Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the woman recognised by many countries as the president-elect of Belarus, describes Ireland as her “second home”.
During the 1990s she was one of the “Chernobyl children” brought to Ireland by Adi Roche. Then she was known as Sviatlana Pilipchuk and her hometown of Mikashevichy in the south of Belarus is just 30km from where the Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred in 1986.