Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
In Russian courts, the war that began in February 2022 is slowly bleeding into cases that once had nothing to do with sanctions, foreign policy, or NATO.
A custody fight between a Ukrainian mother living in France and a Russian father has now produced a ruling that uses Moscow’s own geopolitical categories as a legal argument about where a child should live.
Russia’s Supreme Court overturned three lower-court rulings that had ordered Alexey Yermakov to return his daughter to her mother, Veronika Tyshkova, in France. Among the reasons the top court gave: France is on Russia’s list of “unfriendly” states and a member of NATO and the European Union, which, in the court’s view, “create risks for the child,” Russian newspaper Kommersant reported.
The Supreme Court sided with Yermakov in July 2026, and the case became public on October 21.
Yermakov and Tyshkova married in 2018, lived in Kyiv and divorced in 2021. In March 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Tyshkova moved to France with their three-year-old daughter, while Yermakov remained in Ukraine. In 2024, a French court recorded his consent to the child’s permanent residence in France, according to Kommersant.
How the father took the daughter to Russia
In March 2025, Yermakov asked the French court for permission to take their daughter on a two-week vacation to Turkey and Slovakia, promising to return her, Kommersant reported. Instead, in April 2025, he brought the girl to Russia, where she was granted Russian citizenship on his application.
Tyshkova filed a return claim in Novosibirsk’s Central District Court. In October 2025, the court ordered the father to send the girl back to France under the Hague Convention. Appeals and cassation courts upheld the order.
What the Supreme Court said
Yermakov took the case to Russia’s Supreme Court, which found that returning the girl could expose her to “serious risk of physical or psychological harm or intolerable conditions,” Novaya Gazeta’s Russian edition reported. The judges pointed to the girl’s adaptation to life in Russia, her Russian citizenship, and France’s status as an “unfriendly” state belonging to NATO and the EU.
Dmitry Litvinsky, the French lawyer representing Tyshkova, said the court had “placed its own political understanding of the situation above existing legal norms,” warning that Russian courts may now give the Russian citizenship of one parent decisive weight over every other fact in a custody dispute, according to The Insider.
