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Every picture tells a story.
After the former Welsh Leader of Reform UK, Nathan Gill, recently pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery for receiving money to promote Kremlin narratives, Zia Yusuf, head of Reform’s Department of Government Efficiency, told the BBC that “most people in the senior leadership team have never really heard of the guy” and that he was just “one of tens of thousands of people” the party’s leader Nigel Farage “meets on an annual basis”.
Then the photos began to circulate.
Gill was pictured at the Leave.EU group’s party on the evening of the EU Referendum in June 2016, and one of the top four figures celebrating the victory of Farage’s campaign on College Green outside Parliament on the morning after the vote.
There are videos of Farage supporting Gill for the leadership of Welsh UKIP, saying that he had “worked closely” with him and that he was “hard-working, honest, and loyal”. He told the BBC in 2016 that his fellow MEP had “never, ever let me down” and that Gill “was honest as the day is long“.
Pictures emerged of Farage campaigning for Gill as a candidate for UKIP’s successor, the Brexit Party – also led by Farage – in Merthyr Tydfil in 2019, with footage showing them both walking around as Farage is questioned by Channel 4 News’ Matt Frei on his funding streams.
Nathan Gill, then, was not just one of the “tens of thousands of people” the Reform Leader met every year.
And Byline Times can now reveal that, during the crucial period when Gill was most active, working directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most senior ally in Ukraine, he was also one of Nigel Farage’s closest confidantes.
No Bit-Part Player
Nathan Gill’s Old Bailey guilty verdict followed his being stopped by counter-terrorism police at Manchester Airport in September 2021. A series of WhatsApp messages on Gill’s seized devices revealed that he had been taking bribes, from December 2018 to July 2019, from a pro-Russian Ukrainian MP, Oleh Voloshyn.
Six months earlier, in May 2021, Gill’s close associate, the Polish activist and lobbyist Janusz Gabriel Niedźwiecki, had also been detained by Poland’s Internal Security Agency on charges of espionage for Russia.
Gill had made at least four trips to Ukraine and Moldova in 2018 under Niedźwiecki’s auspices, speaking at parades and forums organised by pro-Russian separatists and Russian businessmen, with travel arranged by a Moscow travel agency.
But, according to the prosecution at the Old Bailey, the WhatsApp orders issued to Gill were part of a separate project: to support Viktor Medvedchuk.
Known as ‘Moscow’s Man in Ukraine’, Medvedchuk is a senior Ukrainian politician and a personal friend of Putin, who is the godfather of his child Nadia.
Medvedchuk was sanctioned by the US and EU in 2014 for his role in supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea and backing separatist movements in eastern Ukraine. In 2019, he was already facing charges of treason in Ukraine.
In July 2019, only two weeks after Nathan Gill returned to the European Parliament representing Farage’s new Brexit Party, he hosted a roundtable with other MEPs, in which Medvedchuk (filmed like other Gill hosted meetings by Medvedchuk’s TV channels News One and 112 Ukraine) announced a new “peace plan” that would bring an end to the war that had been raging in eastern Ukraine – on Russian terms and by keeping the country firmly under Kremlin control.
This announcement was so important that Medveduk travelled the next day to Moscow to meet Putin, where the Kremlin recorded him as saying: “I presented my peace plan to the newly-elected European deputies from Great Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Bulgaria and Slovakia.”
Though the plan failed and was followed by a full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces, Medvedchuk remained so key to Putin that, when arrested by Ukrainian authorities in April 2022 on charges of treason and passing on military secrets, the Russian President was willing to trade no fewer than 215 Ukrainian prisoners of war to rescue him.
Far from being a mere bit-part player in the various Russian operations to stifle Ukrainian independence, it seems that Nathan Gill was active at a strategic international level in the biggest looming conflict in Europe since the Second World War.
Which raises the question: how much did his party leader, Nigel Farage, know about this?
‘Honest as the Day is Long’
Byline Times has spoken to several people who were familiar with the workings of UKIP and its European Parliament members as it transitioned to the Brexit Party and then Reform UK followi