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The advances by the Ukrainian army in the north have been modest, but they are emblematic of both sides’ strategy: maneuvering artillery to gain territory.
But as he drove between positions in his camouflaged armored van near the town of Derhachi, the clock was ticking. A Russian surveillance drone hovered above, watching, sending back coordinates to Russian artillery units, the major said. About twenty minutes later, at least three shells rained down, forcing the major and his team to scramble.
“They’re getting better,” said the major, named Kostyantyn. “They know our positions, but they saw the car coming and started to fire.”
The Russian front lines north of Kharkiv were stagnant for more than a month. But over the last several days, Ukrainian forces have advanced outward from the city, launching a concerted offensive to the north and east that began with heavy shelling and an infantry assault supported by tanks and other armored vehicles.
Though the gains have been modest, they are emblematic of both the Ukrainian and Russian strategy as the war drags into its third month: a slow moving grind that focuses on one village at a time and relies primarily on drones and concentrated fire with artillery.
These weapons, capable of lobbing munitions from outside the direct line of sight of opposing forces, are now the central component of the war following the Russian defeat around Kyiv, where long columns of troops and tanks were visible targets vulnerable to ambush. Without them, Ukrainian and Russian units cannot advance nor can they really defend.
The back and forth maneuvering is playing out across Ukraine’s east — both as Russian forces advance in the Donbas region, and as Ukrainian forces try to force Russian artillery units out of range of Kharkiv, a sprawling city 25 miles from the Russian border.
“This is a war of position, a war of artillery,” said Kostyantyn, the major, who declined to provide his last name for security reasons.
This dynamic has played out for days in Ruska Lozova. The town, just north of Kharkiv, was declared liberated by the Ukrainian military late last month, though the fleeing enemy soldiers have been replaced by incoming artillery shells, and terrified residents continue to evacuate.
Russian drones, namely the small Orlan 10, which sounds like a lawn mower, have proven to be a lethal, loitering presence. The drone’s ability to identify Ukrainian positions for Russian artillery batteries has meant that every foot of gained ground around Kharkiv is met with heavy shelling.
“They have an Orlan hanging up in the sky, they see the positions, target them and fire,” Kostyantyn said. The Ukrainians have their own drones — many of them small over-the-counter types — capable of delivering similar results.
The Russians occupied Ruska Lozova, a town with a prewar population of about 6,000, midway through March, residents and Ukrainian military officers said, after they had been pushed back from Kharkiv in the preceding weeks. It is unclear how many Russian soldiers were garrisoned there, though residents estimate that it was somewhere in the hundreds given the number of vehicles in the town.
Ruska Lozova is a pleasant suburb of single story homes, bisected by the Lozovenka river. Many of its residents are avid hunters in the nearby forests and open fields. But the town’s strategic military importance lies in its hills, which offer a direct line of sight into Kharkiv, several miles away.
Once they took Ruska Lozova, Russian soldiers positioned artillery on the high ground and began firing into Kharkiv. To the north and east of the city, Russian soldiers set up other artillery positions in nearby villages and expanded the bombardment. The Ukrainian military returned fire from artillery positions in locations in and around the city that were staggered to ensure some are out of range of their Russian counterparts.
The result was a duel between weapons like multiple launch rocket systems, some with ranges of roughly 20 miles; howitzers, with a range of around 13 miles and heavier mortars, capable of lobbing shells around five miles.
“Both sides are using artillery to deny the other side the ability to maneuver,” said Michael Kofman, the director of Russia studies at CNA, a research institute in Arlington, Va. “And they’re pairing it with drone-based intelligence.”
For the Ukrainians, taking back Ruska Lozova became a priority, a way to relieve pressure and shelling on the northern portions of the city.
Kostyantyn’s unit, a Special Forces battalion, along with other forces, took part in the assault. The first part of the operation, he said, was suppressing and eliminating the Russian artillery around the town before advancing. Residents of Ruska Lozova said that as Ukrainian troops arrived, in late April, the shelling was relentless.
“Every house is damaged, everything is burning. It’s smashed to a pulp,” said Natalia Chichyota, 41, the day after Ruska Lozova was liberated. At least two civilians were killed there during the occupation.
Tanks and armored personnel carriers followed the Ukrainian artillery barrage, Kostyantyn said, explaining that the mechanized troops were able to move more easily after the Russian artillery had been all but silenced and displaced.
“After we suppressed their firing points with artillery, our vanguard entered,” he said, adding that Russian air support arrived soon after. Residents said the Russians had used airstrikes that left large craters, especially around one of the churches in town, but were nowhere near as frequently as artillery fire.
