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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The owners and insurers of the giant container ship Ever Given have announced a settlement with the Suez Canal Authority, which has held the ship since it got stuck in the canal in March.
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As new COVID-19 strains threaten southern Europe's summer of recovery, tourism-reliant countries are scrambling to save vacation season while adapting their hospitality industries to the uncertainty.
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Governments around the world are using the pandemic to ignore international asylum law and shut out refugees. Advocates expect these policies will continue long after the COVID-19 crisis.
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As Eastern European nationalists prepare for life after President Trump, the media they control are promoting false claims that Joe Biden's victory was rigged.
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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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Hungarian journalists have created an independent news site, pushing back as Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his allies move to assert control over the media.
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NATO allies Greece and Turkey are contesting offshore energy reserves in the Eastern Mediterranean. For weeks, warships patrolled near a tiny Greek island off the Turkish coast.
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It is still not clear what caused the fire at at a camp housing migrants and refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos, leaving thousands in need of new shelter.
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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.
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A tiny Greek island, just off the coast of Turkey, finds itself at the center of a confrontation between the two countries over gas drilling rights in the eastern Mediterranean.
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As parents, teachers and children across the globe struggle with how to return to school safely during the pandemic, we look at strategies in Mexico, South Korea and Greece.
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A popular podcast in the Netherlands is showing the Dutch how to face their country's colonial and slave-trading past as lawmakers push for a national apology and reparations.