FOREWORD

T
he snow lay deep and crisp and even for Andrew
Bagshaw’s memorial service in Kyiv. It was
beautiful and yet bleak. The Ukrainian Orthodox
priests sang their ancient hymns in a small side chapel
in Saint Sophia Cathedral, the photographers’ cameras
clicked, candles flickered. His friends read out letters
from his family from the far side of the world, from the
land of the haka, their voices breaking with loss. But
no one who knows what is really happening in Ukraine

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 spoke about what Andrew was doing there, about why he
risked and lost his life.
I didn’t know Andrew and somehow it felt wrong to
speak, but I regretted that decision later. This foreword
is my heartfelt attempt to make good for that.
Andrew and his British friend Chris Parry were trying
to rescue an elderly woman when their car was reportedly
hit by Russian artillery. The thing is, Andrew and Chris
were heroes of our time, of all time, who did the greatest
possible service to common humanity. They risked their
lives to save others.
Who were those others? Most Ukrainians in places
like Bakhmut and Soledar, on the eastern front, fled
when Russia’s big war started in February 2022. Those
who stayed on were truly the wretched of the earth: poor,
old, simple. Some stay on because their loved ones are
buried nearby and they don’t want to leave; some are so
uninterested in living they can’t be bothered to leave;
some are tending animals — chickens, pigs, sheep — and
they don’t have the wherewithal to get out.
That means they are prey to the Russian killing
machine. To make it all the more galling, at least some
of the time, the stay-behinds are sympathetic to the
old Soviet Union and the ‘Greater Russia’ that is killing
them. I’ve met them in Bakhmut where Andrew worked a
lot and they were, to put it mildly, hard going.
So Andrew risked his life not for some child genius
who can save mankind — a much-loved Hollywood plot
— but mostly for the elderly, the confused and the not-
quite-there. In one case told in this book, he helped rescue

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 a woman who was being forced to stay in the red zone by
an abusive father. Andrew got the help of the Ukrainian
police and then they ordered father and daughter to
get out. This is a rare kind of courage: not a rash act of
bravery but a persistence in defending civilised values in
the face of Russian artillery.
A word or two about that. The red zone is, roughly
speaking, a strip of 25 kilometres stretching back from
the front line where you can get killed by artillery, most
commonly mortars. These small bombs fly high, higher
than Everest, then plummet to earth. If they land on
asphalt or concrete, the shrapnel scissors across the
landscape at hundreds of miles an hour, red hot. The
shrapnel is full of jagged edges and something no bigger
than a sycamore seed can slice through an artery. Even
if you are lucky and the mortar shrapnel doesn’t get you,
the sound they make is terrifying, leaving you literally
sick to the pit of your stomach. I’ve been to Bakhmut
seven times and each time it took an act of conscious
courage. Andrew Bagshaw, I reckon, went to Bakhmut at
least 70 times.
For what? He was a proud New Zealander, from the
country as far away from the killer in the Kremlin and
his zombified populace as it is possible to be. He had, you
could say, no skin in this game.
But I would argue with that, big time. Russia’s war
against Ukraine is a thing of evil but it did not suddenly
erupt in 2022. Vladimir Putin has been waging a kind
of war against the West since he took power in 2000.
He harks back to the good old days of Soviet power

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 — that means Stalinism — and behind that, Russian
imperialism. In Vladimir Putin’s sick mind, might is
right, and killing innocent old men and women and kids
is worth it. He lives inside a dark fairy tale of eternal
Russian power.
The Ukrainians are not the first people to suffer from
Russia’s wicked game. I first saw evidence of Russian war
crimes in Chechnya in 2000. I first called Vladimir Putin
a war criminal 23 years ago. Then he invaded Georgia.
Then he gave arms and men to buttress Bashar al-Assad,
the butcher of Syria. Then he invaded Ukraine, twice.
You get the drift.
What Andrew Bagshaw did was to do something to
stop Putin’s dark nonsense. Or, at least, to try to save
innocent human lives that got in the monster’s way.
He is a true hero.
Read this book.

