HORROR video shows the moment a US volunteer medic was killed in a Russian attack in Ukraine.
Ex-Marine Pete Reed was evacuating civilians when the ambulance he was travelling in was hit by a guided missile and his wife said he died saving a member of his own team.
FacebookPete Reed was a former Marine in Ukraine as volunteer medic[/caption]
The moment the van he was travelling in was hitThe van just before the missile struck
The vehicle was struck by a missile as Reed was helping to extract civilians from the besieged city of Bakhmut in the east of the country.
The small city is facing a fierce Russian onslaught from three sides – with Ukrainian forces fighting there claiming they have just a four-hour life expectancy.
The incident happened on February 5 but footage of the attack has now been made public.
The video shows Reed and other aid workers standing beside the white van.
A missile flying parallel to the ground directly hits the Mercedes van, destroying it and killing him.
Frame-by-frame analysis of the of video taken at the location shows that Reed was killed by a laser guided missile fired by Russian troops, the New York Times reports.
Some of the vehicles in convoy had markings including a Red Cross that should have indicated to the Russians what type of vehicles they were, though the van Reed was in didn’t.
Marc Garlasco, a war crimes investigator, explained the weapon used should have allowed the attacker to identify the nature of the target.
He said “you have an expectation that the firer is going to have the ability to differentiate between a medical worker and a combatant”.
Reed served two deployments as a Marine rifleman in Afghanistan and started the charity Global Response Medicine in 2017 with his wife Alex Potter.
In 2016, he became famous in war zones, when he set up the only field hospital on the front lines of the Battle for Mosul, as the Iraqis tried to liberate it from ISIS control.
“My husband Pete Reed was killed yesterday in Bakhmut, Ukraine,” Potter wrote at the time of his death.
“He was evacuating civilians and responding to those wounded when his ambulance was shelled,’ wrote Potter on social media on Friday.
“He died doing what he was great at, what gave him life, and what he loved, and apparently by saving a team member with his own body”.
Reed joined the Marine Corps in September 2007, soon after his 18th birthday.
As an infantryman he was deployed twice over the next four years to Afghanistan’s Helmand province.
A once popular tourist destination, Bakhmut has largely been reduced to ruin by the Ukraine war.
The city has been hollowed out by artillery fire and levelled by carpet bombing – with its frozen ground carved up by craters and trenches.
