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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It's unclear if the soldiers have been taken prisoner or are under the protection of the U.N., but a Ukrainian official says they would be able to return home after a prisoner exchange with Russia. -
In the catacombs of a steel plant in Mariupol, Ukrainian soldiers stage a last stand against Russian occupation as their wives plead with aid groups to evacuate them along with civilians. -
"Like the apocalypse, like a horror film," is how one evacuee describes weeks of sheltering in the vast, Soviet-era steel plant. Her daughter says, "Each day felt like it would be our last one alive." -
It was seen as a way for Russia to prop up its currency and retaliate for Western sanctions, but it could cause global energy prices to spike. One analyst sees it as a warning to the rest of Europe. -
Spooked by reports that traffickers are waiting at the Ukraine-Poland border, a Polish woman started an all-women car service to drive Ukrainian refugee women and children to homes or shelters. -
More than 150,000 displaced Ukrainians now live in Krakow, increasing the population by 20% in just a few weeks. Now the city is helping them find long-term housing, jobs and spots in schools. -
Alarmed by the humanitarian crisis caused by Russia's invasion, an economist in Slovakia gathered food and clothes from friends — and found himself leading a convoy carrying tons of aid into Ukraine. -
The country has taken in the most refugees escaping war in Ukraine by far. Families, volunteers and nonprofits have sprung into action to care for them. -
Many Polish families are offering temporary lodging for Ukrainians who have fled. Some Poles are fostering Ukrainian children who had been living at a home for orphaned or neglected children. -
The teenagers on the Afghan girls national soccer team lean on each other as they adjust to a new life in Portugal, where they fled after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.
