Cesar Quintana agonized for weeks that his 2-year-old son wouldn’t make it out of the battered Ukrainian coastal port Mariupol as Russian troops encircled the city.
Thankfully, he did.
But Alexander and his mother are now in Russia, where Quintana, who has full legal custody of the boy in California, is no closer to seeing him again.
Quintana has been trying to bring his son back to the U.S. since his estranged wife took the child to Ukraine without Quintana’s permission in 2020. He was working to get the boy returned through a Ukrainian court when the war broke out, and he lost communication with them.
Last month, he finally learned that, unlike the millions of Ukrainians who fled to Poland or Moldova, the family and others from Mariupol escaped across the closest international border to Russia.
Russia, however, is not a partner of the United States under an international treaty that governs the return of children abducted overseas by one of their parents, though Ukraine is. That has Quintana hoping the Ukrainian court will take his case back up and he can get Russian authorities to enforce any ruling in his favor. He said he’s also trying to persuade his estranged Ukrainian-American wife, Antonina Aslanova, to return to California on her own.
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