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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The U.S. is working to help Europe find alternative energy sources should war in Ukraine lead Russia to cut off natural gas supplies.
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After a video call with European allies, President Biden said there's unanimity on the threat posed by Russian troops on Ukraine's borders. Some allies are sending weapons to Ukraine. Others are not.
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The teenagers on the Afghan girls national soccer team lean on each other as they adjust to a new life in Portugal, where they fled after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. -
Young writers who are Roma, Europe's largest ethnic minority, see their own struggles in Amanda Gorman's poetry, and are translating her new book into Hungarian.
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Pope Francis visited a refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos over the weekend, and called for more attention to migrant seekers.
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Greece, where 62 percent of people are fully vaccinated, has started collecting monthly fines from those who refuse the shots. Austria is also taking similar measures.
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Portugal, where nearly everyone is vaccinated, is becoming a test case for living with the coronavirus — as a worrying new strain spreads worldwide.
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The first of more than 20 volunteers who helped migrants in Greece are going on trial, in what rights groups say is a politically motivated attempt to criminalize humanitarian work.
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Six young Portuguese, alarmed at how the warming climate is affecting their future, are suing 33 European countries to compel them to significantly reduce carbon emissions.
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Some Afghans evacuated by the U.S. are being held on a U.S. military base in Kosovo because of insufficient security vetting. Their future is unclear.
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Former Soviet bloc countries were elated when they were able to open to the West. But that emotion has been replaced by discomfort, as deeply conservative societies grapple with the EU's liberalism.
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After catastrophic fires razed the forest that was the lifeblood of Greece's second largest island, residents are planning for a hotter, drier future — and demanding the government do the same.
