Award Winning Filmmaker Brent Renaud Killed in a Shoot-Out in Ukraine

American film-maker Brent Renaud was killed on March 13 during a shoot-out by Russian troops. He was working on a refugee documentary while he was in the war-torn country. 

His vehicle was hit just outside the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. Photograph of the body of the journalist has been circulating on social media. 

According to American journalist Juan Arredondo, they were both travelling towards Irpin checkpoint when they both were shot. Juan was shot in the lower back while Brent was shot in the neck. 

“We crossed the first bridge in Irpin, we were going to film other refugees leaving, and we got into a car, somebody offered to take us to the other bridge, we crossed the checkpoint, and they started shooting at us,” Arredondo told Camilli an Italian journalist in a video. 

The US department condemned the attack on news professionals and on others who were covering the conflict. 

“We are horrified that journalists and filmmakers_noncombatants_have been killed and injured in Ukraine by Kremlin forces, “the department said via Twitter. “This is yet another gruesome example of the Kremlin’s indiscriminate actions.”

Christof Putzel, a filmmaker and close friend who received a text from Brent just three days before his death expressed that Brent was one of the most respected independent producers of his era.

Renaud and Putzel won a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University journalism award for “Arming the Mexican Cartels,” a documentary on how guns trafficked from the United States fuelled rampant drug gang violence.

Along with his brother Craig, Brent Renaud won a Peabody Award for “Last Chance High,” an HBO series about a school for at-risk youth on Chicago’s West Side.

Brent worked along with his brother and generally covered humanistic stories from the darkest corners of the world. They covered stories such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the political crisis in Egypt and Libya, Mexican drug war, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, refugee crisis in Central America so on and so forth. 

Brent Renaud’s death is the first reported death of a foreign journalist in the 2022 war in Ukraine.