When Ukrainian children’s home director Liubov Rudyka took the minors in her care to Naples after Russia invaded , she thought she was bringing them to safety. It never occurred to her that Italy might not want to give them back. And yet, four years later, their return has become a legal battlefield.
Ukrainian authorities have told CNN that several children who were evacuated to Italy with Rudyka are among dozens of Ukrainian minors whose return home has been prevented by the Italian courts. A dispute over their situation escalated in April, after Kyiv announced that one of the Ukrainian children, a 15-year-old boy named Sasha, had been legally adopted by an Italian family – despite having a mother who wants him to return to Ukraine.
Kyiv argues that the evacuations were meant to be temporary and that while the war continues, the situation has stabilized in parts of the country and there are safe places for the children to return to. The Ukrainian government’s main worry is that the longer the children stay abroad, the less likely they are to return in the future – a worrying prospect for a country that faces a major demographic crisis.
Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, told CNN that Italy is refusing to cooperate with Kyiv on the issue and is preventing Ukrainian authorities from checking on the children’s welfare.
“We continue to send official requests (and) the Italian representatives are telling us that the judiciary is completely independent and that they cannot influence this decision. But I demand that they intervene,” he told CNN, going as far as likening the situation to the cases of thousands of Ukrainian children who have been illegally deported to Russia. The Kremlin denies this and says it evacuated Ukrainian children for their own safety.
“(Italy’s) attitude is, in fact, no different from the Russian side’s position… they have taken our children away and are denying us access to them,” he said.
CNN has repeatedly contacted the Italian government, the Italian Ombudsman for Children and Adolescents, the Commission for International Adoption and the court that ruled on the adoption for comment. All declined, citing privacy laws concerning minors.
The children’s home that Rudyka oversaw was in Sumy, a city in northern Ukraine that was almost completely surrounded by Russian troops in the first days of the full-scale invasion in early 2022.
According to Rudyka, a charity which had previously organized holidays for the children contacted her with an offer to evacuate them to Italy. She made the journey to the southern Italian city of Naples in the summer of 2022 with the 25 children in her care.
“I thought it would be like a summer camp: the children would spend some time in Italy and then return,” Rudyka told CNN. “But then, after about three weeks, perhaps a month, the children began to be assigned Italian (legal) guardians,” she said.
While Rudyka was the children’s legal guardian under Ukrainian law, the Italian authorities did not recognize her as such. Instead, CNN’s reporting has confirmed, they treated the children as unaccompanied minors, gave them refugee status and assigned them new guardians.
This approach is rooted in Italian law. Rome strengthened legal protections for child refugees amid the European migrant crisis a decade ago. Among other provisions, it introduced a ban on the return or removal of any unaccompanied child from Italy unless ordered by a court in exceptional circumstances.
But this meant that Ukraine was essentially shut out from making any decisions about the fate of the evacuated children.
Rosa Emanuela Lo Faro, an Italian lawyer who represents some of the minors, told CNN that in some cases the children were completely cut off from their lives back in Ukraine.
“There was a ban on communicating with (their) guardians in Ukraine, Ukrainian friends, all Ukrainian people. The child could only communicate with their Italian guardians and that’s it,” she said.
Lo Faro has worked with the Ukrainian authorities and managed to get some of the guardianship decisions overturned by the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation, but she told CNN the situation remains very complicated.
She said in some cases, foster families wishing to adopt the children put pressure on the authorities. “(They argue) that they’re better off here, that they are doing well here and that if they return to Ukraine, they (would) have war instead,” she said.
‘Please leave the children here until the war is over’
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“My husband and I do not have children, but we wanted to give these children some relief, so they can have some good time outside the institutions and so we sai…
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