Saw the casualties there, was there any fighting going on? was there any artillery shells coming in close by that you would ve, made you aware that this was a particularly dangerous spot? no, no. it was, it was actually awfully quiet there. didn t get no warning, because usually, you can hear when, when the rounds come in. you can hear the whistling noise that determines that there is some mortar or artillery shell coming in. there wasn t nothing like this. reporter: and he catches the exact moment on his own cell phone. a frame by frame analysis shows what military experts tell cnn is an antitank missile striking the vehicle. a weapon that requires line of sight targeting to be this accurate. minutes later, the medics s dash cam records a second strike.
Good evening. we begin tonight with a single frame of video from the war in ukraine. the stunning reality and brutality of this war. this is the image. what you are looking at is the precise split second before a russian missile explodes next to a team of aid workers, including an american tending to a wounded civilian earlier this month. it may be hard to see, but we ve circled it. the missile is circled as flying parallel to the ground. it s an antitank missile, which means that someone had eyes on the target, which is the vehicle driven by the aid workers to the left of where the missile s about to go. the vehicle they are standing right next to. one of the men killed is pete reed, a marine corps veteran. in january, he went to work in ukraine with the aid organization global average.
Does the, did the van that mr. reed was in and the others, pete reed was in, was that marked at all as a medic s van? it doesn t seem to be, does it? looks like a white civilian van. i mean, i understand that inside, it s converted into an ambulance, but it doesn t have the sort of big red crosses on it that you might expect. in that kind of location. look, i mean, what the medics say is that there s no way this could ve been mistaken for anything other than an ambulance, simply because these medical teams, pete reed included, had been working in bakhmut for months upon months , and the russians knew very well what they were doing, what these medical sort of volunteers , the kind of action they ve been involved in, and the kind of way they were. they say there s no way this could ve been mistaken. for anything military at all. which, again, you know, underlines for them this idea that they were particularly watched and then targeted russian forces. yeah. and as you said, they tried
Would ve been targeted, well, what the medics say is that, look, the russians know very well these volunteers from the united states, from other countries, are doing enormous amounts of good to the civilian population inside these areas. sometimes they re the only sort of medical presence on the ground, and the russians, they say, are determined to stop that. to, to take that away, to deter these people from going to the front lines. the medic i spoke to in that report, erko, said for his part, it s not going to work. he s determined to go back, and says he ll be back in the front lines in just a couple of weeks, anderson. wow. i just want to show a still image again where you see that missile there. i ve never seen an image like this. it took me a while to actually even see the missile, but once i realized it was parallel to the ground, you can also see where mr. reed and the others were. the van that they were in, the medics were in, i know the van that the, the man who pulled up f
Slow motion revealing its yet another antitank missile. it was observed and aimed directly, and, to be sure that it s going to be perfect hit, they waited until the complete stop, and after that, basically fired. reporter: so do you think that you were deliberately targeted by the other side? yes, i think that there is not much of a debate about it. they, they shot two different vehicles and tried to hit another one also, so they were ready. we were prepared. reporter: russia has repeatedly denied deliberately targeting civilians. but over this gruesome video of the aftermath, the russian private military company wagner says the volunteer medics were foreign mercenaries hit by what it calls an accurate strike.