Ukrainian Children in the Italian Alps Resist Kyiv's Call to Return

A Guardian investigation published on 16 September follows Ukrainian children evacuated from state care after Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, several of whom were relocated to small villages in the Italian Alps and now say they do not want to go home. One of them, a 15-year-old identified only as Denys, told the paper he had arrived in the Alps in March 2022 on an overnight bus, homesick and confused, and that his future now lies in the European Union.

The Guardian's reporting describes a wider pattern: thousands of children in Ukrainian state care were moved abroad when the war began, and Kyiv has since sought to bring them back, while many of the children themselves resist returning. The paper frames the dispute as one between a state's claim on its youngest citizens and the lives those children have built elsewhere in Europe.

The Italian Alpine villages that took in some of these children are the setting for part of that argument. The Guardian does not name the individual communities involved, and the numbers settled in any single valley are not given in the report.