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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Russia's invasion of Ukraine has prompted Poland's Trump-loving conservative populists to unite with U.S. Democrats and European Union leaders: pillars of liberal democracy they have fought for years.
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Alarmed by the humanitarian crisis caused by Russia's invasion, an economist in Slovakia gathered food and clothes from friends — and found himself leading a convoy carrying tons of aid into Ukraine. -
The country has taken in the most refugees escaping war in Ukraine by far. Families, volunteers and nonprofits have sprung into action to care for them. -
Citizen-soldiers are joining Ukraine's new international brigade of foreign fighters. They include Poles who compare Russia's invasion of Ukraine to the Soviet Union's brutal occupation of Poland.
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Many Polish families are offering temporary lodging for Ukrainians who have fled. Some Poles are fostering Ukrainian children who had been living at a home for orphaned or neglected children. -
A Ukrainian family fled their home and now are stuck on the Ukrainian side of the border with Poland in an endless line.
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NPR foreign correspondents in Kiev and Moscow give updates on the crisis.
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A chef famous in Ukraine for championing the nation's cuisine sees his cooking as part of the anti-Russian resistance.
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President Biden has called on Americans in Ukraine to leave at once. But Americans there are questioning the urgency.
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British Prime Minister Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In Moscow, Russian President Putin made his first public remarks on the crisis since late 2021.