What followed after Ukrainian tanks and infantry entered the town is not exactly clear. Residents said the first Ukrainian soldiers arrived outside their homes around April 26. Ruska Lozova was declared liberated on the 28th. The Russian retreat, by all accounts, was relatively orderly.
During that time frame, Kostyantyn said, there was a “rifle battle” around the town between Ukrainian and Russian troops, an uncommon occurrence during this stage in the war, which had mostly featured artillery, rocket and mortar fire.
“Now we are digging trenches there, they are firing at us with artillery from another village,” said Kostyantyn. The Russian artillery withdrew to a village further north called Pytomnyk. The bridge on the main highway that connects the two towns has been rendered unusable, likely delaying any further Ukrainian advance.
“And like that, village after village, we push them back from Kharkiv.”
The major did not disclose the number of Ukrainian casualties suffered in the battle, nor did he disclose any estimates of Russians wounded and killed. But any type of offensive operation like the one to capture this town almost certainly entails losses on both sides.
Ruska Lozova may have been freed from Russian forces for now, but the war has hardly disappeared. Like so many other towns and cities across Ukraine, it is trapped in the “gray zone” — the land between Russian and Ukrainian forces — and prone to frequent shelling.
“The drones have been flying for days,” said Sergiy, a resident of Ruska Lozova, who fled on Tuesday to Kharkiv. “As soon as soldiers appear, the shooting starts.”
In recent days, much of the remaining population fled into Kharkiv; some are picked up by humanitarian aid convoys made up of volunteers driving their own sedans, mini buses and vans into the destroyed town.
One such run occurred earlier this week when Oleg and Mykola, volunteers from a Baptist church in Kharkiv, drove their 1996 white Mercedes van into Ruska Lozova. They darted around the town, looking for families who wanted to evacuate and handing out shopping bags of food to those who wanted to stay.
It was only toward the end of their hourlong mission, as several people piled into the van, Russian artillery began to shriek in — one round after another creeping closer to their idling vehicle as they struggled to fold an older woman’s walker and load luggage into the back. The passengers crossed their hearts and prayed.
This was what being liberated meant in this chapter of the artillery war, in which the frontline isn’t so much defined by trenches, but the range of the guns on either side.
They drove back toward Kharkiv, the aging van heaving to get up the hill that had once been a perfect vantage point for Russian forces. It was Oleg’s seventh trip into Ruska Lozova since Ukrainian troops reclaimed the town.
“Today was a good day,” he said, straight faced, after making it back into the city. “It was pretty quiet.”
Tucker Carlson. (photo: Getty Images)
If NewsCorp’s owner were Russian, there would be no hesitation in applying sanctions
On Russian state news, as on Fox, bawling ideologues scream threats then whine about their victimhood as they incite anger and self-pity in equal measures. Its arguments range from the appropriation of anti-fascism by Greater Russian imperialists – the 40 countries supporting Ukraine were “today’s collective Hitler”, viewers were told last week – to the apocalyptic delirium of the boss of RT (Russia Today) Margarita Simonyan. Nuclear war is my “horror”, she shuddered, “but we will go to heaven, while they will simply croak”.
Russia would never give genuine western journalists airtime. But it can always find a slot for its favourite quisling: Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. He pushes out Russian propaganda lines or perhaps creates his own lies for Russia to use. Ukraine, not Russia, is the real tyranny. Nato provoked poor Vladimir Putin. The west is plotting to use biological weapons. Last week, he floated the theory that the war was not the result of an unprovoked invasion by a colonialist dictatorship but of the Biden administration’s desire to avenge Donald Trump’s victory in 2016.
It was a big hit in Moscow, reported BuzzFeed’s Julia Davis. “State TV propagandists loved it so much, Russia’s 60 Minutes included it not once, but twice in their evening broadcast – neatly bookended by the Kremlin’s war propaganda.”
Putin’s appeal to both the far right and the Chomskyan wing of the far left in Europe and North America is worthy of a study in itself. He was a dream for ultra-reactionaries: a white, Christian strongman, who was anti-liberal and anti-EU. His victories heralded a world in which might was right and morality was for losers.
In Europe, Russia’s atrocities have forced everyone from Arron Banks and Nigel Farage to Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini to find urgent reasons to change the subject. In the US, there remains a market for Putinism among a large minority of Republican voters. Their yearning for dictatorship, as evidenced by the support given to denying legitimate election results and to the fascistic forces that stormed Congress, is greater. The hatred of liberals in power is deeper.
Murdoch is boosting Russian morale and, conversely, undermining Ukrainian resolve by supplying a dictatorship with foreign validation. Do not underestimate its importance. Russians who suspect their TV anchors are state-sponsored bootlickers are more likely to believe foreign commentators who assure them that the lies they are hearing are true. Reporters risk their lives but Putin cannot fire or imprison Fox News presenters, steal their wealth or poison them with Novichok. Russian forces will not reduce their towns to rubble, rape them, torture them, burn them alive in theatres or shoot them in the head by the side of forest roads. Murdoch and his employees have nothing to fear from Putin. Their endorsement of Kremlin war propaganda carries conviction because it is freely given.
