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 reporter was killed last October, as she was digging up dirt on Malta's most powerful. The final words on her blog were: "There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate." -
The International Commission on Missing Persons in The Hague has identified remains of 18,000 people in the Balkans. Its new challenge: to I.D. the remains of migrants who died trying to reach Europe. -
Just 10 percent of Hungarians polled say they feel totally comfortable making friends with an immigrant. In a survey, Hungarians even rejected a group that doesn't exist. -
Half a century after Enoch Powell delivered the most incendiary political speech in Britain's recent history, his dire vision of race war hasn't come true. But it resonates in British politics today. -
London police are investigating more murders in the last two months than New York cops. Stabbings are largely fueling the increase, but there have been shootings too. -
Thousands of women who were raped in the war that resulted in Kosovo's split from Serbia are eligible for a monthly government stipend of $280. Many are reluctant to claim it. Only 250 have signed up. -
The diplomatic confrontation between the U.K. and Russia over the use of nerve gas in Britain last month is shifting to the U.N. Meanwhile one of the victims, Yulia Skripal, has released a statement saying she's recovering quickly and thanking those who came to her aid.
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British parliamentarians are angry that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has turned down a request to appear from a committee examining who had access to his companies data.
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Britain is expelling 23 Russian diplomats after accusing Moscow of involvement in the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter.
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Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May is under pressure to place sanctions on Russia, following the poisoning of a former Russian spy, who was living in exile in the western city of Salisbury.
