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 seven times, and was nominated for an eighth award in 2022 for his ongoing coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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.
Mark has also been internationally recognized for his coverage of the war in Syria, the rise of the so-called Islamic State and the refugee crisis that followed. 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.
Mark has also been posted to the Middle East and China for The Globe and Mail. He covered the initial arrival of Canadian troops in Afghanistan in 2002, the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. He also reported on the 2013 transition of power in China from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping.
He has also 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 and Aung San Suu Kyi, and Jordan’s King Abdullah II.
He now divides his time between London and Kyiv.
