Russia’s Supreme Court allows father to keep daughter taken to Russia without permission, citing France’s ‘unfriendly’ status and NATO membership
Russia’s Supreme Court has ruled that a Russian man does not have to return his daughter to her mother in France, even though he took the child to Russia without permission, Kommersant reported.
The case concerns Veronika Tishkova, a Ukrainian citizen who married Russian citizen Alexey Yermakov in 2018. They lived in Kyiv, where their daughter was born. The couple divorced in 2021, and the child stayed with her mother. Shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, Tishkova moved to France with her 3-year-old daughter, while Yermakov remained in Ukraine.
In June 2023, he asked a Kyiv court to order his former wife to bring their daughter to Ukraine every six weeks. The court denied his request.
Yermakov also took legal action against his former wife in France. In April 2024, he consented to the child’s living permanently in France. The following March, he asked for permission to take his daughter on vacation to Turkey and Slovakia, promising the court he would return her in two weeks. He did not. It soon emerged that he had taken the child to Russia.
In July 2025, Tishkova asked a court in Novosibirsk to order her daughter’s return. During the proceedings, the girl was granted Russian citizenship at her father’s request. The court nevertheless sided with Tishkova and ordered Yermakov to return the child to France under the Hague Convention. Higher courts rejected Yermakov’s appeals.
He then appealed to Russia’s Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor in July 2026. The court found that the girl had adjusted to life in Russia and that moving to France could therefore adversely affect her. It cited an article of the Hague Convention that allows courts to refuse to return a child “if there is a grave risk that his or her return would expose the child to physical or psychological harm.” The court also said the girl has Russian citizenship and that France is an “unfriendly” country and a member of NATO and the European Union.
Tishkova challenged the ruling, which is now under review by the Supreme Court’s Presidium. Her lawyer, Dmitry Litvinsky, said the Supreme Court had “put its own political interpretation of the situation above the applicable law.” Andrey Targashov, Yermakov’s lawyer, said the court’s position was “in line with international practice.”
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