A Ukrainian Child Chooses the Alps, and Europe Must Answer

The Guardian this week carried the testimony of Denys, a fifteen-year-old who arrived in a small village in the Italian Alps in March 2022, put on an overnight bus and relocated along with thousands of Ukrainian children in state care. He told the paper he felt homesick and confused at first. Four years on, he does not want to go home. Kyiv wants these children back; many, according to the Guardian's reporting, resist.

We read this from Italy, which is where the story physically lands. The Alps are not an abstraction in this dispatch. They are a specific village, a specific school, a specific bed in a specific house. The war produced, among its many displacements, a quieter one: children moved west for safety and then, over years, rooted. The Ukrainian state's wish to bring them home is not unreasonable. Neither is a child's wish to stay where his future, as he puts it, now lies.

The tension the Guardian describes is not really between Ukraine and Italy. It is between two legitimate claims on a young life — the claim of a nation rebuilding itself, and the claim of a person who has already been rebuilt elsewhere. Europe has spent four years improvising responses to displacement. Here is a case that resists improvisation, because the answer is not a policy but a person.

What the foreign coverage does not resolve, and what we cannot resolve from Rome, is what a humane arrangement would look like: not a return forced, not a separation permanent, but something in between that treats a fifteen-year-old as a subject rather than an object of policy. The Guardian's piece is valuable precisely because it refuses to flatten this into a slogan. We would add only this. Italy, which received these children, now holds a share of the question. It should answer it with care.