As useful to Russia is the wider chilling effect. I have seen journalists start off making eloquent and plausible critiques of the left’s hatred of free speech, for instance, or its tolerance of regressive religion, only to find that careers in the worst of the rightwing media come with a price tag. To succeed on Fox News in the US, they don’t have to agree with banning abortion or denying climate change but they must never make their objections public.
The UK’s sanctions regulations include among the reasons for freezing an oligarch’s assets “obtaining a benefit from or supporting the Government of Russia”. The Biden White House promises to punish those “responsible for providing the support necessary to underpin Putin’s war on Ukraine”. On both interpretations, there is a plausible prosecution case for freezing the assets of Murdoch’s NewsCorp.
Because it is a media conglomerate, sanctions would be an attack on free speech. I say this plainly because so many writers and political actors pretend that they are not demanding censorship when that is precisely what they are doing. Nevertheless, in this case the threat to freedom is minimal. Murdoch would not be punished for revealing embarrassing truths about the west but for spreading demonstrable lies for a hostile foreign power.
If you still feel queasy, imagine if Murdoch’s media organisation were exactly as it is today and producing the same arguments the Kremlin uses to justify its crimes. The one difference is that Murdoch is Russian rather than Australian. I don’t believe there would be the slightest hesitation in removing him and his family from control of their businesses. Indeed, the UK, EU and US have already announced sanctions against Russian broadcasters and individual journalists. I have not heard anyone claim that they are attacking press freedom, rather than trying to cripple the propaganda capacity of a warmongering state.
The Murdoch empire contains the Times and Wall Street Journal, whose Russian coverage has been admirable, and HarperCollins, which with a bravery few other publishers would match, fought off a vicious legal assault by the Russian oligarchy and their pet London lawyers against a critical study of Putin’s power.
But good deeds count for nothing in assessing the desirability of sanctions. The tycoon Oleg Tinkov spoke for many rich Russians when he denounced the “massacre” in Ukraine and called for an end to the “crazy war”. The oligarchs the west has sanctioned are losing their fortunes and what little influence they had. Of course they hate Putin’s strategy. Western governments don’t care because, as Tom Keatinge of the Royal United Services Institute explains it to me, they know that a large portion of oligarchical wealth is at Putin’s disposal. Their private thoughts and, when they dare risk assassination attempts, public protests are irrelevant. The need to end war in Europe comes first.
Tender-hearted readers may object that Murdoch is now 90 and may well not be in full control of his organisation. But surely this is an argument for removing him? If in his dotage he is allowing himself to become a cross between Lord Haw Haw and Tokyo Rose, it would be a kindness for western governments to save him from himself.
French president Emmanuel Macron. (photo: Michel Euler/AP)
It will take decades for Ukraine to be accepted into the European Union, France's Emmanuel Macron has said.
This would allow non-EU members to join Europe's security architecture in other ways, said President Macron.
His words came as fierce fighting continued in the eastern Donbas region, where Russia is trying to make gains.
A senior US defence official characterised the Russian advance as "single-digit kilometre kind of progress". A Ukrainian leader in the Luhansk region said serious battles were taking place.
In other developments on Monday:
- President Vladimir Putin marked Russia's Victory Day by insisting that Russian forces in Ukraine were fighting for their motherland. But he made no major announcements in his speech
- US President Joe Biden said he was worried that Mr Putin did not have a way out of the war. He said Mr Putin had mistakenly believed the war would break up Nato and the EU
- Several missiles struck the southern city of Odesa, hitting a shopping centre and a warehouse, local officials said
- Pro-Ukraine activists sprayed Russia's ambassador to Poland with red liquid while he was visiting a Soviet military cemetery in Warsaw
Ukraine began the process of applying to join the EU in February this year, four days after Russia's invasion.
"We all know perfectly well that the process to allow [Ukraine] to join would take several years indeed, probably several decades," Mr Macron said.
He added: "That is the truth, unless we decide to lower the standards for accession. And rethink the unity of our Europe."
Mr Macron said a "parallel European community" should be considered instead, rather than suspending the EU's strict membership criteria to fast-track Ukraine's application.
He said it would be "a way of anchoring countries which are geographically in Europe and share our values".
His comments came shortly after European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the EU's executive would be publishing its initial opinion on Ukraine's bid for membership in June.
Kyiv officials confirmed on Monday that Ukraine had submitted the second part of its EU membership application to Brussels.
