Contributor: Journalists risk everything because the work is so important
In the first weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, millions of Ukrainians were displaced by one of the most rapid mass movements in recent history. Train stations have become shelters. Theaters became help centres. Boundaries have become waiting rooms for grief. Journalists have moved in the opposite direction, towards obscurity, because without witnesses, displacement becomes statistics and war becomes an abstraction.
I was one of them, reporting along with my colleague and friend Brent Renaud.
On March 13, 2022, we crossed what remained of a collapsed bridge to Irpin, a suburb north of Kiev where families had fled Russian bombardment. Ukrainian soldiers helped the elderly, children and injured carry what little they could salvage over twisted concrete and rebar. Dogs were wandering around abandoned cars. Artillery sounds echoed in the distance; this rhythm was quickly becoming the background noise of the battle.
As seasoned journalists, Brent and I had spent recent years documenting displacement — migrants crossing rivers in Central America, refugees passing through camps in Greece, families displaced by hurricanes and conflict in the Americas. The movement had become the story we were following. In Ukraine, this movement felt faster, slower and irreversible.
Minutes after we accepted the car of a local driver who offered to take us to an evacuation point, gunshots rang out. I remember the sound of breaking glass, the sound of bullets splintering metal, the instinct to press my face into the floor of the car. When the vehicle stopped, Brent collapsed next to the driver with blood flowing from his neck. I tried to stop the bleeding with my hands. He was already unconscious.
That’s when I stopped being just an observer.
Brent believed deeply in the responsibility of journalists to document and bear witness to history. We met as fellows at Harvard and formed a friendship based on work aimed at making distant suffering visible without spectacle. Instead of moving away from disasters, we moved towards them; not because of our courage, but because of the shared belief that the public has the right to access first-hand accounts and accurate information about the events that shaped their lives and futures.
Four years ago he became the first American journalist was killed in Ukraine after the invasion.
When journalists are killed for reporting, we must fight to ensure that the truth is not a casualty. Focusing solely on individual losses risks obscuring the larger truth. Brent’s death was not an isolated tragedy.
Journalists continue to be injured, detained and killed at alarming rates in conflicts around the world. Report published by the Committee to Protect Journalists found recently It was stated that 2025 will be the deadliest year in history for the press, with 129 journalists and media workers killed worldwide. More than 400 journalists and media workers have been detained since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war and Brent’s murder. was killed worldwide.
Journalists are often described as impartial observers, but war makes this idea fragile. The line between documenting violence and being a part of it can disappear in seconds. Protective vests, press signs and experience do not guarantee safety. What they guarantee is exposure.
Like me in the months after the attack rescued After multiple surgeries, I wrestled with a question familiar to most survivors: Why was he and not me? Survivor’s guilt is not dramatic. It is repetitive. He lives in small details; in a seat in the car, in a quick decision, in a memory repeated without resolution.
During the occupation of Ukraine, the world saw images of families crossing collapsed bridges, mass graves emerging, and cities reduced to rubble. These images have shaped public understanding, policy debates, and humanitarian intervention. They existed because a journalist stood close enough to record them.
The cost of this closeness is often invisible.
I remember the evacuation train leaving Kiev days after the attack. At that moment I realized I was no longer behind the camera. I was another evacuee, another body moving because of the conflict. War rearranges roles without warning.
I often return to the final moments before the attack, the casual conversation in the car, the assumption that we would finish the day and move on to work. War interrupts time without warning. Only fragments remain: a seat, a voice, the weight of a camera, the memory of a friend whose life was defined by attention to others.
In the years since, trying to make sense of that day has become part of the job. Brent’s life and death are now the subject of the documentary I am producing, “Armed Only with a Camera.” Making the film meant confronting painful images and memories, but we consciously chose not to look away. We did not soften the cruelty of war or hide the reality of Brent’s death, because the violence that journalists witness and sometimes endure is precisely the violence from which the world is usually protected. Witnessing requires honesty, even when it may be uncomfortable.
Journalists living in the United States today face conditions that may one day mirror the war zones we cover abroad. At the same time, the erosion of trust in the press coincided with a growing tolerance for attacks on those documenting the war.
I still return to the places where the movement defined people’s lives, borders, evacuation routes, communities living with uncertainty, not because there are answers to the questions, but because the act of documentation resists extinction. Brent understood this instinctively. The job was never about recognition; It was about presence.
Journalism does not stop violence. But it makes it harder to deny. It creates a record that cannot be easily erased.
That’s the responsibility Brent carries. This is what many journalists now continue to carry with nothing but a camera and the belief that the truth matters.
Juan Arredondo is a photojournalist and the producer of “Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud.”
