Originally published 2022-03-20.
Brent Renaud, the Arkansas filmmaker who shared a Peabody Award with his brother Craig for the 2015 series Last Chance High.
American documentary filmmaker and journalist Brent Renaud was shot dead on 13 March 2022 in Irpin, a town on the north-western edge of Kyiv, Ukraine. He was 50. Renaud was working on a project about refugees for Time Studios, the film and television arm of Time magazine. He was the first foreign journalist reported killed in Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Kyiv regional police said Russian forces had opened fire on his vehicle. His colleague, photographer Juan Arredondo, was wounded in the same attack. Below is what is known about how he died, who he was, and why his death became a symbol of the dangers facing reporters in the war.
What happened in Irpin
In March 2022 Irpin was on the front line. Russian troops were pushing towards Kyiv from the north-west, and thousands of civilians were trying to escape across a damaged bridge over the Irpin River. Renaud and Arredondo had gone there to film people being evacuated.
According to Arredondo, a man offered to drive them towards another bridge. As they passed a checkpoint, gunfire hit the car. The driver turned back, but the shooting continued. Arredondo, a Colombian-American photographer who has worked for the New York Times and National Geographic, later described seeing his friend hit: "I saw him being shot in the neck." Renaud was left behind as the others escaped. The Ukrainian volunteer driving them was also wounded.
Arredondo was taken to hospital in Kyiv, where he recorded a video describing the attack from his bed. That video was quickly shared around the world.
Who was responsible?
Kyiv regional police chief Andriy Nebytov said Russian soldiers had fired on the journalists. Ukrainian prosecutors opened a war crimes investigation the same day under the article of the criminal code covering violations of the laws and customs of war.
In the first hours, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and several news agencies said they could not independently confirm who fired. Arredondo later told CPJ that, based on the trajectory of the shots, he believed a sniper was involved, and that there was a "high probability" the attackers belonged to a Russian air assault unit operating in the area. He said he could not confirm the soldiers' nationality himself, though the volunteer driver said he recognised their uniforms. CPJ reports that an FBI investigation remains open and has not publicly identified any individuals.
A note on early reports: Renaud was wearing an old New York Times press badge, which led some outlets to say he worked for the paper. The Times clarified that he was not on assignment for it and had not contributed since 2015.
Brent Renaud's life and work
Renaud was born on 2 October 1971 in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. He studied English literature at Southern Methodist University and earned a master's degree in sociology at Columbia University.
For most of his career he worked side by side with his younger brother, Craig. Together they made films and television programmes about people living through war, poverty and disaster, for outlets including HBO, NBC and Vice News. Their work took them to Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, Egypt, Libya, Mexico's drug war and Central America's refugee crisis.
Some of the films they made together:
- Off to War (2004–2005), a Discovery series following Arkansas National Guard soldiers in Iraq and their families at home.
- Dope Sick Love (2005), about couples living with heroin addiction in New York.
- Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later (2007), revisiting the school at the heart of the 1957 desegregation crisis.
- Last Chance High (2015), a series about a Chicago school for students who had been expelled elsewhere, which won a Peabody Award.
- Meth Storm (2017), an HBO documentary about methamphetamine in rural Arkansas.
The brothers also won two DuPont-Columbia Awards and co-founded the Little Rock Film Festival. In 2019 Brent became a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a visiting professor at the University of Arkansas.
The reaction to his death
Time's editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal and president Ian Orefice said in a statement that Renaud had tackled the toughest stories around the world, often alongside his brother Craig. Press freedom groups condemned the killing. CPJ said whoever killed him should be held to account and that attacks on journalists violate international law.
Craig Renaud recovered his brother's body. He went on to make Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud, a documentary about their life's work together.
Journalists killed in the early weeks of the war
Renaud's death was part of a deadly first month for media workers in Ukraine. Among those killed while working:
- Yevhenii Sakun, a Ukrainian camera operator, killed on 1 March 2022 when a Russian strike hit the Kyiv TV tower.
- Pierre Zakrzewski, a veteran Fox News cameraman, and Oleksandra "Sasha" Kuvshynova, a Ukrainian journalist working with Fox, both killed on 14 March 2022 when their vehicle came under fire in Horenka, near Kyiv.
- Maks Levin, a Ukrainian photojournalist, who went missing on 13 March and was found dead near Kyiv on 1 April.
Other teams survived close calls. A Sky News crew reportedly came under fire near Kyiv around the start of March, with one journalist saved by his body armour. According to Ukraine's National Union of Journalists, at least 18 civilian journalists had been killed in the line of duty by October 2024.
Why it matters
Journalists are protected as civilians under international humanitarian law. Deliberately targeting them is a war crime. When reporters are killed, the world loses the people who document what happens to civilians, the very story Renaud had come to Irpin to tell.
His life's work focused on people at the margins: soldiers' families, students others had given up on, addicts, refugees. He died while doing that work, filming people trying to reach safety.
Sources: CPJ, March 2022; CPJ database: Brent Renaud; Wikipedia: Brent Renaud; Wikipedia: Journalists killed during the Russo-Ukrainian war. Header photo: Getty Images.
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