It normally takes years for countries to negotiate EU membership, with candidates having to prove that they meet multiple criteria - from respecting democracy and the rule of law to having a robust enough economy.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has suggested the EU use a special procedure to grant Ukraine immediate membership of the bloc, but this has not happened.
Later on Monday, the French president made his first foreign visit since re-election to Berlin, for talks with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on the EU's response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Speaking at a press conference before the meeting, Mr Scholz said Russia's war of aggression had made co-operation between Paris and Berlin even more important.
"This is something that shocks us but also welds us together because we must act together," he said. "It cannot be the case that borders in Europe can be moved around with violence."
The EU is trying to agree a sixth package of sanctions on Russia, including a phased ban on imports of oil, with longer delays for some landlocked states in Central Europe.
However, Hungary has refused to back the oil embargo, describing it as an "atomic bomb" for its economy. Ms von der Leyen travelled to Budapest on Monday in an attempt to resolve the deadlock.
After talks she said that "we made progress, but further work is needed".
Women on Web and Aid Access founder Rebecca Gomperts, second from right, created the nonprofit in March 2018 to provide abortion medication to women in the U.S. (photo: Charles McQuillan/Getty Images)
But following the election of President Donald Trump, the desperate requests she received from Americans went up, and the cost barriers in the US were glaring.
So Gomperts launched a new nonprofit organization based in Austria — Aid Access — with the goal of providing affordable and accessible abortion services to people in the US.
Over the past four years, Aid Access says it has delivered abortion medication — mifepristone and misoprostol — to more than 30,000 Americans across all 50 states, including the 19 conservative states that currently ban telemedicine abortion.
The organization plays a unique role in the US reproductive rights ecosystem by successfully exploiting legal loopholes that make it easier for an overseas doctor to care for American patients in restrictive states — a role that could become even more key if Roe v. Wade is struck down.
If the right to an abortion does get overturned, Aid Access staff say they feel confident their services could continue, in the same way they’ve been able to operate in red states that have barred other abortion groups.
So what’s the catch?
For now, the biggest one may be the big tech platforms. Aid Access needs to spread awareness about its services, and quickly. The pills, when shipped from overseas, can take two to three weeks to arrive, and Aid Access prescribes the two medications up to the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. But because it operates outside the formal US health care system, Aid Access says it has been penalized by search engines and social media giants that have tried to tackle the spread of Covid-19 misinformation.
Aid Access still pops up on Google if you search the organization’s name, but most users had come to the site while searching for terms like “abortion by mail” and “abortion pills.” Following a series of algorithm updates beginning in May 2020, Aid Access says it no longer shows up in top results for general medication abortion searches — and that ads from its sister organization, Women on Web, which serves countries all over the world, are frequently removed or rejected from Facebook and Instagram for dubious reasons, like “language ... that is likely to offend users.”
Republicans might not be able to stop Aid Access right now, but it appears that Silicon Valley can.
How Aid Access works
The Aid Access model goes like this: If you need an abortion, you fill out an online consultation form. If you’re early enough in your pregnancy and deemed eligible, then you’re referred to a provider. People living in the country’s more liberal states and Washington, DC, are referred to a US-based provider who fills prescriptions that ship typically in two or three days. For women living in the 31 states that Aid Access counts as having tighter abortion restrictions, Gomperts sends the prescriptions to a pharmacist in India, who then mails the pills directly to patients in the US. (Aid Access chooses India in part because the country produces regulated, high-quality generics, Gomperts has said.)
Gomperts and the women she prescribes pills for operate in something of a legal gray area. As a result of being registered to practice medicine in Austria, she is subject to Austrian law, and therefore exempt from specific rules and regulations affecting doctors in the US, like state requirements for ultrasounds or 72-hour waiting periods. And while personal imports of drugs from other countries are usually against US law, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has said it generally avoids going after individuals who bring medicines in for personal use.
It’s a model Gomperts developed first in 2005 with Aid Access’s older sister organization. Since its founding, Women on Web says it has delivered abortion pills to more than 100,000 women across the world, reaching pregnant patients in countries with restrictive laws, like Sudan, Hungary, and Brazil. In 2018, Gomperts set up Aid Access under a separate corporate structure, to serve the US while protecting Women on Web from the aggressive US anti-abortion movement.
Activists note that medication abortion is far safer than many painkillers easily purchased over the counter, and the World Health Organization maintains that individuals can self-administer the drugs without direct supervision of a health care provider during their first trimester. New Lancet research published in February affirmed the safety of the Aid Access model, which also provides the medication at significantly lower cost than in-person surgical abortions or even the new crop of US startups like Hey Jane, Abortion on Demand, and Carafem.
