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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Many in Europe's largest ethnic minority group live in poor, marginalized communities where conditions could lead to a swift outbreak, say researchers and activists. -
Greece is looking at enormous losses in a main industry due to COVID-19. Authorities have launched a website for virtual visits "until we can all be together in person again," a tourism official says. -
At least 20 refugees in a camp outside Athens have tested positive for COVID-19. Some 60,000 refugees live in camps in Greece, some crammed into tight quarters with little access to water or soap. -
Reporters Without Borders says the government has forbidden state-controlled media from using the word and ordered its removal from health brochures distributed at hospitals, schools and workplaces. -
Hungary's nationalist government has granted sweeping emergency powers that Prime Minister Viktor Orban says are necessary to fight the coronavirus pandemic. Critics say he's simply grabbing power. -
The Dutch market is a global blossom powerhouse but sales are withering as virus-hit countries hunker down. -
"This trial, too, shall pass," Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I said. "But our lives will have changed forever." He asked parishioners to stay home for their own safety and the safety of others. -
For years, Uighurs in Turkey have been pained as they search for missing loved ones back home. Now that's compounded by their own insecurity in Turkey.
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Their parents are missing back home in China, likely in prison or detention. "We want them to know they belong to a family that's much bigger than the one they have lost," the school's founder says. -
Once viewed as a refuge by members of the Muslim minority group, Turkey has detained Uighurs and told them to hush criticism about the Chinese government. Some have already been deported.
