Ukrainian attorney Oleksiy Stolyarenko was running on very little sleep as his virtual conversation with LSU Law Interim Dean Lee Ann Wheelis Lockridge, Professor Scott Sullivan, and the LSU Law community began on Wednesday, March 30.
“Last night I had, really, no sleep because the bombardment was so bad,” said Stolyarenko, who earned his LLM from LSU Law in 2010 and spoke via Zoom from his Kyiv apartment. “There were three airstrike alerts, and they were bombing all day and night.”
The sound of sirens and shelling has become so common in Kyiv that residents can now decipher what type of munitions are being used during different strikes, Stolyarenko said. Yet, as the Russian invasion continued into its sixth week, Stolyarenko said the Ukrainians’ resolve to defeat their neighbors and maintain their independence has not waivered.
“We want to preserve our integrity. We want to be our own country. We don’t want to be dictated to or told what we should think or what language we should speak,” said Stolyarenko, who has practiced in Ukraine for about 15 years and is currently with Baker McKenzie in Kyiv, practicing primarily in the areas of intellectual property, information technology, personal data protection, consumer protection, e-commerce, and advertising law. “So, every Ukrainian is either fighting or packing stuff to deliver it to the army.”
Since the invasion began, Stolyarenko has been helping support the war effort by raising funds, securing supplies and shipping them to where they’re most needed. He has previous experience, having done the same in 2014 and 2015 when Russia invaded and subsequently annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine. For Americans interested in supporting Ukrainians, he suggested the following efforts:
- SupportUkraineNow.org is a crowdsourced information platform with a comprehensive list of official fundraising efforts, requests for material donations, and resources for hosting or hiring Ukrainians, among other resources
- The Leleka Foundation is a US-based nonprofit organization that raises charitable funds and implements medical and social support projects in Ukraine
- Support Hospitals in Ukraine raises funds to ship medical equipment, tactical medicine, and field surgery supplies from the U.S. to Ukrainian hospitals
- Stolyarenko’s personal initiative is to purchase tourniquets and individual first aid kits for military and emergency services. Contributions can be made via PayPal by sending them to Oleksiy.stolyarenko1@gmail.com.
On the morning of the Russian invasion, Stolyarenko was at a train station in Kyiv, returning from a three-day trip to the Carpathian Mountains. His family had been preparing for the possibility of an invasion for weeks, stockpiling supplies and making evacuation plans. He quickly moved his wife and son to his parent’s home in central Ukraine, then subsequently moved several more times, and he is currently back in Kyiv.
“We were expecting they would invent something … that they would create some diversion before they would attack. So, everybody was very much surprised. I mean, we were shocked, and we still can’t believe that the Russians are capable of this,” he said. “When Ukrainians meet now, they say: ‘How did you meet the 24th of February?’ Everyone has a story.”
Like most Ukrainians, Stolyarenko’s personal relationship with Russia runs deep. His mother was from Russia, his first language is Russian, he has relatives in the country, and he works with many colleagues across the border. The firm he works for, Baker McKenzie, was the first international law firm to be established in Russia. When he started his undergraduate studies in Ukraine in 2000, all his classes were still being taught in Russian, even though the country had gained independence nine years earlier.
Stolyarenko is a native of Kryvyi Rih, which is one of the largest cities in central Ukraine and the hometown of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It’s an industrial city in which boys are raised to be tough and to honor their word if they want to be respected, Stolyarenko said. In this way, he added, Zelensky and his government’s resistance throughout the conflict reflect the president’s upbringing in Kryvyi Rih.
“They’ve fought, they’re holding up, and they’ve stayed in Ukraine, and that’s the most important thing,” he said. “It gives people hope and shows people that everything is organized and working.”
While Stolyarenko praised Zelensky’s wartime performance, he also noted that he was not a strong supporter of the president prior to the Russian invasion.
“He is very visible and he is very articulate, so I think he’s doing a great job right now,” he said. “As I said, I am not a big fan of his because he was, well, a mediocre president in peacetime, but in this situation, he has been very effective.”
As for where the conflict goes from here, Stolyarenko said it’s very difficult to say. He expressed skepticism about a negotiated peace while the Russians are still actively fighting in Ukraine, and he also doubted the Russians will settle for anything less than complete rule of the country.
“I’m honestly thinking that this conflict will only end after the Russian regime and the Russian economy fall,” he said, “because the purpose of their actions is destruction of the Ukrainian state as a sovereign state. So, at this point, what is the negotiating position that Russia can reasonably take? Because we will not agree to that.”
For the foreseeable future, Stolyarenko said, Ukrainians must remain defiant, continue doing all they can to support their army, and begin preparing for the rebuilding of their country once the Russians are driven out.
“The work ahead is enormous. We need to build a stronger Ukraine,” he said. “We want to become self-sustainable again and be able to defend ourselves from any future action that may come from Russia or any other country.”
While rebuilding Ukraine poses daunting challenges, financially and otherwise, Stolyarenko said it also provides an opportunity for the nation to root out some longstanding problems in its own government.
“There is an understanding that when we come out of this war, we will have a lower tolerance for corruption and other things we have had in the past. The rule of law is an important thing, and our problem is mostly with institutions. So, we need to build institutions that support the rule of law and establish better standards,” he said, adding meaningful improvements can also be made to the legal system. “We need to shift our legal studies and our legal base to be more like that of Europe and other developed countries in the West.”
During his virtual conversation with the LSU Law community, Stoyarenko spent more than an hour and a half with Lockridge, who taught him when he was at LSU Law, and Sullivan, who teaches and writes about public international law, U.S. foreign relations and international security. Watch the full conversation below.
