Ukrainian children resettled in Italy resist Kyiv's call to return

Thousands of Ukrainian children who were evacuated from state care when Russia invaded in 2022 are now resisting Kyiv's efforts to bring them home, according to a Guardian investigation published on Wednesday. The paper followed several of the children placed across Europe, including a teenager who arrived in a small village in the Italian Alps in March 2022 after an overnight bus journey and describes his future as lying in the European Union rather than Ukraine.

The Guardian frames the story as a quiet conflict between a state that wants its children back and children who have built new lives in the countries that took them in. Its reporting describes homesickness and confusion giving way, over four years, to schooling, language and attachment to the places that received them. The paper does not name the villages or quantify how many of the children are in Italy, and the figures it gives for the wider evacuation are for Europe as a whole.

The dispatch is a reminder that the war's demographic effects have settled far from the front line. Italy has absorbed part of that displacement through its ordinary reception system rather than through any dedicated programme for unaccompanied minors, which is why the children in the Guardian's account appear in small communities rather than in camps or large urban centres.

Abruzzo knows this pattern from its own history. The 2009 earthquake displaced tens of thousands of people from L'Aquila and the surrounding villages, and the reconstruction that followed took more than a decade to complete. Families who were moved to the coast, to temporary housing or to relatives elsewhere often did not come back, and the mountain interior has been emptying ever since. The Guardian's subjects are not earthquake survivors, but the mechanism its reporting describes — displacement followed by attachment to the place that receives you, and then reluctance to return — is one this region has lived through.

The comparison has limits and should be stated as such. The children in the Guardian's investigation were moved across borders by war, not within a region by a seismic event, and their legal position is governed by Ukrainian and European rules that have no equivalent in disaster recovery. The Guardian does not report any Abruzzo placement, and this newspaper has no evidence that any of the children it describes were settled here.

What the region can contribute is the observation that small Apennine communities are structurally dependent on incomers. Depopulation has closed schools and shops across the interior, and the arrival of even a handful of families can keep a primary school open for another year. Whether those families stay is decided less by policy than by work, housing and whether the village offers a life a young person wants. The Guardian's reporting suggests the same calculation is being made by Ukrainian teenagers in the Alps, and that Kyiv is finding it harder to reverse than it expected.

The Guardian's account is careful about the legal and diplomatic stakes. Ukraine has pressed for the return of children taken into care abroad, and European states have generally cooperated with requests while applying their own child-protection standards, which do not permit the compulsory return of a minor who has reached an age of independent decision-making. The paper reports resistance from the children themselves rather than a formal refusal by any government, and it does not claim that Italy has blocked returns.

For the Apennine interior, the story is a reminder that reception is not only a coastal or metropolitan question. Mountain municipalities host small numbers of foreign residents, often with less administrative capacity than larger centres, and their ability to keep those residents depends on services that depopulation has already thinned. That is a national problem with a local face, and the Guardian's reporting gives it a human scale the aggregate figures do not.