected to hold negotiations in the U.S. on Friday or Saturday.
“We have progress in our dialogue with the American side regarding some of our points, they also speak with Russian side,” Zelenskyy said during a visit to Brussels where EU leaders were set to decide whether to use tens of billions of euros in frozen Russian assets to underwrite a loan to meet Ukraine’s military and financial needs over the next two years.
“We are in the war and United States are decision-makers, who can really stop Putin and I count on this," Zelenskyy said. “I really count on pressure from United States. Putin does not want to stop this war, but he can if United States will pressure more.”
As European allies gathered for the high-stakes summit, Russia and Ukraine exchanged more aerial attacks.
Ukraine’s air force said Russia fired 82 drones of various types at Ukraine overnight, 63 of which were intercepted or jammed.
In Cherkasy, Russian drones that targeted critical infrastructure wounded six people and left parts of the city without electricity, regional administration head Ihor Taburets said. Russian drones also wounded four people in Kryvyi Rih and seven near Odesa, according to local officials.
In Russia's Rostov region, three people were killed by Ukrainian drones overnight, including two crew members of a cargo ship that was hit in Rostov-on-Don and a man who died in Bataysk. At least 10 others were wounded, according to local officials.
The Russian Defense Ministry said its air defenses intercepted 47 Ukrainian drones overnight.
Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addresses a media conference during the EU Summit in Brussels, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Omar Havana)
FILE - U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, right, Russian presidential foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov, left, Russian Direct Investment Fund CEO Kirill Dmitriev, second right, and Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, arrive for meetings in Moscow, on Dec. 2, 2025. (Kristina Kormilitsyna, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Four-term North Carolina Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt, a towering figure in North Carolina politics in the late 20th century who helped leaders from both major parties strive for public education reform, died Thursday at the age of 88, his daughter Lt. Gov. Rachel Hunt announced.
Hunt, whose career provided a prototype for the modern "education governor," served an unprecedented 16 years as governor as the state received the rewards and stings of shifting from textiles and tobacco to a high-tech economy.
Rachel Hunt’s office said that her father died peacefully Thursday at his Wilson County home.
“He devoted his life to serving the people of North Carolina, guided by a belief that public service should expand opportunity, strengthen communities, and always put people first,” Rachel Hunt said in a news release that also referenced “my beloved daddy and hero.”
Considered a business-oriented progressive, Hunt was a giant in state government and influential in the national education reform movement of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He was first elected governor in 1976 and, after a constitutional change, became the first North Carolina governor elected to successive four-year terms.
Following an epic U.S. Senate campaign loss to Republican icon Jesse Helms in 1984, Hunt's political career resumed eight years later with a third term at the Executive Mansion, followed by reelection in 1996.
Hunt remained active in Democratic politics after leaving office in 2001, particularly as he watched protégés such as former Gov. Roy Cooper and the late U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan achieve higher office. He campaigned for President Barack Obama in 2012 and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Cooper in 2016.
“I can think of no one who shaped North Carolina’s recent successes as much as Governor Jim Hunt," current Democratic Gov. Josh Stein said Thursday. And Cooper called Hunt the “greatest Governor in North Carolina history.”
Even entering his 80s, Hunt urged Republicans in charge of the legislature to fund “big things” for public education, rather than pass more income tax cuts.
“I'm proud of what we've done together,” Hunt said in a May 2017 interview. “But I'm far from satisfied about where we are and determined to keep doing my little bit, I guess, to help us keep changing things and improving things in North Carolina. And I know you do it mainly through education.”
Hunt concentrated relentlessly on public schools, talking about the connection between education achievement and competing in the world economy. In the 1970s, while lieutenant governor, he worked with Republican Gov. Jim Holshouser to make North Carolina the first state with full-day kindergarten.
In the 1980s, he helped create the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and pressed for standardized testing for public school students nationwide so that states could compare themselves.
