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 anda ninety-year-old "mermaid" who swims in a mine-filled sea. Kakissis highlighted the tragedy for both sideswith a story about the body of a Russian soldier abandoned in a hamlet he helped destroy, and sheshed 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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In Ukraine's second-largest city, near the Russian border, grade-schoolers attend classes in a subway station that doubles as a bomb shelter.
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As bipartisan support in the U.S. wanes, Ukraine hosts foreign ministers from the European Union, which continues to view Russia's war on Ukraine as an existential threat.
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In Ukraine, possibly the world's most mined country, a team of sappers races to clear explosives left by Russians along the southeastern frontline to help Ukrainian troops take back occupied land.
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After a classmate was killed in his hometown of Bakhmut — the longest and bloodiest battle in Russia's war on Ukraine — a rescue worker volunteered to evacuate people from the front lines. -
A Russian missile has killed a promising young musical duo as Ukraine pleads for more air defense weapons from its western allies.
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Zaporizhzhian Cossacks are warriors who have been revered for centuries in Ukraine. A family is maintaining the Cossack traditions by training people with swords, maces and their bare hands.
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Ukraine says it wants to keep exporting grain from its ports in the Black Sea, saying it needs partners to keep those exports flowing. in the port city of Odesa, the U.S. offered additional help.
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Award-winning novelist Victoria Amelina, who retrained as a war crimes researcher to document Russian atrocities and preserve Ukrainian culture, has met a tragic end.
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A young award-winning novelist who retrained as a war crimes researcher to document Russian atrocities and preserve Ukrainian culture has met a tragic end.
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On a wooded river island, a Ukrainian family guards the legacy of the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks, whose history and traditions are making a comeback during the war.
