Duckworth contradicts the Russian story, he says there were few military people at the restaurant:
An American volunteer in Ukraine said he was at a Kramatorsk restaurant when it was hit by a Russian missile on Tuesday evening. Nick Duckworth, 28, from Sonora, California, said he arrived at the Ria Lounge restaurant with colleagues around 20 minutes before the missile attack, which took place just after 7.30 p.m. local time. “I can remember trying to tell my team to get down but failing before it hit,” Duckworth said in messages exchanged with CNN.“Once they moved, I ran to help a translator for a journalist team who had severe injuries. Once a more qualified medical professional reached her and our team’s paramedic arrived on scene, I ran into the restaurant to start assessing where help was needed most – which included trying to reach a girl pinned by the roof and a pillar. As well as starting to help move debris where others were pinned but in more stable conditions,” he continued. Duckworth said there was a children’s party at the restaurant. “There was a kids' party, a lot of other humanitarian workers, and journalists. Very few actual military personnel were in the area in comparison to the mass amount of civilians.”
His group had almost ended up sitting inside the restaurant, where the full impact of the strike was felt, except a server managed to find them a table outside at the last minute. He said this likely saved his life.
“The only table open inside would have been buried under the rubble,” Duckworth said.
He and his colleagues, including British volunteer Mo Hornik, escaped with only minor injuries and posted pictures on Facebook from the scene and inside the hospital.
Duckworth said he had been in Ukraine for around 14 months working for a humanitarian charity delivering aid to civilians in frontline villages. He has posted frequently on Facebook about delivering medical supplies and other provisions to frontline areas in eastern Ukraine.
“We are only more united and motivated to continue our work through this act of terror,” Duckworth wrote in a post on Facebook.
You will just have to accept that you are supporting the bombing of children's parties and civilians. Trying to lie about what happened doesn't bring back the dead kids.
I don’t know whether Duckworth is a merc-type volunteer or a humanitarian-type volunteer, and don’t much care. Often, they are or claim to be both, and ask for donations. Some tag along after real fighters and post videos on social media, others video themselves delivering aid to people, but most of the time are living it up at a nice hotel in Lviv, when not drinking beer and eating pizza in Kramatorsk while on a little field trip for photo-ops.
If he’s a humanitarian type volunteer, he’s not working for a legitimate humanitarian organization that I can see. There are more than enough Make-Up-Your-Own-NGO-And-Get-Other-People-To-Pay-For-Your-Adventure-As-War-Tourist types operating over there. Some are total scammers, some good-hearted and mean well and have some weird need to be seen as brave saints and be admired on social media.
There are way too many James Vasquez types milling about in Ukraine:
https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/4142443/posts?page=10#10
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4140157/posts
Another dodgy “volunteer”:
Maybe Duckworth means well. Maybe he really saw mostly civilians there, or maybe he just said so because it’s good for donations and also what the Western media want to hear — and what the host country wants him to say (say the wrong thing to the media and you get declared PNG and kicked out of the country).
The South African guy on the video who said there were soldiers all over under the rubble seemed to be speaking spontaneously and I believe him more than I believe this Duckworth guy. A number of pro-Ukrainian mainstream Western media articles stated the pizza restaurant was very popular with soldiers. Yet we are to believe only civilians and kids’ parties?
You are so full of it, up on your high horse falsely accusing people and virtue signalling. I never supported the bombing of civilians and kids’ parties. I think it’s horrible and said so. I also said these things happen in wars. Wars are horrible.