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.