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.