Joanna Kakissis
Joanna Kakissis is a foreign correspondent based in Kyiv, Ukraine, where she reports poignant stories of a conflict that has upended millions of lives, affected global energy and food supplies and pitted NATO against Russia.
Kakissis began reporting in Ukraine shortly before Russia invaded in February. She covered the exodus of refugees to Poland and has returned to Ukraine several times to chronicle the war. She has focused on the human costs, profiling the displaced, the families of prisoners of war and a ninety-year-old "mermaid" who swims in a mine-filled sea. Kakissis highlighted the tragedy for both sides with a story about the body of a Russian soldier abandoned in a hamlet he helped destroy, and she shed light on the potential for nuclear disaster with a report on the shelling of Nikopol by Russians occupying a nearby power plant.
Kakissis began reporting regularly for NPR from her base in Athens, Greece, in 2011. Her work has largely focused on the forces straining European unity — migration, nationalism and the rise of illiberalism in Hungary. She led coverage of the eurozone debt crisis and the mass migration of Syrian refugees to Europe. She's reported extensively in central and eastern Europe and has also filled in at NPR bureaus in Berlin, Istanbul, Jerusalem, London and Paris. She's a contributor to This American Life and has written for The New York Times, TIME, The New Yorker online and The Financial Times Magazine, among others. In 2021, she taught a journalism seminar as a visiting professor at Princeton University.
Kakissis was born in Greece, grew up in North and South Dakota and spent her early years in journalism at The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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The southern Mykolaiv region has seen targeted strikes, leading Ukrainian officials to round up hundreds of people suspected of leaking information to the Russians. -
The families of Ukrainian soldiers imprisoned by Russian forces have embarked on a desperate search for information after a deadly explosion at the Olenivka prison. -
The small town of Nikopol, Ukraine, sits across the river from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Attacks are causing serious alarm for the community. -
The milestone comes after the U.N. and Turkey signed agreements with Russia and Ukraine to resume exports. The U.N. had pushed for a deal to address a growing global food shortage. -
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry denounced Saturday's strike as "spitting in the face" of Turkey and the United Nations, which brokered the grain export agreements. -
Displaced when Russia bombed their historic building, a Mariupol theater troupe has reconstituted what's left of the group and is putting on a play by a famous Ukrainian playwright. -
A Russian soldier's forgotten body is discovered in a liberated village north of Kyiv, setting off a range of emotions and an inquest — as Russia refuses to acknowledge many of its war dead. -
Ukraine has very liberal abortion laws. In Poland, it is almost entirely illegal. Millions of Ukrainians discovered this when they fled the war in their home country and crossed the Polish border. -
Belarusians who see their country's fate as linked to Ukraine's victory are joining an anti-Kremlin resistance that includes activists, ex-spies and a Belarusian brigade fighting for Ukraine. -
More than a thousand soldiers were evacuated from the Azovstal steel plant, and Russia is consolidating control of Mariupol. It is making plans to annex the southwestern parts of the country.
