On Sunday morning, we learned that a former New York Times reporter and award-winning documentary filmmaker, Brent Renaud, was killed by reportedly Russian troops who opened fire on a vehicle in the Ukraine city of Irpen, making him the first U.S. casualty of the Russia-Ukraine war.
“The occupants … kill even journalists of the international media who try to show the truth about the inaction of Russian troops in Ukraine,” Kyiv Chief of Police Andrey Nebitov wrote in a post on Facebook. “Of course, the profession of a journalist is a risk, but U.S. citizen Brent Renaud paid his life for trying to highlight the aggressor’s ingenuity, cruelty and ruthlessness.”
Other journalists were wounded in the incident, though Renaud was apparently left behind after they were taken away in an ambulance. According to PBS reporter Jane Ferguson, who later saw Renaud’s body on the side of the road underneath a blanket, nothing could be done to save him at that point.
“Ukranian medics could do nothing to help him by that stage,” she said on Twitter. “Outraged Ukranian police officer: ‘Tell America, tell the world, what they did to a journalist.’”
How has this news impacted the White House? Sadly, I don’t think it has.
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“This is obviously shocking and horrifying, and I’ve just learned about it as I came onto air here, so I will be consulting with my colleagues, we’ll be consulting with the Ukrainians to determine how this happened and then to measure and execute appropriate consequences as a result of it,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on CBS News’s Face The Nation after being asked about consequences for Russia. “I will just say that 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,”
So, according to Sullivan, this is just what we should have expected from Russia. Apparently, it’s no big deal that an American has just been killed. Further, Joe Biden, who has been at Camp David this weekend, has yet to release a statement on Renaud’s death. I find this particularly shocking.
Has Biden done anything about this yet? Has he made any effort to reach out to Renaud’s family? It would be the right thing to do, seeing as Renaud was killed by enemy military in a war that he failed to prevent. Though, part of me hopes that Biden doesn’t make that call because, knowing him, he’ll just pretend to empathize with them because of his late son Beau, who died of brain cancer, not in combat.
Biden has a habit of doing this. For example, the widow of 20-year-old Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum, who died at the Kabul airport, met with Biden and left feeling disappointed. She said it felt “scripted and shallow,” and that Biden kept bringing up Beau. According to her, the conversation, which only lasted a couple of minutes, showed “total disregard to the loss of our Marine.”
Biden has repeatedly failed to prove himself a worthy commander-in-chief; he doesn’t seem to care about the loss of life caused by his policies or inaction. In fact, Katie Rogers of the New York Times reports that, upon his return to the White House Sunday afternoon, Biden “ignored shouted questions” about Renaud. According to her pool report, Biden’s dog Commander “came closer to the [press] pool” than Biden did.
That sounds right.