Russia's transportation minister found dead in what officials say was an apparent suicide

MOSCOW (AP) — Russian's transport minister was found dead from a gunshot wound in an apparent suicide, investigators said Monday — news that broke hours after the Kremlin announced he had been dismissed by President Vladimir Putin.

The Kremlin did not give a reason for the firing of Roman Starovoit, who served as transport minister since May 2024, and it was unclear when exactly he died and whether it was related to an investigation into alleged corruption, as some Russian media suggested.

Russia’s Investigative Committee, the top criminal investigation agency, said the body of Starovoit, 53, was found with a gunshot wound in his car parked in Odintsovo, a neighborhood just west of the capital where many members of Russia's elite live. A gun previously presented to him as an official gift was reportedly found next to his body.

A criminal probe was launched into the death, and investigators saw suicide as the most likely cause, according to committee's spokesperson Svetlana Petrenko, who did not say when Starovoit died.

Law enforcement agents were seen carrying Starovoit's body from the site Monday evening.

Andrei Kartapolov, a former deputy defense minister who heads a defense committee in the lower house of parliament, told news outlet RTVI that Starovoit killed himself “quite a while ago,” and some Russian media alleged that he may have taken his life before the publication of Putin's decree firing him. Starovoit was last seen in public Sunday morning, when an official video from the ministry's situation room featured him receiving reports from officials.

Russian media have reported that Starovoit's dismissal could have been linked to an investigation into the embezzlement of state funds allocated for building fortifications in the Kursk region, where he served as governor before becoming transportation minister.

The alleged embezzlement has been cited as one of the reasons for deficiencies in Russia's defensive lines that failed to stem a surprise Ukrainian incursion in the region launched in August 2024. In the stunning attack, Ukraine's battle-hardened mechanized units quickly overwhelmed lightly armed Russian border guards and inexperienced army conscripts. Hundreds were taken prisoner.

The incursion was a humiliating blow to the Kremlin — the first time the country’s territory was occupied by an invader since World War II.

The Russian military had announced its troops had fully reclaimed the border territory in April — nearly nine months after losing chunks of the region.

Starovoit's successor as Kursk governor, Alexei Smirnov, stepped down in December and was arrested on embezzlement charges in April. Some Russian media have alleged that Starovoit also could have faced charges as part of the investigation.

His dismissal also followed a weekend of travel chaos as Russian airports were forced to ground hundreds of flights due to Ukrainian drone attacks. Most commentators said, however, that the air traffic disruptions have become customary amid frequent Ukrainian drone raids and were unlikely to have triggered his dismissal.

Shortly after Putin’s decree on Starovoit was published, Andrei Korneichuk, an official with a state railways agency under his ministry, collapsed and died during a business meeting, Russian news reports said. They said he died of an apparent heart attack.

An official order releasing Starovoit from his post was published on the Kremlin’s website Monday morning without giving a reason for his dismissal.

Shortly before the news of Starovoit's death broke, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov praised Starovoit’s replacement, Andrei Nikitin, and refused to comment on the reasons behind the move.

Russian authorities have investigated a slew of cases of high-level corruption that was widely blamed for military setbacks in Ukraine.

On Monday, Khalil Arslanov, a former deputy chief of the military's General Staff, was convicted on corruption charges and sentenced to 17 years in prison. Arslanov is a former member of the military brass close to former Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Several of them were targeted in a far-ranging probe into alleged military graft.

Last week, Shoigu's former deputy, Timur Ivanov, was convicted on charges of embezzlement and money laundering and handed a 13-year prison sentence.

Shoigu, a veteran official with personal ties to Putin, survived the purges of his inner circle and was given the high-profile post of secretary of Russia’s Security Council.

In another move Monday, the Investigative Committee announced the arrest of Viktor Strigunov, the former first deputy chief of the National Guard. It said Strigunov was charged with corruption and abuse of office.

FILE - Russian Transport Minister Roman Starovoit attends a meeting in Mineralnye Vody, Russia, Tuesday, May 6, 2025. (Dmitry Astakhov, Sputnik, Government Pool Photo via AP)

FILE - Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, meets with Russian Transport Minister Roman Starovoit at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Jan. 30, 2025. (Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

FILE - Transport Minister Roman Starovoit attends a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Jan. 30, 2025. (Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, file)

Russian law enforcement agents carry the body of former Transportation Minister Roman Starovoit, who was found dead from a gunshot wound in an apparent suicide, investigators said Monday, hours after his dismissal in Odintsovo, outside Moscow, Russia, Monday, July 7, 2025. (Evgeniy Razumniy/Kommersant Photo via AP)

FILE - Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, meets with Russian Transport Minister Roman Starovoyt at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Jan. 30, 2025. (Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

FILE - Russian Transport Minister Roman Starovoyt attends a meeting in Mineralnye Vody, Russia, Tuesday, May 6, 2025. (Dmitry Astakhov, Sputnik, Government Pool Photo via AP)

FILE - Transport Minister Roman Starovoyt attends a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Jan. 30, 2025. (Gavriil Grigorov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, file)

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)