Russia's war against Ukraine. a Russian bomb hit the school. firefighter puts out the fire. Rescuers disassemble the blockage of the school.ZHYTOMYR, UKRAINE - March 4, 2022. Credit: SV_zt/Shutterstock.com

On Feb. 24, the first day of the war in Ukraine, it felt to Inna Liniova like the capital city of Kyiv "exploded" around her. "People started running out from the city," she recalled. "People were very scared. We all had to adjust to reality. " Liniova, the executive director of the Ukrainian Bar Association, had a choice to make. And so did her colleagues. Stay or go? The bar association's main office sits "in the center" of Kyiv. It has 19 board members and about 7,000 members across the eastern European country. Liniova's choice was to go. She and her partner "grabbed whatever I can think of," including their dog, and drove out against a seemingly endless column of packed-together cars. It took them 18 hours, instead of the usual nine, to make it to her small hometown of Storozhynets in western Ukraine, where her mother lived. Within hours, said Liniova in a recent Zoom interview, she and her bar association colleagues, at least those who didn't take up arms and start looking for military training, began working in ways they never had before. In just a few days, they set up a hotline, giving information to Ukrainians who were fleeing the country but who didn't know what their rights would be as refugees, or even exactly where to run to, or what to do about a dead body, a family member's or a neighbor's, lying before them, or how to document war crimes. Also in those first days, the bar association, which had four board members volunteer to become warfighters, began a seemingly unlikely team-up: The group established communication with the New York State Bar Association, which hurriedly put together a Ukrainian Task Force, and which in December had launched a Ukraine-based chapter. As Inna Liniova sat in her mother's house working feverishly, as did her fellow Ukrainian Bar Association leaders from elsewhere, the task force began feeding both legal and practical information to the UBA. It also began stitching together connections, such as linking Ukrainian lawyers to world-renowned experts on international law, as war-based legal issues started to pour in. In addition, the bar association and task force began posting and disseminating inside the United States powerful and, at times, illuminating statements on the war from the Ukrainian legal community, along with statements from other legal and policy-centered groups in America and Europe. An early statement from the UBA that was linked on the bar association website said, for example, of the mounting attacks on Ukraine: "Russian military strikes affected not only military infrastructure, airfields, warehouses and military control centers, but also all airports in the country and residential buildings." It continued, "It is obvious for the world and for Ukraine that 'protection of the Ukrainian people,'" as Russian President Vladimir Putin had said publicly was a reason for the military operations, "is a pretext for advancement of military contingent into Ukraine thus putting pressure on the Government of Ukraine and forcing Ukraine's domestic and foreign policies, in particular on EU and NATO membership." "UBA YET AGAIN CALLS ON THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY TO URGENTLY: … provide Ukraine with lethal weapons and armor so that to increase Ukraine's resistance capacity," the statement also said. At the same time, the stateside task force began quickly creating specialized teams, according to its co-chair, Ed Lenci, who joined in the recent 90-minute Zoom interview. Nine interviewees from New Jersey, New York, Ukraine and Poland participated in the video session. They laid out the extra-ordinary efforts made, and still being made, by a collection of lawyers and the overseas coordination among them. The teams formed by the task force included an immigration refugee group that has been advising the Ukrainian chapter and the UBA on refugee issues, and that has been recruiting and training lawyers to help with what is expected to be an influx of Ukrainians seeking protected status in the U.S. Other teams include a charitable donations group that, in part, has been vetting charities to make sure donated money will be used appropriately inside Ukraine; an international tribunal team that has been following and assessing courts of justice that will weigh in on war crimes; a sanctions team that's been assessing sanctions imposed on Russia and calling for more; and a law school team that's been recruiting students and professors to help in the overall effort, including with drafting legally based documents. In a statement about the task force, T. Andrew Brown, the bar association president, said, "With their country at war, many Ukrainian lawyers have been stretched to the limit." "We must condemn the aggression of the Russian Federation perpetrated against the Ukrainian people, but words alone are not enough." Back in tiny Storozhynets, which sits near the border with Romania, Inna Liniova has been working most closely, for weeks, she said, with cohorts such as Anna Ogrenchuk, the UBA's president and co-chair of the bar association's International