A United States journalist, Brent Arnaud has been shot dead in the town of Irpin, just outside Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital in an attack Kyiv’s police chief Andriy Nebytov blamed on Russian soldiers operating in the area.
The fifty year old Renaud was also a filmmaker who had previously worked for the New York Times.
The police chief said two other journalists were injured and taken to hospital.
This is the first reported death of a foreign journalist covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
One of the injured journalists, Juan Arredondo, is reported to have told an Italian reporter that he 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 start 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.”
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Renaud had worked for a number of US news organisations and had reported from Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti.
He won a Peabody Award for his work on a 2014 series on Chicago schools, “Last Chance High”.
The Biden administration has reacted to the incident with National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan telling CBS News that the country could impose “appropriate consequences” against Russia for Renaud’s death.
“This is part and parcel of what has been a brazen aggression on the part of the Russians, where they have targeted civilians, they have targeted hospitals, they have targeted places of worship, and they have targeted journalists,” said.
Renaud’s death comes less than two weeks after Ukrainian journalist Yevhenii Skaum, a camera operator for the Ukrainian television channel LIVE, was killed.
