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. Children from the Sumy orphanage pictured during their evacuation to Italy. Liubov Rudyka 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’ When a large group of Ukrainian orphans arrived in Rota d’Imagna, a small municipality in the northern Italian region of Lombardy in 2022, local teacher Diego Mosca helped place them in schools and started organizing weekend and vacation activities for them. He enlisted the help of his cousin, Michela Noris. “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 said, okay, we can try to host,” she told CNN. Noris said they started with one 11-year-old boy, but then took his sister and others. “In the end we hosted something like 10, 12 children and we had to come up with a rota system,” she told CNN. A large group of Ukrainian children came to stay in a dorm in Rota d’Imagna, northern Italy. Noris and other locals began looking after them for weekends and vacations. Minako Sasako/The Yomiuri Shimbun/AP The program worked well – until the summer of 2024, when the Ukrainian staff who arrived with the children announced they would be returning home. Noris and the other families involved in hosting were horrified. She started a petition asking for the best interests of the children to be considered – it gathered more than 18,000 signatures. “We don’t want the children here in Italy forever. We just said, ‘Listen, guys, we know that the situation in Ukraine is terrible. The war is still ongoing. Just please leave the children here until the war is over, and then take them back.’” International dispute Sasha was only 10 when a court in Ukraine ruled that he and his two sisters would be removed from their parents’ care due to a difficult domestic situation, according to court documents. The three siblings were living in the children’s home in Sumy when the war started and were among the 25 children who traveled to Italy with Rudyka. Sasha’s parents did not lose their parental rights when the court took the children away from them, according to the ruling, and CNN is not publishing their family name to protect their privacy. Rudyka said the expectation was that the children would return to their parents once their home situation improved – but the invasion prevented that happening. In 2023, as it became clear the war would not end quickly, Ukrainian authorities decided to bring the children back to the country, finding safer homes for them in western Ukraine. Rudyka found a place for the children in Ternopil, in western Ukraine. The Ukrainian consulate in Naples began filing requests for their return with Italian courts. But as Rudyka soon found out, the court proceedings were conducted separately for each child – with sometimes very different outcomes. “That is why it turned out that some children returned, whilst others remained. As of today, we still have five children in Italy,” Rudyka told CNN. Sasha’s two sisters have been allowed to go back to Ukraine, but in Sasha’s case, the courts ruled against his return – and, in April, approved his adoption by the Italian family who had been fostering him since 2022. Still only 15 years old, the boy is now at the center of an international dispute. A spokesperson for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, told CNN that its official position is that, given the war, returns to Ukraine should only happen voluntarily and only if they are determined by the host country to be in the best interests of the child. Lo Faro said that Italian juvenile courts, assisted by child psychologists, are meant to take children’s opinions into consideration when making decisions. But she noted this is especially complicated in the cases of Ukrainian children who came to Italy at a very young age and remember little from their lives in Ukraine. “It’s obvious that they say what the Italian family wants, because they have forgotten what they did in Ukraine, even the language and the customs, and they’ve taken on all the Italian habits of course,” she said. It is unclear what Sasha wants – CNN has not been able to contact him. According to Lo Faro, he consented to the adoption. However, his family said he told them he wanted to come back to Ukraine, while Rudyka told CNN that when she asked him what he wanted, he said he didn’t know. Mosca, the teacher who coordinated the program in Rota d’Imagna, said that many of the children in his care appear torn, living “with half their heart on one side and half their heart on the other.” Rescuers clean rubble and conduct search and rescue operation at damaged residential building after Russian drone attack on January 30, 2025 in Sumy, Ukraine. Kateryna Anokhina/Global Images Ukraine/Getty Images Sasha’s father, a Ukrainian soldier fighting in the war, has been officially missing in action since 2025. His mother, Natalia, told CNN she wants Sasha to come back to live in Ukraine; the Ukrainian authorities support her in this. She believes he’s been prevented from communicating with his Ukrainian family. “I’ve sent him my best wishes (for his birthday), but they won’t let him speak to anyone at all – not to me, not to his sisters, not to anyone,” she told CNN. CNN has asked the juvenile court in Lecce, which considered the case, for details. It refused, citing legal reasons. Lo Faro said she is now trying to get Sasha’s adoption blocked, with a hearing scheduled for later this month. Brothers seek to reunite According to Ukrainian authorities, more than 4,800 children were evacuated from Ukrainian residential schools and homes to several European countries in 2022. Some were orphans while others, like Sasha and his sisters, had been placed into state care. Lubinets, the Ukrainian ombudsman, told CNN there are currently more than 300 children whose return to Ukraine is being prevented by local authorities, most of them in Italy, Germany and Austria. Volodymyr Ivanyuta, who has been appointed by the Ukrainian government to represent some of the Ukrainian children in Italy, said over time he has seen Italian courts increasingly rule against the return of children to Ukraine, whatever their situation. “We have children living with a family that is doing (everything) to prevent their return,” he said. “Then there are children in our care who are in children’s homes, they have no specific people interested in them, and yet these children are still not allowed to return (by Italian courts).” Ivan’s younger siblings are among these children. Ivan, now 20, and his four brothers were taken into state care in 2017 because their mother was struggling to take care of them. When the full-scale war started, the three youngest boys were evacuated to a children’s home in Modica, Sicily, where two, who are still minors, remain; the third now lives on his own in Italy, Ivan said. “Their living conditions are more or less normal; they are being fed, but overall, they don’t really like it there,” Ivan, who is currently in Germany, and trying to get the brothers back together, said of his siblings in the children’s home. “I asked them if they wanted to return to Ukraine. They say yes.” Ivan said that while he is allowed to communicate with his youngest brothers, his requests to visit have been rejected by those in charge. “This is a terrible situation… I still don’t understand the reasons,” he said. The facility’s director refused to comment to CNN on the case, citing privacy issues. Ivan is not willing to give up – and has been in touch with several non-profits who are helping him figure out the next steps. “The Italians are deciding the fate of my family, my brothers, and won’t even let me see them,” he said. Noris said she still misses the children who have left her town in northern Italy, worrying often about their safety. “We took two of them to the seaside for three days and they were so excited,” she said. “They didn’t need anything special, they didn’t need parties, they didn’t need money, they just needed – and still need – attention, the attention of people who look after them. That is the only thing that they needed.” CNN’s Victoria Butenko, Daria Tarasova-Markina and Kosta Gak contributed reporting. The post Hundreds of Ukrainian children were evacuated to Italy. Kyiv is now battling to get them back appeared first on Egypt Independent.
