Award-winning American journalist Brent Renaud was killed by Russian forces in Irpin, Ukraine, according to police in the Kyiv region in a social media post on Sunday. Kyiv police said another US journalist was wounded by Russian troops.
In a tweet, the Kyiv region police named the 50-year-old American journalist as Brent Renaud. Police posted a photo of his body and his US passport as evidence, as well as a picture of an old New York Times press badge with Brent Renaud’s name on it.
According to a New York Times report, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, Anton Gerashchenko, said in a statement that Renaud “paid his life for attempting to expose the insidiousness, brutality and brutality of the aggressor.”
CNN has been unable to verify which media outlet the US journalist was working for in Ukraine.
The New York Times said in a statement on Sunday, “We are deeply saddened to hear of the death of Brent Reynaud. Brent was a talented filmmaker who contributed to The New York Times over the years. Although he has appeared in The Times in the past. (most recently in 2015), he was not on assignment for any desk at The Times in Ukraine. Early reports circulated of him working for the Times because he was wearing the Times Press badge that had been in place several years earlier. was issued for an assignment.”
Some more context: The northern Ukrainian city of Irpin, just outside Kyiv, has been the site of substantial Russian shelling in recent days and has seen widespread destruction, according to the Kyiv regional government on Friday.
Brent Renaud was a Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker, producer, and journalist who lived and worked in New York City and Little Rock, Arkansas, according to his biography on the Renaud Brothers website.
Along with his brother Craig, Renaud spent years “telling humanistic truth stories from the world’s hot spots”, including projects in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Egypt and Libya, according to their website Bio. Brent Renaud was a 2019 Harvard Niemann Fellow.
Christoph Pützel, a friend and colleague of Renaud’s, told CNN that his passing is “a devastating loss to journalism today.”
“I woke up this morning to find out the passing of Brent, a longtime best friend, incredible ally, the best war journalist I think ever existed. Brent has nowhere to go. , had the ability to receive, listen and hear any story. Communicate what was happening to people that others wouldn’t see it otherwise. And that’s a devastating loss to journalism today,” Putzel told CNN’s reliable sources. But told Brian Stelter on Sunday.
Putzel said Renaud was working on a documentary about refugees from around the world when the crisis struck Ukraine. He added that “Brent was on the plane the next day” and covered the plight of refugees from Kyiv to Poland. A post on the Renaud Brothers’ Facebook page on March 8 urged readers to follow their coverage of War Ukraine.
Several years earlier, Putzel and Renaud won a DuPont Award for a story they worked on about guns being smuggled from the US to Mexico. “When we accepted our award, what I said was the bigger thing than Brent’s balls, his heart. And I stick to that. What kind of journalist he was,” Putzel said.
He said Renaud had a unique ability to get people to trust him as he told his stories in places like Iraq and other war zones. “You can sit and spend a week watching all of Brent’s stories back-to-back and just be amazed. The career he had, his ability to reach people, the humanity behind people’s suffering. His ability to capture is something I’ve never seen before, and I was honored to work with him for as long as I did,” Putzel said.
The director of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard said Sunday that the foundation is “heartfelt” over the death of American journalist Brent Renaud in Ukraine.
Foundation curator Ann Marie Lipinski said in a tweet, “Our Neiman Fellow Brent Renaud was talented and kind, and humanity was infused in his work. He died outside Kyiv today, and the world and journalism are short for it.” We are heartbroken.” ,
The Committee to Protect Journalists on Sunday condemned Renaud’s killing and called for the killers to be brought to justice.
The New York-based organization said in a statement, “According to a Ukrainian police officer and news reports, American journalist Brent Renaud was shot dead and another journalist was injured on Sunday in the city of Irpin outside Kyiv. Shooting, The Committee to Protect Journalists called for bringing the killers to justice.”
“We are shocked and saddened to learn of the death of American journalist Brent Reynaud in Ukraine. Such an attack is completely unacceptable, and a violation of international law,” CPJ program director Carlos Martínez de la Serna said in the statement. “Russian forces in Ukraine must immediately stop all violence against journalists and other civilians, and whoever killed Renaud should be held accountable.”
