KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Emergency workers pulled more bodies Wednesday from the rubble of a nine-story Kyiv apartment building demolished by a Russian missile, raising the death toll from the latest attack on the Ukrainian capital to 28.
The building in Kyiv’s Solomianskyi district took a direct hit and collapsed during the deadliest Russian attack on Kyiv this year. Authorities said that 23 of those killed were inside the building. The remaining five died elsewhere in the city.
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An elderly man carries belongings from his apartment that was destroyed by Russia's missile attack on Tuesday, in Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, June 18, 2025.(AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
A woman lays flowers at the site of Russia's Tuesday deadly missile attack that ruined a multistory residential building in Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, June 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
In this aerial photo provided by the Ukrainian Emergency Service, searchers sift through the wreckage on the site of Russia's Tuesday deadly missile attack that ruined a multistory residential building in Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, June 18, 2025. (Ukrainian Emergency Service via AP)
Ukraine's Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko, right, examines the site of a missile strike that ruined a residential building during Russia's massive missile and drone air attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, June 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
A resident reacts after a Russian missile hit a multi-storey apartment during Russia's combined missile and drone air attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, June 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
A Russian drone attacks a building during Russia's massive missile and drone air attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, June 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
Workers used cranes, excavators and their hands to clear more debris from the site, while sniffer dogs searched for buried victims. The blast blew out windows and doors in neighboring buildings in a wide radius of damage.
The attack overnight on Monday into Tuesday was part of a sweeping barrage as Russia once again sought to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses. Russia fired more than 440 drones and 32 missiles in what Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said was one of the biggest bombardments of the war, now in its fourth year.
Russia has launched a summer offensive on parts of the roughly 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line and has intensified long-range attacks that have struck urban residential areas.
At the same time, U.S.-led peace efforts have failed to grain traction. Also, Middle East tensions and U.S. trade tariffs have drawn world attention away from Ukraine’s pleas for more diplomatic and economic pressure to be placed on Russia.
The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv said the attack clashed with the attempts by the administration of President Donald Trump to reach a settlement that will stop the fighting.
“This senseless attack runs counter to President Trump’s call to stop the killing and end the war,” the embassy posted on social platform X.
Kyiv authorities declared Wednesday an official day of mourning. Mourners laid flowers on swings and slides at a playground across the street from the collapsed building. On Tuesday, a man had waited hours there for his 31-year-old son’s body to be pulled from the rubble.
Psychologists from Ukraine’s emergency services provided counseling to survivors of the attack and to family members of those who died.
“Some people are simply in a stupor, they simply can’t move,” Karyna Dovhal, one of the psychologists, told AP. “People are waiting for their sons, brothers, uncles ... Everyone is waiting.”
Valentin Hrynkov, a 64-year-old handyman in a local school who lived on the seventh floor of a connected building that did not collapse, said he and his wife woke up to the sound of explosions followed by a pause, and then another blast that rattled their own building.
He said his wife had shrapnel injuries in her back and his legs and feet were cut by broken glass. The damage trapped them in their apartment for around 30 minutes before rescue workers could free them, he said.
He felt an overwhelming sense of “helplessness and primal fear” during the attack, he told The Associated Press.
“I was especially scared to sleep last night,” Hrynkov said. “A car drives by and I cover my head. It’s scary.”
By dawn on Tuesday, residents of buildings in the densely populated neighborhood could be seen huddled in ground-floor entryways to seek shelter from the ongoing drone assault.
Drones were striking every few minutes within hundreds of meters of the building hit by the missile. The continuing attack forced firefighters and rescue teams to delay the rescue operation.
Relatives and friends of the destroyed building’s residents later gathered outside in shock, many crying and calling out names, hoping survivors might still be found beneath the rubble.
Vasilisa Stepanenko and Oleksandr Babenko contributed from Kyiv, Ukraine.
Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
An elderly man carries belongings from his apartment that was destroyed by Russia's missile attack on Tuesday, in Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, June 18, 2025.(AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
A woman lays flowers at the site of Russia's Tuesday deadly missile attack that ruined a multistory residential building in Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, June 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
In this aerial photo provided by the Ukrainian Emergency Service, searchers sift through the wreckage on the site of Russia's Tuesday deadly missile attack that ruined a multistory residential building in Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, June 18, 2025. (Ukrainian Emergency Service via AP)
Ukraine's Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko, right, examines the site of a missile strike that ruined a residential building during Russia's massive missile and drone air attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, June 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
A resident reacts after a Russian missile hit a multi-storey apartment during Russia's combined missile and drone air attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, June 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
A Russian drone attacks a building during Russia's massive missile and drone air attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, June 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
