Ukrainian Children in Italian Care Resist Return, and the Plain Weighs Its Welcome

The Guardian has reported on the thousands of Ukrainian children who were evacuated from state care when Russia invaded in 2022 and placed in institutions and families abroad, and who now say they do not want to return home even as Kyiv presses for their repatriation.

The newspaper's account opens with a fifteen-year-old, identified only as Denys, who arrived in a small village in the Italian Alps in March 2022 after an overnight bus journey and describes feeling homesick and confused at first. His position now, according to the report, is that his future lies in the European Union.

The story is a reminder that the reception of Ukrainian minors was never only an emergency measure. It created legal and human ties that outlast the circumstances that produced them, and the question of what happens when the receiving country and the country of origin disagree about a child's best interest has no easy answer in either Italian or EU law.

The Guardian frames the tension as one between a state's claim on its own children and the expressed wishes of the children themselves. Kyiv wants them back, and the newspaper reports that many resist. That is not a dispute about facts so much as about whose assessment of a child's welfare takes precedence — the guardianship authorities in Ukraine, or the courts and social services of the country where the child has lived for more than four years.

Italy's role in this is substantial. The country received a large share of Ukrainian arrivals after February 2022, and its network of small municipalities, parishes and cooperatives absorbed families and unaccompanied minors into ordinary civic life rather than into camps. The Guardian's detail — a village in the Italian Alps, a school, a host family — describes a model of dispersal that Italy has used for other reception programmes and that foreign observers have often noted, sometimes approvingly, sometimes critically for the isolation it can produce.

Emilia-Romagna's own experience of Ukrainian reception ran through the same channels: municipal social services, the cooperative sector that staffs much of Italy's welfare provision, and schools that enrolled children who arrived without Italian. That system is built for continuity rather than for return, which is precisely why the repatriation question is difficult to resolve administratively. A child who has been in a classroom in the plain for four years is not in the same position as one who arrived last month.

The Guardian's report does not resolve the legal question, and neither does this dispatch. What it documents is a situation that will not be settled by a single decision: individual cases, individual assessments, and a slow reckoning between two states that both claim to be acting for the child. For the municipalities and cooperatives that took these children in, the practical task is narrower — to keep the case files in order and the school places open while the argument runs its course.