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

Thousands of Ukrainian children who were moved into state care after Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022 are now at the centre of a quiet dispute between Kyiv and the European countries that took them in, according to a Guardian investigation published this week. The paper followed several of the children, including a boy who arrived in a small village in the Italian Alps in March 2022 at the age of 15, after an overnight bus journey that separated him from his family.

The Guardian reports that Kyiv wants the children back, but that many resist returning, citing schooling, stability and the prospect of a future inside the European Union. The reporting describes children who have learned the local language, settled into host families or residential care, and who now describe their host countries, not Ukraine, as the place where their lives are headed.

The story is presented by the Guardian as a question of child welfare set against the claims of a state at war. Ukraine's position, as the paper describes it, rests on the desire to bring its youngest citizens home and to prevent the long-term loss of a generation. The children's position, as the paper records it, is more practical: they have school places, routines and, in several cases, the beginnings of a second language.