Aid Access says its work will continue in a post-Roe environment, and that requests for pills and information tripled in the wake of Monday’s leaked Roe opinion draft.
Christie Pitney, a midwife who fills prescriptions for Aid Access patients in California, Massachusetts, Oregon, and DC, said that while patients in some states with trigger bans may have to switch from US-based providers like Pitney to Gomperts, Aid Access will keep serving them. “We’ll still be here,” she said.
“We’re pretty nonplussed, to be honest,” Pitney told Vox. “I don’t see a route [to stopping us]. It’s not to say that it’s impossible, I just don’t see a route for politicians to eliminate access to Aid Access; they just don’t have the jurisdiction to criminalize an international doctor.”
Other international doctors could also join Aid Access if Roe were struck down to help Gomperts prescribe the abortion pills, though she told Vox that thus far she has not been approached by any physicians.
A struggle for internet traffic
Despite the unique strategy Aid Access and Women on Web deploy, over the past two years, the organizations say they have been fighting against search engine algorithms that deprioritize their services, and opaque social media policies that limit or block their posts.
Earlier this year, in an interview with the New York Review of Books, Gomperts said that “the algorithms of Google are suddenly becoming the de facto gatekeeper to access to safe abortion services in the US.” When Google set out to correct Covid-19 misinformation and started elevating more health sites that were officially government-sanctioned, Gomperts said it had the side effect of demoting sites like hers.
Searches like “abortion by mail” and “online abortion” no longer led users to Gomperts’s groups, she says. Women on Web, for example, says it saw a 90 percent drop in daily global traffic after Google rolled out a new update on May 4, 2020. A subsequent update brought back some of what had disappeared, doubling its now-minuscule traffic, but then a third algorithmic update six months later took 40 percent of what remained. “We’re back to pretty low,” said Venny Ala-Siurua, the executive director.
Ala-Siurua told Vox that deprioritization in internet search results remains one of their biggest barriers. Google “keep[s] pushing up traditional health providers, brick-and-mortar clinics, but they’re missing what’s happening in the digital world today,” she said. “The algorithm is not neutral. It was built and written usually by white men in the Bay Area who might not really be in tune with what the needs are here.”
Aid Access isn’t alleging Google is intentionally restricting access to its site specifically, but Gomperts told the New York Review of Books that they might eventually launch a lawsuit over this. “The algorithms are making it much harder to find the places where you can obtain these medicines,” she said. “That is what people don’t realize: It’s Google that is filtering people’s access to information.”
Lara Levin, a Google spokesperson, told Vox that their search ranking systems “are designed to return relevant results from the most reliable sources, and on critical topics related to health matters, we place an even greater emphasis on signals of reliability.” Levin added that no update is made to benefit or penalize any one site. “We give site owners and content producers ample notice of relevant updates along with actionable guidance,” she said.
The Facebook and Instagram accounts for Women on Web have had spending restrictions placed on them for more than a year, after their ads were flagged or hidden by other users who oppose their work or who found their content “to be offensive ... violent, [or] about a sensitive topic.” Some of their ads for medication abortion have also been rejected, with rationales like “Ads must not promote the sale or use of unsafe supplements, as determined by Facebook in its sole discretion.” One Women on Web Instagram post that read, “You can now order abortion pills BEFORE you are pregnant,” and included a link for advanced provision was taken down for not following “community guidelines.”
Facebook did not respond to a request for comment on the Women on Web ads specifically, but pointed Vox to company policies from Meta (Facebook and Instagram’s parent company) including ad prohibitions for direct sales of prescription drugs, and for ads promoting reproductive health products or services to people under age 18. In November 2021, Facebook also announced it would remove ad targeting options for topics people may perceive as “sensitive” — including health-related causes.
But at least one of the examples Women on Web showed Vox — the one about ordering pills before you’re pregnant — wasn’t an ad. It was a regular post to the group’s Instagram profile that they didn’t pay to amplify or target.
The algorithmic battles playing out reflect broader challenges faced by tech companies, which are under pressure to crack down on misinformation and propaganda and to take clearer stands on polarized political issues that users may be researching. The last few years have also brought greater attention to the ways in which machine learning and AI more broadly can reflect bias and discrimination, even while purporting to be objective and neutral.
“We have to be careful not to frame questions as one of adapting to technology,” said David Broniatowski, a professor at George Washington University who has studied anti-vaccination communities online. “The technology is out in the world, so we should ask how to remake technology so we can achieve goals that are of best benefit to society.”
Aid Access has withstood legal challenges, so far
Aid Access has faced one regulatory challenge, in 2019, when the FDA sent the group a cease-and-desist letter, claiming that its generic mifepristone drug represented a “misbranded and unapproved” drug that posed risk to consumers. (The FDA approved one brand of mifepristone, Mifeprex, in 2000, and in 2019 approved a generic version.)
