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 small country bordering Russia and partly occupied by it is alarmed by the recent arrival of tens of thousands of Russian men fleeing conscription into the Ukraine war.
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As Russia's bombardment of Ukraine's infrastructure continues, the Ukrainian government is set to receive more than $4 billion in aid from the U.S. to help keep basic services running.
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Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy emerge as the single largest party. Her coalition will be able to form the next government, and Meloni is expected to become Italy's first female prime minister.
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Few Ukrainian cities have suffered as much Russian bombardment as Mykolaiv, near the coveted port of Odesa. Targeted strikes led the authorities to round up suspected collaborators.
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Fighting at Europe's largest nuclear power plant, now occupied by Russia, turns a Ukrainian city across the river into a target for Russian missiles and a danger zone for a nuclear accident.
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Less than 24 hours after Ukraine and Russia formalized a deal to reopen Black Sea ports and resume agricultural exports, Russian missiles hit the port in Odesa.
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Several actors who survived the Russian bombing of a theater in Mariupol are now in Ukraine's far west. They went back on stage over the weekend for the first time since the war began.
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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. -
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.
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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.
