Brent Renaud, an award-winning American filmmaker and journalist, was killed in Ukraine on Sunday while reporting in a suburb of the capital, Kyiv, according to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry.
Mr. Renaud, 50, had worked for a number of American news and media organizations in the past, including HBO, NBC and The New York Times. The Ukrainian authorities said he was killed in Irpin, a suburb that has been the site of intense shelling by Russian forces in recent days, but the details of his death were not immediately clear. Ukrainian officials said another journalist was wounded as well.
At the time of his death Mr. Renaud was on assignment for Time Studios working on a “project focused on the global refugee crisis,” according to a statement from Time executives.
Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, said in a statement that Mr. Renaud “paid with his life for attempting to expose the insidiousness, cruelty and ruthlessness of the aggressor.”
Mr. Renaud had contributed to The Times in previous years, most recently in 2015, but he was not on assignment for the company in Ukraine. Early reports that he was working for The Times in Ukraine circulated because he was found with a Times press badge that had been issued for an assignment years ago.
“We are deeply saddened to hear of Brent Renaud’s death,” said Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for The Times. “Brent was a talented filmmaker
Mr. Renaud often worked with his brother, Craig Renaud, and won a Peabody award for a Vice News documentary about a school in Chicago. The two have worked on film and television projects from conflict zones and hot spots around the world.
Over the past decade, the brothers had covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the earthquake in Haiti, cartel violence in Mexico and youth refugees in Central America, according to their website.
Mr. Renaud was a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University from 2018 to 2019. Ann Marie Lipinski, curator of the Nieman Foundation, posted on Twitter on Sunday that Mr. Renaud “was gifted and kind, and his work was infused with humanity.” Lamenting his death, she said that “the world and journalism are lesser for it.”
Mr. Renaud’s reporting partner who was shot, Juan Arredondo, was also a Nieman fellow in the 2019 class. A video posted on the Okhmatdyt hospital’s Instagram page showed Mr. Arredondo describing the shooting from a hospital bed. He said they were shot in a car after they passed a checkpoint while going to film civilians fleeing the fighting.
Michael Schwirtz is an investigative reporter with the International desk. With The Times since 2006, he previously covered the countries of the former Soviet Union from Moscow and was a lead reporter on a team that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for articles about Russian intelligence operations.
The New York Times