Aid Access, in turn, sued the FDA, alleging the agency was impeding Americans’ constitutional right to an abortion and that its drugs were, in fact, approved. Aid Access also maintained that the FDA had no legal jurisdiction over Gomperts. The case was dismissed in part because the FDA never took action following its letter.
The Biden administration has taken a friendly stance toward medication abortion, but a change in the White House in 2024 or beyond could mean new challenges from the FDA or other agencies. Legal threats against Aid Access without the constitutional protection of Roe might make things even more complicated.
Anti-abortion activists and lawmakers have been ramping up their efforts to crack down on abortion pills, an unsurprising development given that medication abortion accounted for 54 percent of all US abortions in 2020. In 2022 alone, according to the Guttmacher Institute, lawmakers in 22 states have introduced new legislation to restrict the drugs.
Rather than punish those who seek abortions, the slew of anti-abortion laws introduced over the past decade has targeted physicians, clinics, and anyone else who helps to “aid and abet” someone who has an abortion, as Texas’s recent ban put it. Abortion activists have worried about the criminalization of patients, but so far efforts have been limited and largely unsuccessful.
Whether any of these new laws could affect Aid Access’s operations or the patients who seek out its services remains an outstanding question. It’s hard to know what abortion access in the US will look like in a year, or five.
But for Americans seeking to end their pregnancies now — whether they live in red states with heavy abortion restrictions or in blue states with more liberal laws but heavy financial barriers — Aid Access represents a lifeline. If they can find it.
"This is what happens when the same people who are supposed to stop gun violence have a history of shooting people of color." (photo: Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty Images)
This is what happens when the same people who are supposed to stop gun violence have a history of shooting people of color.
The young Brooklynite died in his sister’s arms after he was shot on the corner of Quincy Street and Patchen Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, his mother, Lorna Wright-Bovell, told The Daily Beast.
While detectives at the local 81st NYPD precinct have not yet identified a suspect in the case, Wright-Bovell received rather different, jolting news on Wednesday: that the investigators on the case are currently being overseen by the police chief who killed her eldest son in 2008.
Nearly 14 years before Orenzso’s death, Ortanzso Bovell, a 25-year-old Black man, was shot and killed by then-Lieutenant John Chell of the NYPD.
Now-Deputy Chief Chell was never criminally charged for the killing—which he maintained was an accident—and has continued his ascent in the New York City Police Department. That has led him all the way to a perch as commanding officer for Brooklyn North detectives, essentially the indirect boss of the investigators on Orenzso’s case.
Only two weeks before Orenzso’s murder, Chell appeared besides NYC Mayor Eric Adams as part of the administration’s first big show of a nascent war against gun violence, specifically to announce a 17-person gang takedown in Brooklyn.
But ever since her elder son’s death in 2008, Wright-Bovell and others have questioned Chell’s continued rise. Most notably, in 2017, Wright-Bovell won $1.5 million from the city in a high-profile civil trial where a jury found Chell intentionally shot the gun that killed Ortanzso.
Civil trials have a lower standard of proof than criminal proceedings, where lawyers must convince a jury of a party’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Last year, Wright-Bovell again spoke out, questioning Chell’s latest promotion in the wake of the George Floyd protests and a larger nationwide reckoning over police violence. Her story illustrates the complex issues that arise when politicians promise to reduce gun violence using the same cops whose conduct has deeply damaged trust between the public and the police.
“I don’t know if Chell could be holding a grudge for 14 years,” a grieving Wright-Bovell told The Daily Beast. “It’s 2008, he killed my son. The articles are all over that he was found [liable] of killing my son and that’s all I wanted. But 14 years after, here I am again with Chell in my life.”
When asked about the ethics of Chell’s involvement in the ongoing Bovell murder case, an NYPD spokesperson told The Daily Beast that he was not the “immediate supervisor or investigator.”
“Investigators continue to actively investigate this case and remain in contact with family members regarding updates,” added the spokesperson.
Attempts to reach Deputy Chief Chell directly for comment for this story were unsuccessful, and a request for comment to the president of the Captain’s Endowment Association—Chell’s union—went unanswered.
According to the NYPD website, “detective borough chiefs oversee investigations conducted by the precinct detective squads.”
Even just the appearance of a conflict of interest should concern police enough to move the case under a different command structure, argued Alex Vitale, a policing expert and author at Brooklyn College.
“That should matter to them. They claim it matters to them,” Vitale told The Daily Beast. “But I think their culture of… defensiveness and, ‘We didn’t do anything wrong,’ is trumping that.”
