Director Brent Renaud speaks onstage at The 74th Annual Peabody Awards Ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street on May 31, 2015 in New York City. | Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images for Peabody Awards
By Maeve Sheehey
Updated:
confirmed the news on Facebook, writing that the 51-year-old media correspondent was shot and another journalist wounded.
“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,” Andriy Nebytov said in the post.
The police in Kyiv said Renaud died after Russian forces opened fire on his car. The Associated Press reported that American journalist Juan Arredondo was traveling with Renaud when both were shot, and while Renaud was killed, Arredondo was shot in the lower back and wounded.
The mayor of Irpin said on Sunday, following the shooting, that journalists would be denied entry into the city “to save the lives of both them and our defenders,” the AP reported.
Later on Sunday, a State Department spokesperson also confirmed Renaud’s death.
“We offer our sincerest condolences to his family on their loss and are offering all possible consular assistance,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Out of respect for his family’s privacy, we have no specifics to offer at this time.”
In a statement released on Twitter, Cliff Levy, deputy managing editor at the Times, said: “We are deeply saddened to hear of Brent Renaud’s death. Brent was a talented photographer and filmmaker who had contributed to The New York Times over the years.”
Levy added that Renaud was not on assignment for any desk at the paper.
Renaud was no stranger to conflict zones, and risked his safety to report on issues such as the War in Iraq, meth addiction in the American South and natural disasters. His work, much of which was conducted with his brother, Craig, received widespread acclaim for its raw, honest portrayal of human suffering.
The journalist was reportedly shot in Irpin, which is just outside the capital of Kyiv. He was there covering Russia’s war on Ukraine, which is entering its third week as the death toll rises and forces continue their advance toward the capital.
Asked on Sunday morning about the killing, which journalist Clarissa Ward earlier reported, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that he had just learned of the report and was unable to confirm at the time. He added that, if an American journalist was killed, that was “a shocking and horrifying event.”
“It is one more example of the brutality of Vladimir Putin and his forces … is they’ve targeted schools and mosques and hospitals and journalists,” he added, “and it is why we’re working so hard to impose severe consequences on him and to try to help the Ukrainians with every form of military assistance we can muster to be able to push back against the onslaught of these Russian forces.”
The attack on an American filmmaker follows repeated Russian censorship of journalists who speak out about the reality of the invasion and contradict Russia’s false narrative about the war.
Most recently, a law was passed threatening up to 15 years imprisonment for journalists speaking out about the conflict. A number of media outlets, including the Times, yanked their journalists from Russia on fears of that threat.