Section Ukraine Chapter. During the interview, both Liniova and Ogrenchuk described, in often vivid language, the type of work and efforts—some legally focused, some not—they've found themselves thrown into because of the war. Their voices grew strained with emotion at times, and some of their words were spiked with emphasis, but mostly they appeared level and steadfast in the face of the trauma around them. "The legal community is the one who has to analyze and label what is happening in Ukraine, say that this is OK and this is not OK," said Liniova, referring to her and colleagues' work in putting out statements about, and documenting, some of the death and devastation happening during the war. Other work, she said, has included speaking publicly about her legal organization's view that "the leadership of the Russians" is misleading about and "confus[ing] international law." "One example" is that the Kremlin has "confused the notion of collective defense with the notion of aggression," she said. "They are saying that property rights of Russian leadership and others are being violated" and "they try to justify their actions in Ukraine" based on this and international law. "They twist and they mix" elements of international law to make flawed arguments, she said. "We believe it's a primary goal of the legal community to name these actions" and the flawed arguments being put forward, said Liniova. Ogrenchuk spoke of fielding questions over the UBA's call-in hotline, in the first days of the war, from Ukrainians who wanted to leave the country as a family, but who were worried whether they could, since they didn't have citizenship or other documentation for their children. She and other lawyers who've helped guide Ukrainians have told them how to consult with border authorities, she said, or which specific border patrol they should go find. And they've explained that Poland almost immediately began accepting Ukrainians and their children, even when they had no documents, Ogrenchuk said. She also noted that at least 600 calls have come into the hotline in recent weeks, and that some 200 lawyers in all have staffed the line. "What do we do if we're injured" as we try to leave? was another question that came in, she recalled. Other questions have been about handling dead bodies and about war crimes. Lawyers have told callers to quickly get cellphone pictures of the crimes, since that evidence may prove to be crucial later. "We organized a hotline that now grew into something bigger," said Ogrenchuk. Liniova noted that she and other attorneys have already been discussing "establishing a dedicated tribunal for the Ukrainian [war-crimes] case." At one point, she also said as her voice rose: Some "judges of the Supreme Court are fighting with guns, fighting in the streets now." Anna Dabrowska, a law firm partner in Warsaw who chairs the bar association's Poland chapter, talked later in the interview about some of the steps she and her colleagues have been taking to help Ukrainians. Her firm's labor law team produced and began distributing, she said, informational guides for Ukrainians who planned to find refuge in Poland. Poland has taken in nearly two million of the estimated 3.3 million Ukrainians who have fled their homeland since Russian troops and tanks began invading. The guides addressed not only documentation issues for those coming to Poland by car and by foot—they also listed information on how Ukrainians might find work in Poland, or get healthcare, or potentially get social security benefits. Dabrowska, a transactional lawyer at her 115-attorney firm, Wardynski & Partners, also said that her country has been opening up avenues for Ukrainians so quickly that some information in the guides became outdated fast. And so the firm produced more. Last week, Poland passed a broad law giving Ukrainians the right to live and work in the country for a year and a half, along with access to healthcare and education benefits. Asked why Poland has been so welcoming to Ukrainians, when not every nation would have such open arms, Dabrowska said, "We feel a very strong bond with them, historically speaking ... the western part of Ukraine used to be part of Poland." And "many Polish people have similar roots" to Ukrainian's roots, she said. "It's a Slav country," Ukraine, as is Poland, "and I think Slavic people need to help each other." The law partner also talked about how recently she'd taken into her home a refugee family—a mother, a toddler and a mother-in-law from Ukraine. "They came on the Sunday after the war broke out," she said. "They were fleeing from Lviv," a city in western Ukraine that is normally just a 2-hour train ride from the Polish border. "It took them 23 hours on the train, standing" to get here, she said. "You could hardly close the [train] door." "You can imagine how traumatic that was," she said, as she called them "a wonderful family." Once the baby, mother and mother-in-law made it into Poland and to safety, she said, they were depleted and exhausted, like so many of the other Ukrainians she's come upon who've snatched up belongings and run from their homes. Dabrowska and others have fed many of the refugees they've met. "I'm fighting Putin with chicken soup to give to these tired, cold people," said Dabrowska.