U.S. reporter Brent Renaud was shot and killed in Ukraine

An award-win­ning US jour­nal­ist work­ing in Ukraine, Brent Renaud, has been shot dead in Irpin, out­side Kyiv, on Sun­day 13 March. Ukrain­ian police said he had been tar­get­ed by Russ­ian sol­diers. Two oth­er jour­nal­ists were injured and tak­en to hos­pi­tal. It is the first report­ed death of a for­eign jour­nal­ist cov­er­ing the war in Ukraine. The Inter­na­tion­al and Euro­pean Fed­er­a­tions of Jour­nal­ists (IFJ-EFJ) con­demn the killing and call for the killers to be brought to jus­tice.

Brent Renaud, 50, was a jour­nal­ist and doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er who lived  and worked in New York City and Lit­tle Rock, Arkansas. He had pre­vi­ous­ly worked for the New York Times. His film and tele­vi­sion projects have cov­ered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the earth­quake in Haiti, polit­i­cal tur­moil in Egypt and Libya, the fight for Mosul, extrem­ism in Africa, car­tel vio­lence in Mex­i­co, and the youth refugee cri­sis in Cen­tral Amer­i­ca.

One of the injured jour­nal­ists, Juan Arredon­do, was with Brent Renaud when they came under fire: “We were across one of the first bridges in Irpin, going to film oth­er refugees leav­ing, and we got into a car”, he said in a video pub­lished on Twit­ter. “Some­body offered to take us to the oth­er bridge and we crossed a check­point, and they start­ed shoot­ing at us. So the dri­ver turned around, and they kept shoot­ing; there’s two of us. My friend is Brent Renaud, and he’s been shot and left behind… I saw him being shot in the neck.”

A third vic­tim, a Ukrain­ian who had been in the same car as Brent Renaud and Juan Arredon­do was also wound­ed, accord­ing to a medic at the scene.

The news comes less than two weeks after Ukrain­ian jour­nal­ist Yevheniy Sakun, a cam­era oper­a­tor for the Ukrain­ian tele­vi­sion chan­nel LIVE, was killed when a build­ing near the TV trans­mis­sion tow­er in Kyiv was hit by shelling.

On 26 Feb­ru­ary, two Dan­ish jour­nal­ists had also sus­tained gun­shot wounds after unknown gun­men tar­get­ed their car in Ukraine.

On 28 Feb­ru­ary, a British tele­vi­sion crew for Sky News was ambushed while cov­er­ing the war in Ukraine. Despite their shout­ing that they were jour­nal­ists, they were shot at var­i­ous times: a bul­let hit Chief cor­re­spon­dent Stu­art Ram­say in his low­er back while cam­era oper­a­tor Richie Mock­ler was shot twice in his flak jack­et.

A few days lat­er, on 6 March, a Swiss jour­nal­ist cov­er­ing the war in Ukraine, Guil­laume Bri­quet, was shot and wound­ed after com­ing under fire in the Myko­layiv region, in south­ern Ukraine.

“We are shocked by the increas­ing num­ber of attacks on jour­nal­ists try­ing to cov­er the war in Ukraine,” said IFJ Gen­er­al Sec­re­tary Antho­ny Bel­langer. “The deaths of jour­nal­ists Brent Renaud and Yevheniy Sakun can­not go unpun­ished. The author­i­ties must do every­thing pos­si­ble to iden­ti­fy the per­pe­tra­tors of these war crimes.”

“These sys­tem­at­ic attacks on jour­nal­ists and oth­er war crimes require a strong response from the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty,” added EFJ Gen­er­al Sec­re­tary Ricar­do Gutiér­rez. The EFJ calls once again for the estab­lish­ment of a spe­cial inter­na­tion­al tri­bunal on these war crimes com­mit­ted in the con­text of the Russ­ian inva­sion of Ukraine. This mur­der­ous spi­ral must be stopped!”.