KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Hundreds of Ukrainians observed the longest day of the year on Saturday with a midsummer celebration of some of their oldest traditions, a display of cultural perseverance in a nation threatened by war.
Rooted in Ukraine's ancient past of Slavic paganism the event, Ivana Kupala, features rituals and symbolism to honor the summer solstice, related to fertility, nature, purity and renewal — values that predate the region's Christianization at the end of the first millennium.
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The wheat ripens against the setting sun in Pyrohiv, Ukraine, outside of Kyiv, Saturday, June 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
People perform a rite during a traditional midsummer celebration in Pyrohiv, Ukraine, outside of Kyiv, Saturday, June 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
A young woman dressed in traditional Ukrainian clothing smilies during a traditional midsummer celebration in Pyrohiv, Ukraine, outside of Kyiv, Saturday, June 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
Young women dressed in traditional Ukrainian clothing dance in circle during a traditional midsummer celebration in Pyrohiv, Ukraine, outside of Kyiv, Saturday, June 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
People jump over bonfire during a traditional midsummer celebration in Pyrohiv, Ukraine, outside of Kyiv, Saturday, June 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
People dance in circle around a bonfire during a traditional midsummer celebration in Pyrohiv, Ukraine, outside of Kyiv, Saturday, June 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
People wearing traditional Ukrainian clothing dance in circle during a traditional midsummer celebration in Pyrohiv, Ukraine, outside of Kyiv, Saturday, June 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
At the open-air National Museum of Folk Architecture and Ukrainian Life on the outskirts of Kyiv, participants in embroidered shirts and blouses strolled among thatched-roof cottages, wooden churches and windmills dating to the 18th and 19th centuries. Women and girls wore vinoks — wreaths made from wildflowers — as they took part in folk dances, games and craft workshops.
Viktoria Phi, a master of folk art at the museum, taught visitors to weave the colorful flowered headdresses. She said that Ivana Kupala, which also has variations in other Slavic countries from the Czech Republic to Bulgaria to Russia, was a “small oasis” in the war in Ukraine, where people can “walk and enjoy nature, architecture, songs and dances.”
"It's most popular among young people, and I am very happy when a family comes with young children," she said.
As the sun began to set over the wheat fields and wildflower meadows, hundreds formed a circle around a pyramid of logs. When the bonfire was lit, flames climbed into the twilight sky as music swelled and people spun around the pyre hand in hand. In a purification rite, some leapt over the burning embers.
With Russia's war in Ukraine now in its fourth year and aerial attacks on cities intensifying, for some the observance of old folk customs holds deeper meaning.
Saba Alekseev, 25, said the event gave her a chance to “breathe some fresh air without thinking about (the war), for some time at least, because it’s impossible to put it out of your mind under shelling.”
For 18-year-old Sofia Orel, it was a reminder that "it is crucial to support Ukrainian culture and traditions, especially since the war started, because this way we preserve what is ours.”
“As I am weaving a wreath, I’m thinking that I will teach my daughter how to do it," she said. "These are our traditions and they have to be passed on and honored.”
The wheat ripens against the setting sun in Pyrohiv, Ukraine, outside of Kyiv, Saturday, June 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
People perform a rite during a traditional midsummer celebration in Pyrohiv, Ukraine, outside of Kyiv, Saturday, June 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
A young woman dressed in traditional Ukrainian clothing smilies during a traditional midsummer celebration in Pyrohiv, Ukraine, outside of Kyiv, Saturday, June 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
Young women dressed in traditional Ukrainian clothing dance in circle during a traditional midsummer celebration in Pyrohiv, Ukraine, outside of Kyiv, Saturday, June 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
People jump over bonfire during a traditional midsummer celebration in Pyrohiv, Ukraine, outside of Kyiv, Saturday, June 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
People dance in circle around a bonfire during a traditional midsummer celebration in Pyrohiv, Ukraine, outside of Kyiv, Saturday, June 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
People wearing traditional Ukrainian clothing dance in circle during a traditional midsummer celebration in Pyrohiv, Ukraine, outside of Kyiv, Saturday, June 21, 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)
