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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People of the former Soviet bloc rejoiced when the Iron Curtain fell and embraced membership in the European Union. Hungary is an example of a growing culture clash in the conservative East. -
Adults "can see us as serious or they can see us as a joke," one of the kids says. "A lawsuit is not a joke," her brother adds. The European Court of Human Rights has fast-tracked their 2020 lawsuit. -
Rights groups accuse nations of using COVID-19 as an excuse to shut out refugees. Here's one story of migrants who attempted a risky voyage across the Mediterranean, but Malta sent them back to Libya. -
Leaders from across the European Union's 27 member-states celebrated the start of vaccination efforts on Sunday. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called it "a European success story." -
Hashim Thaci, a senior guerrilla commander during the Kosovo war in the late 1990s, said he had a confirmed indictment from a special court in The Hague. -
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a leading European populist allied with President Trump, is publicly predicting a Trump election victory while quietly preparing for a world without him.
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It is a sharp fall for Nikos Michaloliakos, a former army commando who has compared himself to Julius Caesar, and for a party whose members say they're victims of persecution. -
Kastellorizo has become a pawn in a dispute between Greece and Turkey over maritime borders and offshore resources. But as the governments' standoff continues, islanders speak of peace and harmony. -
Europe's largest refugee camp, on the Greek island of Lesbos, was built to hold 3,000 people. When fires struck this week, the settlement of 12,000 was largely destroyed. -
The camp on the island of Lesbos was under lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic. More than 12,000 migrants are in need of emergency shelter.