Returning as governor in the 1990s, he championed the Smart Start early childhood initiative, viewed as a national model to prepare children for school, and higher teacher pay. And after the end of his career in office, The Hunt Institute began training up and coming political stars nationwide about public education policy.
“If there is one person that is responsible for remaking and reforming education in the nation, particularly in the Southeast and starting with North Carolina, it is Jim Hunt,” former Democratic Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes said in a 2009 interview. “We will feel the effect of Jim Hunt’s leadership for generations to come.”
Hunt was an unabashed lobbyist for his programs and initiatives, often making late-night phone calls to lawmakers to persuade them. If that failed, he would enlist key constituents in a legislator’s district to bombard with them calls all weekend.
“He really had a way of pushing you to do things you never thought you could do,” said Gary Pearce, a longtime Hunt staffer and later biographer. “He made you feel like that you were genuinely making the world a better place.”
James Baxter Hunt Jr. was born May 16, 1937, in Greensboro, North Carolina. He grew up on the family’s tobacco and dairy farm in Wilson County. After law school graduation, Hunt, his wife, Carolyn, and their young children lived in Nepal for two years while working for the Ford Foundation.
Hunt rose quickly in Democratic politics, serving as president of the state’s Young Democrats in 1968 and getting elected lieutenant governor four years later.
In a controversial move during his first term as governor, Hunt commuted the sentences of nine Black men and one white woman convicted of the 1971 firebombing of a Wilmington grocery store during days of violence that included the shooting of a Black teenager by police. Key witnesses in the case had recanted their testimony. Full pardons for the “Wilmington 10” didn’t come until 2012.
His second four-year term closed with his political battle with Helms, the conservative firebrand known as “Senator No” for his opposition to civil rights, gay rights, abortion and the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Hunt lost as Helms’ campaign blistered him with ads portraying Hunt as a flip-flopper on the issues.
A defeated Hunt returned to practicing law but remained in public life. His comeback to state politics in the early 1990s helped delay a growing Republican tide in North Carolina politics.
Even GOP leaders begrudgingly were impressed with Hunt’s ability to tack with changing political winds. In the mid-1990s, he called a special legislative session to get tough on crime and proposed tax cuts larger than what Republicans initially offered.
Republican U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, a former state House speaker in the 2010s, called Hunt on Thursday “one of the most consequential public servants in North Carolina’s history.”
Rachel Hunt served in the legislature and was elected lieutenant governor in 2024. Jim Hunt was on hand at the Legislative Building in early 2025 when she took as a duty of lieutenant governor the gavel as Senate president, following in her father's footsteps 52 years later.
Memorial information for Hunt will be announced later.
FILE - Former President Bill Clinton, second left, greets former North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt, second right, U.S. Rep. G.K. Butterfield, D-1st District, right, and North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, during a rally Oct. 25, 2016, while campaigning for Democratic presidental nominee Hillary Clinton at the N.C. Democratic Party Coordinated Campaign Office in Rocky Mount, N.C. (Alan Campbell/The Rocky Mount Telegram via AP, File)
FILE - Former North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt speaks to the media at the Marriott hotel, in downtown Greensboro, N.C., Jan. 28, 2012, before The North Carolina Democratic Party's Sanford-Hunt-Frye Dinner, a fundraising event. (AP Photo/Ted Richardson, File)
FILE - North Carolina Lt. Gov. Rachel Hunt, right, kisses her father, former North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt, left, after she presided over the Senate session at the Legislative Building, Jan. 8, 2025, in Raleigh, N.C. (AP Photo/Chris Seward, File)
FILE - North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt, center, gives the thumbs up to House and Senate leadership after signing the 1999-2001 state budget during a ceremony at the Capitol building, in Raleigh, N.C., June 30, 1999. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton, File)
FILE - North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt responds to reporters' questions at a hotel, in Durham, N.C., Jan. 20, 1999. (AP Photo/Bob Jordan, File)
FILE- Former North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt speaks at the Democratic National Convention, Sept. 5, 2012, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
