Mark MacKinnon

Mark MacKinnon has been covering international affairs and Canada’s role in the world since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States and the subsequent war in Afghanistan.

Since that moment, he has covered elections and wars, revolutions, and refugee crises, in all corners of the world.

One of Canada’s most decorated foreign correspondents, Mark has won the National Newspaper Award 10 times, in addition to being named Canada's print Journalist of the Year by the organization in 2016. In 2026, he was recognized with the Career Achievement Award by World Press Freedom Canada, which noted the many personal risks Mark had taken to bring international news to Canadian readers.

Mark has been covering Russia and Ukraine since 2002, when he was first sent abroad to serve as The Globe and Mail’s Moscow bureau chief. He covered the Orange Revolution in 2004 and Ukraine’s 2014 Revolution of Dignity, and witnessed firsthand Russia’s subsequent annexation of Crimea as well as the start of the eight-year proxy war in Donbas.

He has been covering Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine since its first days in February 2022.

Mark has also been internationally recognized for his war reporting. His 2016 story "The Graffiti Kids," which followed the lives of the teenagers who inadvertently started the Syrian war, was named Story of the Year by the London-based Foreign Press Association. He won the same FPA prize again in 2024 for his feature story "The Fearless," which followed a team of Ukrainian special-forces fighters through three years of war.

Mark has also been posted to the Middle East and China for The Globe and Mail. He reported on the 2013 transition of power in China from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping, and has won accolades for his investigations into the garment industry in Asia, and for his reporting from the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan.

Mark is the author of The New Cold War: Revolutions, Rigged Elections and Pipeline Politics, which was published in 2007 by Random House, and The China Diaries, an e-book of his train travels through the Middle Kingdom along with photographer John Lehmann.

Mark has interviewed many world leaders, including Volodymyr Zelensky, Shimon Peres, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Jordan’s King Abdullah II.