The Children Who Do Not Want to Go Home

The Guardian reported this week on the Ukrainian children evacuated from state care after Russia's full-scale invasion, thousands of whom were moved westward and some of whom reached small villages in the Italian Alps. Kyiv wants them returned. Many resist. One boy, fifteen when he arrived in March 2022, told the paper that his future lay in the European Union. The detail is small; the question it raises is not.

Italy has long been a country that people leave, not one that receives. Emigration shaped the national character more than any single event of the last century and a half, and the memory of departure still colours how Italians read the arrival of others. The Ukrainian children in the Alps invert the pattern twice over: they came without choosing to, and now some of them choose to remain. That double movement is unfamiliar, and it is worth sitting with.

The story is also a story about the state. These children were in institutional care in Ukraine before the war, and they are in institutional care in Italy now. The Guardian's reporting suggests that the question of their return is being negotiated between governments, as it must be, but that the children themselves have views that do not always align with the diplomatic file. A republic that takes the rights of minors seriously has to make room for that misalignment, however inconvenient.

We do not pretend to know what the correct outcome is in any individual case. Family reunification, national reconstruction, the duty of a state to its own young — these are weighty claims, and they can pull in opposite directions. What the foreign coverage makes visible is that the argument is being conducted largely in the language of states, while the people at its centre are speaking, quietly, in the language of their own lives.

Italy is often described from abroad as a country of arrival and transit, a frontier rather than a destination. Reports like this one suggest a subtler reality: that it is also, for some, a place where a life can begin again, and that the young are capable of recognising this faster than the institutions around them.