An award-winning journalist who was a former New York Times contributor has been killed by Russian forces near Kyiv, the region’s head of police said Sunday.

Brent Renaud, 51, a video journalist who has also reported for NBC, Vice News and HBO, was fatally shot in the neck when Russian troops opened fire on a car near the Romanivsky Bridge in the Ukraine town of Irpin, police and a witness said.

“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 on Facebook.

“Of course, the profession of a journalist is a risk, but US citizen Brent Renaud paid his life for trying to highlight the aggressor’s ingenuity, cruelty and ruthlessness.”

Nebitov also shared a video of a police officer at the scene with a bloodied man’s body.

Two other journalists were injured in the attack, too, and taken to the hospital, Nebitov said.

“We had crossed the first bridge in Irpin. We were going to film other refugees leaving. We got into a car. Somebody offered to take us to the other bridge,” he told the Italian paper Internazionale, the Daily Mail reported.

“We crossed a checkpoint, and they started shooting at us. The driver turned around, there were two of us. My friend is Brent Renaud,” he said.

Get the latest updates in the Russia-Ukraine conflict with The Post’s live coverage.

Juan said the attackers shot Renaud and that he was forced to flee without his friend for his own safety.

“He has been shot and left behind. I saw he has been shot in the neck. We got split,” he said.

PBS reporter Jane Ferguson said she saw Renaud’s body on the side of the road under a blanket.

“Ukranian medics could do nothing to help him by that stage,” she wrote on Twitter. “Outraged Ukranian police officer: ‘Tell America, tell the world, what they did to a journalist.’ “

The attack comes as Irpin has been the target of heavy shelling by Russian forces.

The New York Times issued a statement about Reanud’s death Sunday.

“We are deeply saddened to hear of Brent Renaud’s death. Brent was a talented filmmaker who had contributed to The New York Times over the years,”  a New York Times rep told The Post.

Though he was initially identified as a New York Times journalist, he had not been on assignment for the newspaper at the time of his death, the representative said.

“Early reports that he worked for Times circulated because he was wearing a Times press badge that had been issued for an assignment many years ago.”

Renaud previously won a Peabody Award for his work alongside his brother, Craig, for a Vice News documentary about a school in Chicago, according to the bio on their Web site. The brothers had worked on documentary projects for their company, the Renaud Brothers, from Iran, Afghanistan, Haiti, Egypt, Libya and Mosul.