Kiwi aid worker Andrew Bagshaw is missing in Ukraine.
Kiwi aid worker Andrew Bagshaw is missing in Ukraine.
The family of a British aid worker said they fear for his health after he went missing on the front lines in Ukraine.
Christopher Parry, from Cornwall in England, has not been seen since last Friday after he left for an evacuation mission with Andrew Bagshaw, a Kiwi aid worker.
The pair are thought to have gone into Soledar, a small salt mining town near Bakhmut, where Russian attacks have intensified over the past four days.
“We are very worried and concerned about the health and whereabouts of Chris right now,” Parry’s family said in a Foreign Office statement.
“He is an extraordinary person who is compassionate and caring and would not be dissuaded from his work in Ukraine liberating elderly and disabled people.”
Three days before Parry disappeared, he said he was “willing to go” where others would not to rescue desperate civilians.
‘How far until things get a little bit too bad?’
Describing how his role involves entering the most perilous parts of the country, he said: “As you get closer to the front you just speak to the Ukrainian soldiers and say ‘How far until things get a little bit too bad?’
“They’ll say ‘Oh, 200 metres’, then you go ‘OK, I’ll leave the car here and I’ll go on foot for the rest’.”
He added: “A lot of volunteers won’t go anymore, but there are people there who want to get out, so I’m willing to go.”
Parry travelled from his home in Cheltenham to Ukraine last March to help “good against evil”.
He spent his birthday last week “like he did every other day of the past year - evacuating civilians from a war zone”, according to a fellow humanitarian worker.
Brad, a volunteer who did not provide his last name, had previously gone with Bagshaw, 48, on missions to rescue civilians.
He said that the scientist, who was born in the UK to his New Zealand parents, was “low-key and punctual” and willing to put himself in dangerous situations.
Andrew Bagshaw, son of doctors Philip and Sue, volunteered to assist the people of Ukraine by delivering humanitarian aid. Photo / Grzegorz Rybak, RNZ.
The 42-year-old, from the US, said: “There are a lot of people who come out here dressed as some sort of Hollywood figure... They’re in it for the trappings of it, for the selfies, and Andrew just had no use for any of that stuff.
“He wore armour. He wore a helmet. He wore what you should have to be prepared for the job.”
Christian Campbell, a fellow humanitarian worker, said that the pair had been “pushing into” Soledar to “perform an evacuation, as Russian forces unfortunately mounted an offensive on the village”.
Laurel Chor, a journalist who spent time with the aid workers in Ukraine, described their “dangerous and scary” missions which often took them into the conflict’s “grey zones”.
Writing on social media, she said Bagshaw was “quiet and reserved”, but someone who “stopped at nothing to aid those that others wouldn’t or couldn’t help”.
His parents Susan and Philip Bagshaw, who live in Christchurch, said that he had travelled to Ukraine to “assist the people, believing it to be the morally right thing to do”.
Andrew Bagshaw's parents Dame Sue Bagshaw and Philip Bagshaw say agencies from New Zealand and the UK, where their son was born, are working hard to find him. Photo / RNZ
Chor described Parry as someone whose “cheerful demeanour never wavered in spite of shells whistling overhead”.
Parry originally lied to his parents about volunteering on the front line, claiming he was working from Poland. He returned to England briefly last summer to explain the truth.
A spokesman for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said: “We are supporting the families of two British men who have gone missing in Ukraine.”
