Brent Renaud, first foreign journalist to be killed in Ukraine
Brent Renaud, a 50-year-old freelance photographer and filmmaker, was killed on Sunday in Irpin, a northwestern suburb of Kyiv, where fighting has been raging for several days. He is the first foreign journalist to be killed since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24. A Ukrainian public television journalist was killed on 1is march into the Russian bombing of the Kiev TV tower.
Brent Renaud and another American journalist, who was injured, were hit at midday while driving with a Ukrainian civilian, who was also injured.
Brent Renaud “was shot in the back of the neck and killed instantly”said Danylo Shapovalov, a doctor engaged with the Ukrainian forces who took care of the victims.
A journalist from Agence France-Presse saw the body of the slain journalist, who had his identity papers on him, including an old accreditation card from the New York Times.
The American daily said in a press release that this journalist “talented” had worked for him in the past, most recently in 2015, but that was not the case in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian authorities quickly accused their Russian enemies of having fired on the American journalists, but the origin of the shots was difficult to establish immediately. “We are consulting the Ukrainians to determine how this happened”said on the American channel CBS Jake Sullivan, national security adviser to American President Joe Biden, denouncing a murder “shocking and horrifying”.
Brent Renaud, also a writer, was from Little Rock, Arkansas, according to the website of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, linked in particular to Harvard University, which granted him a scholarship in 2019. He had worked on numerous documentary film projects with his brother Craig, and covered topics as diverse as the refugee crisis in Central America, the political upheavals in Egypt and the fight against extremism in Africa and the Middle East. , according to the foundation.