The Murder of Andrew Bagshaw: The Road to Soledar

The two men who set out to rescue Andrew Bagshaw were warned the evacuation spot he and his fellow rescuer were headed was controlled by an enemy that was 'taking no prisoners'. In episode three of the podcast The Murder of Andrew Bagshaw they speak to journalist Bryan Bruce about their attempt to piece together the pair's final movements. When Russia invaded Ukraine, 47-year-old New Zealander Andrew Bagshaw made a moral decision. He travelled to Ukraine to help civilians trapped by the war, rescuing more than 500 people before he disappeared while on an evacuation mission. On January 6, 2023, the genetic scientist was killed attempting to rescue an elderly lady from her apartment in the eastern Ukrainian town of Soledar, which was under siege by Wagner Russian mercenaries. When he and his colleague Christopher Parry failed to return from their rescue mission to their base in Kramatorsk that evening, fellow evacuators considered whether their vehicle may have broken down, been in an accident – or worse. Bruce meets with one of the two men who went in search of the pair. Known only as Dima for safety reasons, he says when he and his Canadian colleague Brandon Mitchell got the call that Bagshaw and Parry were missing, they were prepared to risk their lives. '[Bagshaw] was quiet, but he definitely had the balls-of-steel kind of mentality when it came down to it. He was always eager to help, and he would often be willing to help on missions that a lot of other people would just say 'Not worth it'.' Dima and Mitchell were told by soldiers at a command post the next day that the spot Bagshaw and Parry were meant to make the evacuation was 'heavily contested' territory and no longer accessible. If the men had made it there, the enemy would not be taking any prisoners, Dima says. Unlike some volunteers who regularly checked in with the Ukrainian military as they advanced, it appeared Bagshaw and Parry might have taken a different approach. Bruce also speaks to Mitchell, who says he and Dima visited a shopkeeper called Oleg in a small town close to Soledar. Oleg was a coordinator between the civilian population and the military and a good source of intelligence. They were told that, thanks to enemy action the night before, if they were to take Soledar's perimeter road – typically used by volunteers to evacuate civilians – they would die. It would have made sense for Bagshaw and Parry to stop in to ask what was going on in Soledar, but Oleg didn't see them. Nor did the pair stop at any command posts. So where did they go? In this six-part podcast, Bruce retraces Bagshaw's footsteps from New Zealand to the frontline, uncovering the story of a quiet, intensely private man driven by a powerful sense of ethical responsibility. Made with the help of NZ On Air