An American journalist was killed and another wounded by bullets on Sunday in Irpin (Ukraine), in the northwestern suburbs of Kiev, the scene of heavy fighting for several days, we learned from concordant sources.
Brent Renaud, a 50-year-old freelance photographer and filmmaker, is the first foreign journalist to be killed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began on February 24. A Ukrainian public television journalist was killed on 1er march into the Russian bombing of the Kiev TV tower.
The two American journalists were hit at midday while driving with a Ukrainian civilian, also injured, Danylo Shapovalov, a doctor working with the Ukrainian forces, told Agence France-Presse (AFP). cared for the victims.
Brent Renaud “was shot in the back of the neck and killed instantly,” he said.
An AFP journalist 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 statement that this “talented” journalist had worked for him in the past, most recently in 2015, but that was not the case in Ukraine.
Injured, the other American journalist, Juan Arredondo, for his part recounted what had happened to them in a video filmed from the hospital where he was transported, published on social networks.
“We went to film refugees leaving the area. We got in a car, someone offered to take us across the bridge,” he said.
“We spent a checkpoint and they started shooting at us. The driver turned around and they kept shooting,” he added, without specifying which side the shots could have come from.
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. The fighting is intense in the Irpin region, and AFP journalists heard artillery and smaller arms fire there on Sunday.
“We are consulting the Ukrainians to determine how this happened,” said Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor to US President Joe Biden, on the American channel CBS, denouncing a “shocking and horrifying” murder.
“Russian forces in Ukraine must immediately stop all violence against journalists and civilians, and whoever killed Renaud will be held accountable,” the Committee to Protect Journalists tweeted ( CPJ), based in New York.
Brent Renaud, also a writer, was originally 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, political upheavals in Egypt, and the fight against extremism in Africa and the Middle East.
Together, they notably won the Peabody Prize in 2015 for a documentary series about a school for troubled children in Chicago.
Most recently, Brent Renaud had worked on a Black Lives Matter protest in Harrison, Arkansas, known as a sanctuary for white supremacists. His work had been published by the Boston Globe.