Russia’s Supreme Court recently ruled that Alexei Yermakov could keep his daughter in Russia rather than return the child to her mother in France. Among other factors, the Russian court cited the Russian authorities’ official designation of France as an “unfriendly state” and its membership in NATO and the European Union.
Three lower courts had previously ordered Yermakov to return the girl, whom he took to Russia without her mother’s consent.
French lawyer Ilona Shipkov of the law firm Villard Cornec & Associé told The Insider that rulings of this kind could serve to encourage further acts of international parental child abduction.
The girl’s mother, Veronika Tishkova, is a Ukrainian citizen. After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she moved to France with her daughter.
Tishkova’s former husband, Alexei Yermakov, agreed in 2024 that the girl could live in France. He later asked for permission to take the child on vacation to Turkey and Slovakia, promising to return her. Instead, he took her to Russia.
Tishkova went to court in Russia and won an order for the child’s return. The ruling was upheld on appeal and by a cassation court.
The Supreme Court, however, overturned those decisions, saying the girl had acquired Russian citizenship, had become accustomed to life in Russia, and that France was on Russia’s list of “unfriendly states.”
The mother appealed. Her complaint is now being reviewed by the Presidium of the Supreme Court.
How abducting a child can become an advantage for a parent
Shipkov said one of the main problems in Russian court practice is that judges often assess a child’s living conditions after the removal has already taken place — including assessments of housing, school, family surroundings, and attachment to the parent with whom the child is living. As a result, a parent who unlawfully removes a child can gain an advantage in court based on a situation they created themselves — while court proceedings continue, the child becomes accustomed to the new country, and that adaptation can later be used as an argument against returning the child.
“This creates a situation in which the unlawful removal of a child risks becoming a way to gain an advantage in a dispute between parents,” Shipkov told The Insider.
That is precisely the risk the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction is meant to prevent. The treaty establishes a mechanism for the prompt return of children who have been wrongfully removed from or retained outside the country of their habitual residence. Russia joined the convention in 2011.
Shipkov stressed that a court in the country to which a child has been taken is not supposed to decide which parent would be better for the child to live with. Instead, its task is to determine whether the removal was unlawful and whether any of the limited exceptions under the convention apply. Under the convention, the dispute over custody and parental rights should be decided by the competent court in the child’s country of habitual residence.
For example, a return may be refused if it would expose the child to a grave risk of physical or psychological harm, if the other parent agreed to the removal, or if a sufficiently mature child independently objects to returning. Shipkov said those exceptions must be applied narrowly, however, or else the return mechanism loses its purpose.
Russian courts pointed to children’s citizenship and adaptation even before the full-scale war
Shipkov said the Supreme Court’s current ruling does not constitute an entirely new practice. In 2019, the St. Petersburg City Court refused a father’s request to return a child whom the mother had taken from France to Russia. Among the court’s arguments were the child’s Russian citizenship, the absence of any ban on entering Russia, and the absence of an earlier court ruling determining where the child should live.
The court also cited the child’s adaptation to life in Russia and what it called the “inadmissibility of separating a young child from the mother.” Shipkov said, however, that a Russian citizen’s right to enter Russia and the lawfulness of a child’s removal under the Hague Convention are entirely different questions.
“A child can cross the border legally and still be wrongfully removed within the meaning of the convention if the other parent’s custody rights were violated,” she explained, adding that Russian courts sometimes approach such disputes primarily through the lens of Russian family law, even though the Hague Convention requires courts to consider the child’s habitual residence before the removal and the custody rights that existed there.
A Russian prosecutor cited France’s “unfriendly” status and lack of direct flights
Political arguments in such cases also appeared long before the Supreme Court’s latest ruling. In 2022, a court in Chelyabinsk heard a case involving the return of children to France. Shipkov’s law firm represented their French father.
The mother, who was keeping the children in Russia, argued that returning them to France given the political situation could negatively affect their psychological well-being. The prosecutor also cited strained relations between Russia and France, possible difficulties protecting Russian citizens abroad, and the lack of direct air service between the two countries.
Shipkov said arguments like these show how a dispute over returning a child can turn into an assessment of political relations between states rather than an examination of the circumstances of the child’s removal. The Hague Convention, however, does not allow a court to refuse a child’s return simply because the country of habitual residence has been designated “unfriendly.”
“From the standpoint of the 1980 Hague Convention, France’s designation as an ‘unfriendly state’ cannot in itself serve as a legal basis for refusing to return a child.”
She noted that France was already a member of NATO and the European Union when Russia joined the convention, and that those facts were known to both countries before the convention began applying between them. A court may assess specific risks to the child, Shipkov said, but those risks must be established and substantiated rather than automatically inferred from political relations between governments.
In Belarus, a father kept one child and separated siblings
Shipkov also cited a recent case in Belarus, where her firm also handles international child abduction cases. In September 2026, a dispute there involved two children with French and Belarusian citizenship.
Both had been living permanently in France and attending school there. The father, however, unlawfully retained one of the children in Belarus, while the other remained with their mother in France. Despite lengthy court proceedings, the mother was unable to secure the child’s return.
According to Shipkov, the Belarusian court considered, among other things, the child’s citizenship and alleged risks associated with returning to France. The lawyer said cases like these illustrate the danger of replacing the Hague Convention’s criteria with arguments about citizenship, political conditions, or whether life in one country is supposedly preferable to life in another.
Shipkov also said she fears that the use of political arguments could spread to other categories of civil and family disputes.
“I think the risk of this logic spreading to other cases is quite real. Moreover, political considerations had already appeared in child-return proceedings long before the Russian Supreme Court’s current ruling.”
