TREVISO – «They want to take a 16 year old boywho lives and studies in Italy, and bring it in Ukraine to send it to fight”. The story it tells Edgardo Spagnuolo, security guard resident in Villorba (Treviso), is nothing short of particular. His wife Mariana, a 37-year-old Ukrainian nurse, was killed in 2022 by mortar shells fired by the Russian army while she was near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. The war had recently broken out and Mariana, at the time residing in Italy with her husband and two children (a ten-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy born in Ukraine but who arrived in Italy as a child and now with dual citizenship), struck by what was happening in his country he had decided to return to help his people. She left Villorba in April 2022 and in September the clash where she was killed. A few months later, the woman’s family (the mother), resident in Ukraine, was compensated for her loss. «And now – explains the husband – they want the boy, now sixteen years old, an Italian citizen, to move to Ukraine against his will. And with the risk that he could be killed even if he is not old enough to enlist. But in those countries you never know.”
THE KNOT
The story is intricate. The person asking for the sixteen-year-old’s return is Mariana’s biological mother: «The woman who says she is her mother – Edgardo explains – gave her into foster care to some of her relatives when she was little. In fact, she grew up with others. Then Mariana arrived in Italy where we met.” Edgardo immediately recognizes the boy and the family lives their life in peace. Until the outbreak of war, when Mariana feels compelled to return to her homeland and make her medical skills available to her people. And there she, unfortunately, dies. «Mariana’s biological mother and her family – continues the husband – have received several thousand euros in compensation for my wife’s death, as well as receiving a house and land. Nothing came to us.”. Instead, the request to bring the boy back home has arrived which, according to the husband, is motivated only by “reasons of petty economic calculation – he says – such as obtaining more compensation money from the Ukrainian government after the thousands of euros received without the real heirs only one cent has arrived. And, moreover, they want him because he needs a working presence on the farm and in the stable.”
THE COURTS
The tension gradually rose. The Ukrainian relatives have come forward on several occasions to claim the right to have custody of the boy: «This group of Ukrainians with psychological and physical pressure and with the display of photocopies of documents issued by a Ukrainian court, never recognized and validated by any Italian judge, demand that the boy, who is currently subject to the legal guardianship of the Italian husband of his deceased mother, decided by the Court of Treviso, to move to Ukraine”. Edgardo Spagnuolo has been fighting for months to keep the boy in Italy. And Ukrainian relatives have also come to Italy to claim their rights: «Several times these people showed up under our house to apply pressure, so much so that on one occasion the Villorba Carabinieri had to intervene to remove them. The last time it happened in February 2023. Mariana’s biological mother travels up and down Ukraine to come to Veneto and Emilia where she does some odd jobs.” The father does not give up: «I don’t want to send this young man to Ukraine, where he risks being sent to fight. That family lives in a region about a hundred kilometers from Lviv, not far from the border with Poland. The risk is that they will be sent to fight. They don’t take into account that there is a judge’s order appointing me as legal guardian. I will not give in.”