John Sweeney
Kyiv, June 2023

John Sweeney is an investigative journalist and the author of

several books, most recently Killer in the Kremlin. John has
worked for The Observer newspaper and the BBC’s Panorama
and Newsnight series. In 2022, he moved to Ukraine to report on
the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

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 CONTENTS

Introduction 19
Chapter One 24
Chapter Two 39
Chapter Three 61
Chapter Four 77
Chapter Five 97
Chapter Six 117
Chapter Seven 135
Chapter Eight 156
Chapter Nine 182
Chapter Ten 200
Chapter Eleven 229
Chapter Twelve 243
Acknowledgements 250
Sources 253

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 INTRODUCTION

W
hy did he go to Ukraine? And would you do
the same?
Those are two of the questions that
people are mostly likely to have asked themselves, and
each other, after they heard about the humanitarian
mission of New Zealand scientist Dr Andrew Bagshaw.
Andrew left the safety of his home in Christchurch in
April 2022 to volunteer in different parts of Ukraine, most
notably in the dangerous eastern areas of the Donbas,

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 with its now-notorious urban battlefields Soledar and
Bakhmut. Soledar, he said when he got there, was ‘hell’.
And it was in that hell on Earth that Andrew and a
British colleague, Chris Parry, lost their lives in January
2023. They were attempting a civilian evacuation, one
of hundreds Andrew had done in that region, when the
Russians took control of Soledar.
For two weeks the pair were officially reported
missing; then their deaths were eventually confirmed.
The story of Andrew Bagshaw affected many people, for
several reasons. One was simply the tragic circumstances
of it, especially once it emerged that the official account
of their deaths appeared to cover up a much more sinister
narrative involving the notorious Russian mercenaries
the Wagner Group. The true story of Andrew’s death
further illustrates the brutal nature of the Russian
invasion itself, which was based on falsehoods and
disinformation. As Andrew’s father explained, Andrew
was interested in truth, not lies.
Who Andrew’s parents are is a central part of who
Andrew was. Dr Phil Bagshaw and Dame Sue Bagshaw are
well known and respected, not just in Christchurch but
across New Zealand, as doctors with a social conscience
who have given thousands of volunteer hours to improve
the lives of people on the margins — whether they are
living in poverty, struggling with addiction or have
mental-health issues. A short documentary made about
them in 2019 by Frank Film called them ‘the brilliant
Bagshaws’. It is clear that their ethical example rubbed
off on their elder son. After his death it was estimated

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 that he had saved as many as 500 people.
Andrew and the volunteers he worked with in Ukraine
were aware that they might not survive their time there.
Some of them were Ukrainian, but most were from other
countries — Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada,
the UK, the USA, Australia and New Zealand — and they
were driven to help Ukraine because they saw Russia’s
actions as deeply immoral, even criminal. They felt
that the rest of the world should not just stand by and
watch if help could be given. This perspective meant
that they were prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice
for people they had never met. The moral commitment
they made was perfectly expressed by British journalist
John Sweeney, who attended Andrew’s memorial service
in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv: ‘You can say, what’s the
point of dying in somebody else’s war? And I would say
something different to that; I would say, to die helping
other people, it’s the noblest death of all.’
Opposing the war in Ukraine was a very clear moral
position for Andrew and the volunteers he worked with,
just as it was for the New Zealand soldier Kane Te Tai
who was also killed in Ukraine and whose powerful
personal testimony is quoted at length because it
so closely resembles the views of the volunteers. By
undertaking these missions, Andrew and his colleagues
found a new and deeper sense of meaning in their own
lives. As another volunteer said in an interview for this
book, ‘Doing this work is gratifying for your soul.’
But Andrew was more than just a war volunteer.
He was also an intellectual, possibly even a genius.

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 His work in the area of genetics was considered
groundbreaking and he was highly respected by others
in the field, including two of New Zealand’s leading
genetics professors, who talk about him and his work
in this book. He was also a pilot, an obsessive cricket
fan and player, and a son, an uncle and a brother. It is
surely ironic that someone whose personal modesty
and reticence may at times have held back his scientific
career is now better known than he could ever have
imagined; but not because of science. He might have
hated the limelight, but he would have appreciated that
he helped to get the word out about Ukraine and that he
made a lasting difference.
It became obvious during the research for this book
that the war in Ukraine is being documented in a new
way. The volunteers that Andrew worked alongside
recorded and shared their activities and perspectives on
social-media platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and
Facebook, partly to raise funds for their humanitarian
work and partly to increase awareness of the situations
they saw around them. This was a war that could be
documented on a mobile phone — the same phone having
map and translation apps that have made working in a
country like Ukraine possible in a way that it would not
have been even a decade earlier.
By shooting video on their phones, the volunteers
can even be said to have created a new form of war
journalism, one that is immersive, personality-based and
highly subjective and that will remain only as long as the
social-media apps exist. They were documenting the war

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 for the immediate present, rather than for history. But
readers can investigate some of their accounts further to
get a sense of how the war felt for them, and how risky
but necessary many of their activities were. If this book
sometimes relies heavily on those accounts, it is because
this is the most effective way to see what Andrew and his
colleagues did in Ukraine, and why.
Finally, the story of Andrew Bagshaw does not permit
a neutral view of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is
impossible to see the war as anything other than savage,
catastrophic and immoral. As Andrew’s parents said at a
press conference after his death was confirmed, ‘Might
is not right; freedom is indivisible. The world needs
to be strong and stand with Ukraine, giving them the
military support they need now, and help to rebuild their
shattered country after the war.’

