The Ukrainian Children in Italy's Alps Who Do Not Want to Go Home

When he arrived in a small village in the Italian Alps in March 2022, a 15-year-old evacuee identified only as Denys told the Guardian he felt homesick and confused, having been put on an overnight bus and relocated away from his family. Four years later, his position has reversed: he is among the Ukrainian children in state care who say their future lies in the European Union, not in Ukraine. Kyiv wants them back. Many are resisting.

The Guardian's global-development reporting describes thousands of children who were in Ukrainian state care when Russia invaded and were evacuated westward, including into Italy. The Italian placements were arranged in the first weeks of the war, when the reception of unaccompanied and institutionalised minors was treated as an emergency rather than a long-term arrangement. That emergency has now become a legal and diplomatic argument over where these young people belong.

The dispute is not confined to Italy. The Guardian frames it as a wider European question, with host countries holding children whom the Ukrainian state regards as its own responsibility, and with the children themselves now old enough to be heard on the matter. The paper records Denys's own words — that his future is in the EU — as the clearest statement of a position that no repatriation procedure has yet resolved.

The Guardian's reporting places the Italian cases inside a broader pattern across the countries that took in evacuated Ukrainian minors after February 2022. Kyiv has pressed for their return, arguing that children removed from institutional care remain under Ukrainian guardianship. The children, by contrast, have spent formative years in schools, villages and foster arrangements abroad, and a number say they do not wish to go back. The paper does not put a figure on how many in Italy are resisting, and no such figure should be assumed.

The Italian placements described by the Guardian were in Alpine villages — small communities in the north of the country, of the kind that have long absorbed seasonal and settled arrivals with little administrative noise. That is the specific texture of the story as the paper tells it: not a camp or a city dormitory, but a village where a teenager was enrolled, learned the language and, by his own account, stopped thinking of the stay as temporary.

What the Guardian does not report is equally worth noting. The paper does not describe Italian government policy on the repatriation requests, does not name an Italian minister or agency position, and does not state that any specific removal or return has been ordered or carried out. The dispute as reported is between the Ukrainian authorities and the children themselves, with the host arrangements as the setting rather than the protagonist.

The regional reading is a restrained one. The Guardian names the Italian Alps as the location of at least one placement, and that is the full extent of the local detail the source supports. Beyond that, the story is national and European: a question about how long an emergency placement lasts, and who decides when it ends. The paper's own framing — the children's stated preference for an EU future — suggests the answer will be settled politically, and slowly, rather than by any single procedure.