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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Some Ukrainians are spending their days under the fire of advancing Russian troops. We meet some of the last residents of an eastern Ukrainian town.
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It's the first time Ukraine has publicly given a figure for military casualties. As Russia's war on Ukraine enters its third year, Zelenskyy says 2024 could be decisive. -
Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago. Russia expected a quick victory. Ukraine expected Russian defeat. But the war goes on.
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When Russia invaded Ukraine, it expected a quick fight, like its 2014 annexation of Crimea. Two years in, the war grinds on.
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In the 80% of Ukraine that remains in Kyiv's hands, two years of full-scale war with Russia have brought grief, destruction and, despite all, optimism. -
Two years since Russia's invasion, the Ukrainian border city of Kharkiv prepares for a long war by building entire school systems underground.
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As Ukraine struggles for military supplies and aid, a town in the eastern region of Donetsk that has been on the frontline for 10 years has fallen to Russia.
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It's Russia's first significant battlefield win since last May. The White House said Ukrainian soldiers pulled out because they had "dwindling supplies as a result of congressional inaction." -
NATO is promising a delivery of a million drones to Ukraine, even as future U.S. support seems uncertain. Ukrainians in Sumy, a region in northeastern Ukraine, live under Russian shelling and deadly mortar attacks.
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Ukrainian soldiers on a break from the front lines meet up with their wives and girlfriends, who arrive on the so-called "train of love," where every day is Valentine's Day.
