Kyiv – A United States journalist working in Ukraine has been shot dead in the town of Irpin, outside Kyiv, police say.
Brent Renaud, 50, was a journalist and filmmaker who had previously worked for the New York Times.
Kyiv’s police chief Andriy Nebytov 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.
Photographs are circulating online showing a press ID for Renaud that was issued by the New York Times.
In a statement, the newspaper said it was “deeply saddened” to hear of Renaud’s death but that he had not been working for the newspaper in Ukraine.
Renaud last worked for the newspaper in 2015, the Times said, and the press ID he was wearing in Ukraine had been issued years ago.
‘Tell the world what they did’
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.
He often worked alongside his brother, Craig, also a filmmaker, and was based in New York and Little Rock, Arkansas. It is not known whether Craig had also travelled to Ukraine.
A Ukrainian police officer told PBS news journalist Jane Ferguson to “tell America, tell the world, what they did to a journalist”.
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told 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,” he said.
The news comes less than two weeks after Ukrainian journalist Yevhenii Skaum, a camera operator for the Ukrainian television channel LIVE, was killed when a TV transmission tower in Kviv was hit by shelling.
A few days later, a British journalist covering the war in Ukraine was shot and wounded after coming under fire in Kyiv.
Sky News chief correspondent Stuart Ramsay and his four colleagues were driving back to the Ukrainian capital when they were ambushed. (BBC)
