{"id":725382,"date":"2026-08-03T03:23:15","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T03:23:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/725382\/"},"modified":"2026-08-03T03:23:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T03:23:15","slug":"chornobyl-evacuee-on-welsh-family-that-took-him-in-after-disaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/725382\/","title":{"rendered":"Chornobyl evacuee on Welsh family that took him in after disaster"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the summer of 1999, 11-year-old Anton Honchanka was looking to escape his contaminated hometown following history’s worst nuclear disaster.<\/p>\n

His journey would take him from Gomel, Belarus, to a United Kingdom that was experiencing a historic total solar eclipse, a major political reshuffle by Prime Minister Tony Blair, and a music chart dominated by singles such as Livin’ La Vida Loca.<\/p>\n

Anton was one of the children evacuated from Belarus following the 1986 Chornobyl disaster<\/a> in neighbouring Ukraine, after a reactor at the plant exploded and spewed out radioactive material that would spread across swathes of Europe.<\/p>\n

Due to radiation, parents in Eastern Europe saw the Chernobyl Children’s Lifeline program (CCPL) as vital for their children’s health with over 56,000, external<\/a> coming to the UK for medical aid and humanitarian support.<\/p>\n

Thirteen years on since the incident, and with the radiation still hanging in the air, Anton had set off on what he saw then as a “new adventure” thanks to the programme, albeit one “not easy” for his mum to see him leave.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the summer of 1999, 11-year-old Anton Honchanka was looking to escape his contaminated hometown following history’s worst…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":725383,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[1397,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-725382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=725382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725382\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/725383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=725382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=725382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=725382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}