Brent Renaud, First US Reporter Killed in Ukraine, Exposed Horrors of War

The U.S. journalist Brent Renaud, a filmmaker and filmmaker, was killed while working on a documentary on refugees in Kyiv on Sunday. He is the first foreign journalist to have been killed in Ukraine after the Russian invasion. According to Ukrainian officials, he was killed by Russian forces. We discuss Renaud’s remarkable documentary work and feature part of an interview he gave on Democracy Now!After his return from Arkansas, Renaud was embedded in Iraq by the National Guard. Ann Marie Lipinski (Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist) joins us. She got to know Renaud as well as Juan Arredondo while they were fellows at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, which Lipinski curates. “Brent was a very, very special journalist, yes, but also person,” says Lipinski. “He just brought a very, very rare humanity and patience to the work.” We also hear from Cora Weiss, former board of directors chair of Downtown Community Television, where Brent and his brother Craig started their filmmaking career in the same former firehouse building that housed Democracy Now! for over a decade. “He shouldn’t have been killed,” says Weiss. “Brent was terribly important as an educator for all Americans to understand the horrors of war and the unnecessary expense in life.” Carlos Martínez de la Serna of the Committee to Protect Journalists says Renaud’s killing amounts to a war crime.

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