For her part, a grieving Wright-Bovell told The Daily Beast that with Chell, “God is the final judge” over the killing of her eldest. But upon hearing he was tied, even indirectly, to the probe of her youngest son’s murder, she didn’t “know what to think.”
When Chell shot and killed Ortanzso Bovell in 2008, he was a lieutenant and head of the Brooklyn North Larceny Squad.
According to his own accounts to investigators, Chell and his colleagues had attempted to arrest the elder Bovell in a car cops alleged he had stolen that August evening. Chell told both NYPD investigators and the civil trial jury that he had accidentally pulled the trigger of his gun “in the process of falling to the ground” as he stumbled after being pushed by the car.
The New York City Police Department and Brooklyn District Attorney’s office effectively backed up his claim when they quickly closed the case and never charged Chell with a crime.
But an admission during his deposition showed Chell had not yet been interviewed by internal investigators, weeks after the cases had been closed. (The NYPD has suggested this is routine.)
These, and other documents, came to light nine years later, when Wright-Bovell would sue Chell for her “love child” son’s death, and win.
During a five-week trial, witnesses and testimony from the medical examiner convinced the jury that the preponderance of evidence showed Chell did not shoot his gun by accident.
“I believe in the truth,” retired NYPD sex-crimes detective John Baeza, one of the expert witnesses who reconstructed the shooting for the civil trial, told The Daily Beast. The ex-cop still often thinks about his findings, shaken by what he believes is a lack of accountability for Chell.
“What you have is you have somebody who’s a [killer], who has rose [sic] in the ranks of the New York City Police Department to where he’s a Chief, he’s two steps away from being a three-star Chief and possibly chief of detectives,” said Baeza. Chell was never charged with a crime.
“And it just has stuck with me for years because of this.”
Wright-Bovell was awarded $2.5 million for Ortanzso’s death in Brooklyn civil court, where the jury determined that Chell had “intentionally discharged” his weapon. Wright-Bovell eventually accepted $1.5 million in a settlement to avoid an appeal.
In a 2021 statement to THE CITY regarding Chell’s past, Chris Monahan, his union’s president, said the NYPD has a “very thorough investigation in every police-related shooting,” and that successful executives like Chell in the NYPD move up the ladder quickly.
“And, you know, unfortunately, in this type of work, things sometimes happen,” he said at the time.
As for Wright-Bovell, she maintains her son was proven to be “wrongfully killed” and wants to stand up for him—a trait she said they had in common.
“I’m sorry, but that Ortanzso, Ortanzso’s like his mom. Ortanzso stands up,” said Wright-Bovell about her eldest son, whom the family called Marlon.
She also detailed posoitive interactions with police, including the detectives investigating Orenzso’s murder—and even referred to positive experiences Orenzso had himself.
“I don’t like to judge and I don’t like to assume, because I don’t like anybody to judge me,” she said of the work the detectives had done.
Once, she claimed, Orenzso’s name was recognized by local officers when he was pulled over in the time after his older brother’s death.
“He says, ‘Mom, these officer[s] acting strange,’” she told The Daily Beast, recalling his account. “‘Look!’” Orenzso had said the officers exclaimed, “‘This guy’s name is Orenzso Bovell!’”
“You know, that’s the precinct that Chell used to be at Utica Avenue,” said Wright-Bovell. “Where he was the captain. And so they took him... and asked him, ‘What’s his name?’ He says, ‘Orenzso Bovell.’ So they thought it [was] Ortanzso,” said Wright-Bovell.
“The name stands out. And he said he treated them—they treated him very well.”
Wright-Bovell remembered Orenzso, her youngest son who was killed early this year, as soft and loving.
“Loving, crying for everything,” she said. “Big, grown man that if I say, ‘Oh, you can’t do that to your girlfriend,’ [he’d reply], ‘Oh, Mom. Sorry,’ you know?” she recalled, changing her voice to sound like his forlorn tone.
But following his murder, Wright-Bovell said she has struggled with a lack of news on Orenzso’s assailant.
“Now that my son is dead and I realize that [Chell’s] in charge, it makes you say, ‘Huh, I wonder if!’”
Two weeks before the youngest Bovell’s death, Deputy Chief Chell stepped back into the spotlight as he stood shoulder to shoulder with Mayor Adams and other prominent NYPD figures. The Brooklyn District Attorney took questions from the press about Adams’ first major gang takedown.
Since the 2008 shooting, Chell had continued to check off many of the boxes a cop must in order to rise within the department. He had commanded the 79th and 75th precincts—the latter the largest precinct and a prestigious posting in an area that struggles with gun violence—and headed up investigations within the southern section of Brooklyn.
His most recent promotion to commanding officer of detectives in Borough Brooklyn North concerned community members and various local politicians, but it didn’t stop his rise.