Slava Ukraïni!

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 CHAPTER
ONE

I
n the days and weeks that followed his elder son’s
death, Phil Bagshaw often thought of a story from
when Andrew was thirteen. In that memory, Phil was
standing in the kitchen of their home in Jeffreys Road,
Christchurch, when Andrew appeared and told him that
society was a scam. More than that — society was a scam
and he was dropping out. Phil remembered it vividly. He
remembered that Andrew really seemed to believe it.

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 There was a backstory to this announcement, as
Andrew’s mother, Sue Bagshaw, recalled. Andrew had
‘got all the prizes in the third form and then got bullied.
And so he thought, well, that’s it, I’m not going to win
anything else.’ Perhaps he was thinking, ‘What are your
achievements worth if they are mocked or not properly
understood?’
Why did this one story about Andrew come to mind
so readily at that time? Because it obviously illustrated
something central about him and his view of the world.
It was not a kind of nihilism about life and other people,
but more a form of disillusionment. There was a sense
that he saw through everything. But then, most teenagers
feel that way. They believe they can see a hollowness
at the centre of the adult world, with its hypocrisies,
compromises and deceptions. Yet this statement from
Andrew was something more. It was not a posture. It was
a moral expression, even a form of moral enquiry. It asked
why the powerless are tormented, why the powerful go
unchallenged. It asked whether, at the end of it all, there
was really any fairness or any justice.
Truth was important to Andrew, as was acting
honestly. If you were searching for a theme, or a narrative,
to help explain why Andrew Bagshaw was in Ukraine
during the Russian invasion in 2022, risking his own
life to save other lives, that anecdote from when he was
thirteen seems to help. It was not just a part of the story;
it almost tells the entire story in one short sentence.
Andrew was not religious, although his parents
are and have expressed their Christian faith in their

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 extensive charitable and medical work, as well as in more
conventional ways. If you don’t rebel against a moral
upbringing, then you tend to absorb it. You are shaped in
some way by the substance or spirit of it, by the idea that
there is something of value to consider in it, that there is
an ethical dimension to life. Such an inherited or learned
moral sense must explain why so many people who
encountered Andrew talked of his decency and nobility,
his lack of ego and his willingness to help others, long
before he even considered leaving New Zealand to save
lives in Ukraine.
The anecdote about society being a scam also fits with
some of the other stories that were told about Andrew in
the weeks after his death, which were often shared with a
sense of proud bemusement. Parents of gifted children —
and Andrew’s IQ had been measured at 158 — will often
find the children to be, at some level, unfathomable.
They are, at least partially, strangers to them, being
too advanced, and in possession of more knowledge or
wisdom than they should have at their age. Many such
stories were told about Andrew and the brilliance of his
mind, often in a tone that seemed as much disbelieving
as admiring.
‘He was a complete one-off,’ Phil recalled. ‘The brain
would be going at a million miles an hour. He certainly
had a unique mind.’
‘He taught me how to negotiate, that’s for sure,’ Sue
said. ‘Everything was a negotiation with him. From two
years old up.’
They were thinking about Andrew and his distinctive,

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 even unique qualities because early in January 2023, Phil
and Sue had received the kind of phone call no parent
ever wants to get. It was a call they dreaded, though
perhaps not one that was totally out of the blue. It was
summer in New Zealand, and no one was thinking about
anything very serious — and then the call came, on a
Sunday morning. Phil and Sue were told that Andrew
had gone missing in the eastern Ukrainian city of Soledar
in the Donbas region, where he had been volunteering as
an aid worker, delivering supplies and evacuating people
to safer places away from the war zones. But this time,
the war had come too close and moved too quickly.
Andrew was 47 years old. He had been working with
another volunteer, a young British man named Chris
Parry, who was 28, and for two weeks the pair were
officially listed as missing. As the Bagshaw family waited
for news, and tried to figure out what was true and what
was false, what was real information and what was
propaganda, who could be trusted and who should not
be, and then — once Andrew’s death had been confirmed
— waited to hear about how they could get their son’s
remains home, Phil and Sue thought about what made
Andrew the person he was. They thought about what
parts of his story were clear, and what parts remained a
mystery. They asked themselves what had inspired him
to risk his life to save people he had never met, whom
he could barely even speak to, in a country he didn’t
know anything about before he set foot there. What was
it about this war, in this place, at this time? What was it
about Andrew and Ukraine?

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