Fox News correspondent Benjamin Hall was injured while reporting from outside Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital under siege from Russian troops, his employer said on Monday.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki expressed concern for Hall’s well-being during a news briefing Monday, telling a Fox News reporter that “our thoughts, the president’s thoughts, our administration’s thoughts are with him, his family and all of you at Fox News.”
In her statement, Scott said there were few details available about what had happened to Hall. “Our teams on the ground are working to gather additional information as the situation quickly unfolds,” she said.
Hall, who joined Fox News in 2015, works primarily as a Washington-based State Department correspondent. But according to his Fox bio, he has also reported from conflict zones in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza.
His injury, which was first publicly reported Monday afternoon by Fox News anchor John Roberts, comes days after an American journalist was killed in Ukraine. Brent Renaud was fatally shot Sunday while reporting in Irpin, a town outside Kyiv, on a project focused on the global refugee crisis for Time magazine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday posted a letter on Twitter expressing his condolences to Renaud’s family. “The people of Ukraine, who are fighting against the Russian regime to defend their Homeland and democracy in the world, are mourning with you,” he wrote.
Earlier in the conflict, Sky News journalists were shot at while attempting to report from Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv. Two of the team were hit, but all five survived and were evacuated. The Ukrainian authorities later told them they had been attacked by a “saboteur Russian reconnaissance squad.”
On March 1, a Ukrainian camera operator was one of the five people killed when Russian forces fired on the Kyiv TV tower.
In terms of specific actions the Biden administration would take in response to an attack on an American journalist, Psaki said President Biden has led “the world in putting in place consequences” in response to Russia’s “brutal actions that have certainly impacted Ukrainian people and now have certainly impacted some Americans.”
“But in terms of next steps or what the next consequence would be, I don’t have anything to preview for you at this point in time,” she added.