Law Beat: Albany attorney to view Ukrainian relief effort up close - Times Union

ALBANY - Hank Greenberg tackled corruption as a federal prosecutor, advised top state officials as a counsel in state government and spoke from a critical legal pulpit as president of the New York State Bar Association.

But in more than 35 years practicing law, the Albany attorney has never seen anything like he'll be seeing soon.

Greenberg was scheduled to fly Sunday night to Poland to witness first-hand the extraordinary relief efforts under way to help refugees desperately fleeing their native Ukraine as the eastern European national is facing a vicious Russian invasion. Greenberg, a shareholder in the firm of Greenberg Traurig, is part of a delegation of observers from the Jewish Federation of Northeastern New York, part of the larger Jewish Federations of North America.

On Monday, the group will visit the border village of Medyka, population 2,800, where Ukrainians have fled to escape the Kremlin-led carnage on their homeland. In six weeks of war, more than 6½ million Ukrainians have been displaced, with more than four million refugees, according to news reports.

Medyka, a village dating to the Middle Ages, is just about 50 miles west of Lviv, the Ukrainian city that only days ago was struck by two Russian missiles.

"This is a humanitarian crisis in the West — absolutely epic proportions," Greenberg told Law Beat. "The people that are going to be crossing the border that I'm going to see are going to be coming hundreds and hundreds of miles in some cases to get there."

Greenberg explained the purpose of the trip was to bear witness to the conditions, meet with refugees and bring knowledge of what he learned back to the Capital Region to share with as many people as possible. He said people may wish to donate to groups working to assist the refugees.

"What I want to do is call attention and raise awareness to an aspect of the war that perhaps doesn't get as much attention as the actual strategy of the war ... the consequence of war, the casualties of war, the refugees ... and calling attention to their plight," Greenberg said. "This is a humanitarian crisis we haven't seen in 80 years and it's only going to grow. We are just six weeks into the war."

Greenberg is of Russian, Polish and Ukrainian descent. All four of his grandparents immigrated from eastern Europe, but he previously held no intentions of visiting Russia or Poland or Ukraine.

Plans change when Europe faces a crisis it has not experienced since World War II, which ended in 1945. And Greenberg said history weighs heavily on the minds of all who lived through it and remember the horrors of Adolf Hitler's genocidal Nazi regime.

Now, the invasion of Ukraine comes under the orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"This is central Europe and we know what happens when a sociopath dictator marches into sovereign democratic nations and invents a pretext (for war)," Greenberg said of Putin. The Russian dictator has claimed the war is to accomplish the "denazification" of Ukraine — comparing the Ukraine, whose president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish and who lost relatives in The Holocaust — to Nazi Germany.

"What's extraordinary in these polarizing times in which we're living, here is an issue that has literally unified the West around its opposition to what Putin is doing and unified support in this country for the Ukraine," Greenberg said. "You can't do enough."

Putin's forces have indiscriminately bombed civilian populations, attacked maternity wards, Red Cross centers, fired arms at a nuclear reactor and reduced the Ukrainian city of Mariupol to rubble, Greenberg noted.

For their part, the Jewish Federations of North America program has raised and allocated more than $41.9 million to help the Jewish community of Ukraine and others facing difficulties in the war. The local federation has raised nearly $100,000, it said in a news release.

The effort is intended to ensure displaced Ukrainians get the basics of life.

"These are people who are leaving their country — destination unknown," Greenberg told Law Beat. "They need, food. They need medical care. Many of the are victims experiencing PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) in the trauma of war. The cost of providing that kind of assistance is going to be staggering. And that's not even talking about when the war is over, the cost of rebuilding the Ukraine, rebuilding Mariupol."

Unlike the refugees he will meet, Greenberg's destination for this week is known. He was not nervous heading to the Ukrainian border, he said.

"The intensity, the experience, I'm sort of bracing myself for," he said. "Seeing that much human suffering in the raw is not something I've encountered before in my life."

source: https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Law-Beat-Albany-attorney-to-view-Ukrainian-17049520.php

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