Police work like Chell’s on murders, narcotics, and gangs are the center of Mayor Adams’ war on gun violence, and Brooklyn North is a key battleground. Multiple precincts within Brooklyn North were the targets of the mayor’s new anti-crime teams.
This year, Chell also directed the high-profile investigation into the death of Michael K. Williams, who died of a drug overdose in his Williamsburg apartment.
“Treat this case as if Michael K. Williams was hit by a bullet,” Chell recalled telling detectives from the 90th precinct, in an interview at the time with The Daily Beast. “Make believe he got shot.”
But as Mayor Adams has condemned gun violence, he has also condemned police violence—and promised to walk a fine line between supporting the police and stopping misconduct. He has often cited his history of fighting against racially-biased policing during his career as an officer himself.
When The Daily Beast asked the mayor’s office about whether Adams felt Chell’s placement and status in proximity to the investigation of Bovell’s death was proper, the mayor’s team was tight-lipped.
“The mayor does not get involved in the NYPD’s promotions,” said spokesman Fabien Levy.
The Bovells’ mother said she was still in shock after her youngest’s death and did not want to assume anything about the police work in her case. She said she has even insisted to neighbors who came to her with their theories to “let the police do their job.”
She is comforted, she added, by the two grandsons that Orenzso has left behind; Wright-Bovell is the matriarch of 18 grand and great grandchildren.
But she also questioned whether her eldest son’s killer should be allowed to investigate—or oversee the investigation of—any murders at all.
“I work with autistic children. If I ever had an [child welfare] case, or was arrested or had a felony, if my background wasn’t clean, I would not be able to get the job, you know,” she told The Daily Beast. “And this job that he has is a big-time job! So somebody needs to look at him. We have a change of management that may look in and see.”
Protesters take part in an anti-government demonstration near the president's office in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on April 30, demanding President Gotabaya Rajapaksa's resignation over the country's crippling economic crisis. (photo: Ishara S. Kodikara/AFP/Getty Images)
A wheat farmer. (photo: Getty Images)
PFAS-tainted sewage sludge is used as fertilizer in fields and report finds that about 20m acres of cropland could be contaminated
PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 9,000 compounds used to make products heat-, water- or stain-resistant. Known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t naturally break down, they have been linked to cancer, thyroid disruption, liver problems, birth defects, immunosuppression and more.
Dozens of industries use PFAS in thousands of consumer products, and often discharge the chemicals into the nation’s sewer system.
The analysis, conducted by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), is an attempt to understand the scope of cropland contamination stemming from sewage sludge, or biosolids. Regulators don’t require sludge to be tested for PFAS or closely track where its spread, and public health advocates warn the practice is poisoning the nation’s food supply.
“We don’t know the full scope of the contamination problem created by PFAS in sludge, and we may never know, because EPA has not made it a priority for states and local governments to track, test and report on,” said Scott Faber, EWG’s legislative policy director.
All sewage sludge is thought to contain the dangerous chemicals, and the compounds have recently been found to be contaminating crops, cattle, water and humans on farms where biosolids were spread.
Sludge is a byproduct of the wastewater treatment process that’s a mix of human excrement and industrial waste, like PFAS, that’s discharged from industry’s pipes. Sludge disposal can be expensive so the waste management industry is increasingly repackaging it as fertilizer because excrement is rich in plant nutrients.
EWG found Ohio keeps the most precise records of any state, and sludge has been applied to 5% of its farmland since 2011. Extrapolating that across the rest of the country would mean about 20m acres are contaminated with at least some level of PFAS. Faber called the estimate “conservative”.
EPA records show over 19bn pounds of sludge has been used as fertilizer since 2016 in the 41 states where the agency tracks the amount of sludge that’s spread, but not the location. It’s estimated that 60% of the nation’s sludge is spread on cropland or other fields annually.
The consequences are evident in the only two states to consistently check sludge and farms for PFAS contamination. In Maine, PFAS-tainted fields have already forced several farms to shut down. The chemicals end up in crops and cattle, and the public health toll exacted by contaminated food in Maine is unknown. Meanwhile, the state is investigating about 700 more fields for PFAS pollution.
“There’s no easy way to shop around this problem,” Faber said. “We shouldn’t be using PFAS-contaminated sludge to grow food and feed for animals.”
Michigan faces a similar situation as it uncovers contaminated beef and farms, and growing evidence links sludge to public health problems and contaminated drinking water.
The health cost of using sludge outweighs the benefits, advocates say. Many have questioned the sense in spending billions of dollars to pull sludge out of water only to inject the substance into the nation’s food supply, and calls for a ban on the practice are growing louder.
“The EPA could today require treatment plants to test sludge for PFAS and warn farmers that they may be contaminating fields, but it has refused to do so,” Faber said.
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