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When police stopped Nathan Gill at Manchester Airport on 13 September 2021, they did so under Schedule 3 of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019 – a power designed to detect hostile-state activity and foreign interference at UK borders.
Byline Times and The Nerve can now reveal that, when Gill was arrested, the former MEP had been invited to spend four days in Moscow at a major gathering of ‘political technologists’ from across the world, under the auspices of the Kremlin.
According to the Crown Prosecution Service indictment and Gill’s own pleas, he accepted bribes from December 2018 to July 2019 from Oleh Voloshyn – a pro-Russian Ukrainian MP with longstanding ties to Viktor Medvedchuk, Vladimir Putin’s closest political ally in Ukraine.
This new revelation ties Farage’s closest aide even more directly to Russia and its state influence operations.
And, in a week when Reform UK celebrated becoming the first ever political party in the UK to receive cryptocurrency donations, we can also reveal that Gill had prepared a presentation about the electoral role of cryptocurrencies for his Russian sponsors.
‘Thick as Thieves’: Nathan Gill and Nigel Farage’s Putin Problem
Far from being distant from the Reform UK Leader, insiders told Byline Times that the former MEP convicted of bribery was one of Farage’s closest aides, while we reveal how Gill worked on the Kremlin’s strategic plan to crush Ukrainian independence with ‘Moscow’s Man in Ukraine’
From Ukraine to Russia with Love
When Nathan Gill pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery at the Old Bailey, for taking money to issue statements favourable to Russia while he was a UKIP and Brexit Party MEP, it was the first case under the Bribery Act for foreign political interference.
And it provided further proof that Nigel Farage’s parties – like many other right-wing Eurosceptic groups across the continent – were consistently targeted by Putin’s intelligence services and their proxies.
Five days after the first payment was made in December 2018, Gill – then a UKIP MEP – made a statement in the European Parliament to protest the planned closure of Medvedchuk’s TV stations 112 Ukraine and News24. He was interviewed by the TV station’s presenter and the wife of the man who had bribed him, Nadia Borodi (also known as Nadia Sass).
Borodi was also pictured with then UKIP Leader Nigel Farage – who sat as an MEP alongside Gill – outside the European Parliament building in Strasbourg, and then apparently inside Gill’s parliamentary office.
The bribes from Voloshyn continued until July 2019, when Gill was one of the few UKIP MEPs to join Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party.
According to his then fellow MEP Rupert Lowe – who now sits as an independent MP in the UK Parliament after being suspended by Reform UK – Gill acted as the whip for Brexit Party MEPs. In a recent statement, Lowe described being called to a meeting by Gill at the European Parliament, where those in attendance claimed to be “very close to Putin”.
This coincided with a roundtable event Gill hosted for Viktor Medvedchuk, during which ‘Moscow’s man in Ukraine’ announced a new ‘peace plan’ for the country, which he then celebrated with President Putin the next day in the Kremlin, boasting of the support of British and other MEPs.
According to sources Byline Times has spoken to, Farage and Gill were “as thick as thieves” during this period, and it would have been “inconceivable” that Farage could not have known about Gill’s Ukrainian connections and statements.
Farage himself has admitted that he knew Gill for some years and warned him about going to Ukraine – because it is “one of the most corrupt countries in the world”, as he recently described it to the BBC.
But what about Russia, deeply entwined in its post-Soviet corruption through the institution of a mafiya state, which has often been praised by Farage?
A Reform UK spokesperson told Byline Times that Farage did not know about Gill’s planned trip to Moscow. Following this newspaper’s inquiries, Farage took to the airwaves to tell Bloomberg – in an uncharacteristically informal turn of phrase for the Reform Leader – that Vladimir Putin is “a very bad dude”.
Notwithstanding these late disavowals, the historical record of the Moscow gathering in late 2021, as Putin was planning his full invasion of Ukraine, reveals the ideological and technological convergence between the Kremlin’s interests and those of authoritarian right-wing parties in other countries.
‘A Digital Coup’
The Kremlin-backed International Forum on ‘The Role of Civil Society in Ensuring Democratic Standards of Organising and Conducting Elections’, which Nathan Gill was due to attend, took place over four days, with registration beginning on 13 and departures on 16 September 2021.
The theme should have been ironic to anyone paying attention to global politics or Russia’s State Duma elections that took place a few days later.
By late 2021, thanks to dozens of official investigations – including the US Senate Intelligence Committee, the Council of Europe, and the UK’s own Intelligence and Security Committee – Russia’s attempt to subvert overseas elections through illicit loans, cyber attacks, and online influence operations was well known.
Putin had first practised these novel ‘hybrid warfare’ technologies on his own population in a form of social and media control that was dubbed ‘managed democracy’ in the 2012 Duma Elections.
That same combination of financial inducement and social media propaganda was deployed in Ukraine during the annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014, and then in the UK’s EU Referendum and Donald Trump’s US presidential campaign in 2016.
Five years later, any pretence that the symposium Gill was invited to was really about “ensuring democratic standards” would have been risibly uninformed.
Gill was to join 250 core participants from at least 35 countries – mostly linked to far-right, Eurosceptic, or pro-Kremlin parties such as the Rassemblement National (France), AfD (Germany), Lega (Italy), Forza Italia (Italy), the Serbian Progressive Party, and the Action Party (Latvia).
Five roundtables brought together Russian political technologists and hand-picked foreign guests to validate the Kremlin’s new electronic-voting (DEG) platform – which was being rolled out in seven regions, including Moscow, and was being described as a new form of “sovereign digital democracy”.
However, when the elections took plac