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 ruling Conservative Party will choose a new leader this week. The winner will inherit a full-blown international crisis, which erupted Friday after Iran seized a British-flagged oil tanker.
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As their economy continues to flag, Greeks turn to the center-right and a more conservative leader. Four years after Greece nearly left the European Union, a new prime minister has been sworn in.
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A German father struggles to find and bring home his young daughter, taken by his ex-wife when she went to Syria five years ago with her new husband, an ISIS fighter.
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The worldview that nations should promote their interests over those of the international community poses a challenge for Germany, a country built on partnerships.
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When the Hungarian prime minister met with President Trump on Monday, it marked a coming together of two leaders known for their nationalist worldviews and hard-line immigration policies.
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A handful of news websites are struggling to change the narrative from the dominating, pro-government media conglomerate one analyst calls a "centralized propaganda machine."
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The U.S. says it may stop sharing intelligence with Germany if it adopts Chinese firm Huawei's 5G technology. But the threats haven't swayed Germany, which says it can set its own security standards.
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Germany wants to speed up its mobile data service with 5G technology, which Chinese telecom Huawei is bidding to provide. But if Berlin lets Huawei compete, it faces the Trump administration's wrath.
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The center-right European People's Party faces off with its Hungarian partners that keep bashing Brussels and migrants.
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Hungary's prime minister leads the nationalists who want immigrants out of Europe. His government lambasts European Union leaders even as the EU pays for schools, roads and even vanity projects.
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The government-funded House of Fates, set to open this year, has been criticized by Holocaust survivors, scholars and others for presenting a distorted view of Hungary's role during the Holocaust.
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Ghraoui chocolate in Damascus was a place fit for queens — literally. But the family that owned it since 1805 moved from war-torn Syria to Hungary to start over, and ended up thriving.