The Ukrainian Children Who Do Not Want to Go Home, as the Guardian Reports

The Guardian has reported on the Ukrainian children evacuated into state care across Europe after Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, and on the resistance of some to returning home as Kyiv presses for their repatriation. The paper's account opens in a small village in the Italian Alps, where a fifteen-year-old identified only as Denys arrived in March 2022 after an overnight bus journey, homesick and confused. More than four years on, his position, as the Guardian reports it, is that his future lies in the European Union.

The story is one the foreign press has followed since the first weeks of the war, when thousands of children in Ukrainian institutional care were moved westward for their safety. The Guardian frames the present moment as a collision between two legitimate claims: a state's interest in its own children, and a young person's settled life in the country that took them in. The paper reports that many of those children now resist the return.

Italy's part in the story is specific and documented in the Guardian's piece. The country received evacuees into its care system, including in the Alpine north, and the paper's reporting is built around one such placement. The dispatch does not claim that all evacuees wish to stay, nor that Kyiv's position is unreasonable; it reports the tension as the children and their carers describe it.

Umbria is not named in the Guardian's account, and this dispatch does not claim a local placement it cannot source. What the region can offer is context the foreign reporting implies rather than states. This is an interior of small towns with an ageing population and a long history of taking in the young from elsewhere — through seminaries, boarding schools and, more recently, foster and reception arrangements. The region's institutions are small; a single placement in a village school is felt across a whole valley.

The wider frame the international wires have used for Ukraine's children is one of demographics and law. European countries issued a record 3.9 million new residence permits to non-EU citizens in 2025, a ten percent rise on the previous year and the highest level since records began, as The Local Italy reported this week. That figure covers all categories, not this one, but it describes the same continent the Guardian is writing about: one in which a child evacuated in 2022 has by now spent more of their adolescence inside the EU than outside it.

The Guardian's reporting also touches the practical machinery that decides such cases. Guardianship, residence status, and the question of who speaks for a minor whose parents may be unreachable or deceased are handled differently in each member state. Kyiv's position, as the paper describes it, is that these children are Ukrainian and should return; the children's position, as reported, is that return is not straightforwardly available to them. Neither side is presented as acting in bad faith.

For the interior, the consequence the sources support is modest but real. Reception of unaccompanied minors, whether from Ukraine or elsewhere, has become a standing feature of small-town public life in Italy, and it rests on the same thin infrastructure — social services, schools, host families — that the depopulation features in the foreign press describe as stretched. The Guardian's piece does not make that argument. It reports individual lives, and leaves the reader to see the pattern.

What comes next, according to the paper, is a continuing negotiation between Kyiv and the European states that received the children, conducted case by case and often slowly. The Guardian's reporting suggests the outcome will not be uniform. Some will return; some, like the boy in the Alpine village, will argue that they have already arrived somewhere.