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Syracuse University faculty have established a collaborative partnership supporting Ukrainian veterans as conflict persists between Ukraine and Russia.

SU’s partnership with the Ukrainian Veterans Foundation aims to provide Ukrainian veterans with legal consulting and expertise on security and conflict management, according to an SU news release. The faculty members involved in the partnership include veterans, researchers and professors with legal backgrounds. The partnership is looking to reduce problems within the country’s veteran population — many of which are occuring in the United States — before they start.

Vice Admiral Robert Murrett, deputy director of SU’s Institute for Security Policy and Law and a U.S. Navy veteran, is leading the partnership alongside James Baker, the institute’s director and a professor at SU, according to the release. Murrett said he first became involved in the partnership after meeting with Nataliia Kalmykova, director of the Ukrainian Veterans Foundation.

“SU has exceptional capability to address veterans issues at all levels, and we should do all we can to assist Ukraine as they cope with a bow wave of Veterans in their society for the next several years,” wrote Murrett, professor of practice in Public Administration and International Affairs, in a statement to The Daily Orange.

Murrett assists the Ukrainian Veterans Foundation and the Ministry of Veterans Affairs of Ukraine by helping provide resources from SU.

Richard Naperkowski, a senior research fellow at the institute, is another faculty member involved with the partnership. Naperkowski is a U.S. Army veteran who now uses his experiences as well as research in an effort to provide Ukrainian veterans with knowledge on conflict and resolution.

“Ukraine, while they are in conflict, there’s a lot of administrative functions that they have to work out for the first time,” Naperkowski said.

Naperkowski said the team is using lessons learned from American history, including past global conflicts like the Global War on Terrorism and issues within the Department of Veterans Affairs, to establish the “ground works” of the partnership. Through consulting, the institute communicates its ideas to Ukrainian veterans for future implementation, he said.

“We wanna get them ahead of the learning curve, so they don’t have the problems like the veteran suicide problem that we have here, the funding issues that we see all the time, the backlog of customers that they can’t support,” Naperkowski said. “We’re trying to teach them all of the lessons we’ve learned, so that they will have a better product for large populations that’s going to need it fairly soon.”

Maria Cudowska, a faculty fellow at the College of Law, was another initial faculty member at SU involved with the partnership. Originally from Bialystok, Poland, Cudowska said her hometown welcomed many Ukrainian refugees, a critical reason behind why this project is important to her.

“Just seeing that and witnessing that — effectively witnessing history — made me think that collectively as a society and as academics, we need to be thinking about ideas that could be life-changing and helpful to the populations that we serve,” Cudowska said.

Cudowska, Naperkowski and Murrett all expressed their desire for the war to end soon, and for the partnership to continue helping veterans in the future.

“It would be important to secure continuity and in order to do that, you need dedicated people, you need people who have that awareness and who have that sensitivity,” Cudowska said.

Despite the uncertainty of the war’s future, Naperkowski said he envisions the partnership will continue to expand its help for Ukraine.

“While they’re still fighting the war, it’s kind of a question of how things are going to turn out. In the meantime, all we can do is try to give them resources and try to support them in upholding things like the rule of law in their country,” Naperkowski said.

Published on October 12, 2023 at 12:25 am