Authorities have confirmed an award-winning American journalist was killed by Russian forces near Kyiv.
Brent Renaud, 51, a former New York Times contributor and a video journalist who has also reported for NBC, Vice News, and HBO, was fatally shot in the neck by Russian troops when they opened fire on a car in the Ukraine town of Irpin, police and a witness reported.
“The occupants … kill even journalists of the international media who try to show the truth about the inaction of Russian troops in Ukraine,” Kyiv Chief of Police Andrey Nebitov wrote on Facebook.
“Of course, the profession of a journalist is a risk, but US citizen Brent Renaud paid his life for trying to highlight the aggressor’s ingenuity, cruelty, and ruthlessness.”
Nebitov also shared a video that captured a police officer on the scene with a bloodied man’s body.
Two other journalists were also injured in the attack and taken to the hospital, Nebitov added.
“We had crossed the first bridge in Irpin. We were going to film other refugees leaving. We got into a car. Somebody offered to take us to the other bridge,” he told the Italian paper Internazionale, the Daily Mail reported.
“We crossed a checkpoint, and they started shooting at us. The driver turned around, there were two of us. My friend is Brent Renaud,” he said.
Juan said the attackers shot Renaud, and he had to flee the scene without his friend for his own safety.
“He has been shot and left behind. I saw he has been shot in the neck. We got split,” he said.
PBS reporter Jane Ferguson said she saw Renaud’s body lying on the side of the road under a blanket, the New York Post reported.
“Ukrainian medics could do nothing to help him by that stage,” she posted on Twitter. “Outraged Ukrainian police officer: ‘Tell America, tell the world, what they did to a journalist.’ “
Irpin has been the target of heavy shelling by Russian forces.
The New York Times made a statement on Reanud’s death Sunday, saying: “We are deeply saddened to hear of Brent Renaud’s death. Brent was a talented filmmaker who had contributed to The New York Times over the years.”
Initially, Renaud was identified as a New York Times journalist, but he had not been on assignment for the newspaper at the time of his death, a representative told The Post.
“Early reports that he worked for Times circulated because he was wearing a Times press badge that had been issued for an assignment many years ago.”
Renaud and his brother Craig won a Peabody Award for their work on a Vice News documentary about a school in Chicago, according to the bio on their Web site.
The brothers had also worked on documentary projects for their company, the Renaud Brothers, from Iran, Afghanistan, Haiti, Egypt, Libya, and Mosul.
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