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.

The Guardian's piece is built on testimony rather than aggregate figures. It reports that Denys was placed on a bus and relocated together with other children from Ukrainian institutions, and that he described the first months in his new Alpine home as disorienting. The paper says his view has since changed, and that he now sees his future inside the EU rather than in Ukraine.

That individual account sits inside a larger administrative question. According to the Guardian, Ukrainian authorities want the evacuated children returned, while many of those children, by now several years into schooling and daily life outside Ukraine, are unwilling to go. The report presents this not as a single dispute but as a recurring one, involving children dispersed across several European countries.

For the Alps, the story is a reminder of how the 2022 evacuation reached even small mountain communities far from the front line. Italy's reception of Ukrainian minors was organised nationally, but the placements themselves landed in villages whose schools and social services are sized for a few hundred residents. The Guardian does not quantify how many such children remain in Italy or in the Alpine provinces, and no regional breakdown is provided in the report.

The paper also notes the legal and emotional difficulty of the choices involved: a return to Ukraine may mean reunification with relatives or a return to institutional care, depending on the child's circumstances. The Guardian's reporting does not resolve how many cases fall into each category, and Ukrainian officials' positions are described in general terms rather than through named statements on individual cases.

What the report establishes is a tension that is likely to persist as the children age into legal adulthood and the question of return becomes one of their own choosing rather than the state's. The Guardian's account suggests that for at least some of those evacuated to the Italian Alps, the answer has already been given.