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

When 15-year-old Denys arrived in a small village in the Italian Alps in March 2022, according to the Guardian, he felt homesick and confused. He had been put on an overnight bus and relocated along with thousands of other children in state care who were evacuated from Ukraine after the Russian invasion. Four years later, the newspaper reports, he does not want to go back.

The Guardian's dispatch, published on 16 September, describes a wider standoff between Kyiv and the European countries that took in these children. Ukraine wants them returned; many of the teenagers, now approaching adulthood, resist. The Guardian frames their position plainly: 'My future is in the EU.'

The story is not a single case. The Guardian reports that thousands of children in Ukrainian state care were evacuated in 2022, and that the question of their return has become an awkward one for host countries across the continent, including Italy.

The Italian Alpine context matters because the children were not placed in large cities but in small mountain communities, where schools are few, class sizes are shrinking, and demographic decline has already emptied classrooms. The Guardian does not give a figure for how many of these children Italy hosts, and La Veduta does not have one from the wire. What the newspaper does report is the texture of one placement: a village, a bus journey, a teenager who arrived without choosing to.

The dispute sits inside a broader European argument about who controls the fate of unaccompanied or institutionalised minors who crossed borders as refugees. The Guardian reports Kyiv's position — that the children belong to Ukraine — and the children's counter-position, that their futures now lie in the EU. It does not report a resolution, and it does not report an Italian government position on the matter.

For Alpine communities, the practical questions are the ones the Guardian's reporting raises but does not answer: what happens when a child in state care turns 18, whether residency follows, and who is responsible for the transition. The newspaper's reporting is a human story first, but it touches a legal grey zone that European interior ministries have been slow to clarify. No Italian ministry statement appears in the wire coverage, and none is asserted here.

What can be said from the international coverage is limited and should be treated as such. The Guardian establishes that the children exist, that they were evacuated to places including the Italian Alps, and that at least one of them, four years on, regards his future as European rather than Ukrainian. Everything beyond that — numbers, policy, official responses — is not in the wire, and La Veduta will not supply it.