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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A Ukrainian soldier and his wife describe how the large-scale Russian invasion has changed their lives and their country. -
Ukrainians have been fighting for survival since Russia's 2022 invasion. With Donald Trump winning the presidential election, Ukrainians could lose the U.S. as their biggest single ally.
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Much of the world is following the U.S. presidential election, but probably nowhere more closely than in Ukraine. Ukrainians worry what a change in the White House would mean for their survival.
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Ukraine’s president is in Brussels today to speak to European Union leaders about his plan to end the war in a year -- without ceding any territory to Russia.
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Ukraine says North Korean military engineers have been sent to Russia to check how well missiles are launching. -
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is in Washington Thursday, seeking President Biden’s approval on a strategy to end the war with Russia on Ukraine’s terms.
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With the war now in its third year and couples facing long separations, Ukraine has introduced an app that allows couples to propose marriage and register them.
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Children in the U.S. have begun another school year. But overseas, what are the challenges for the children who live in three of the worlds most active war zones: Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine?
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U.S. military veterans who support Ukraine worry about political blowback since the suspect in the apparent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump has connections to their movement. -
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his U.K. counterpart are in Kyiv after Russia received shipments of close-range ballistic missile systems from Iran.
