The Farage Connection: How a Reform UK Leader’s Bribery Conviction Exposed Hidden Ties to Russia
Based on reporting by Peter Jukes at Byline Times
When former Welsh leader of Reform UK, Nathan Gill, admitted guilt to eight counts of bribery for accepting payments to push Kremlin-aligned narratives, the party scrambled to distance itself.
Speaking to the BBC, Zia Yusuf, Reform’s head of government efficiency, claimed that “most people in the senior leadership team have never really heard of the guy,” dismissing Gill as merely “one of tens of thousands of people” Reform leader Nigel Farage meets each year.
Then the photographs emerged — and the narrative began to unravel.
Gill appeared in pictures from Leave.EU’s celebration on the night of the 2016 EU referendum, standing among the core group who toasted the Brexit victory. The following morning, he was again visible on College Green, one of the four key figures alongside Farage celebrating their campaign’s triumph outside Parliament.
Videos resurfaced of Farage endorsing Gill’s leadership bid for Welsh UKIP, describing him as a colleague he had “worked closely” with, someone “hard-working, honest, and loyal.” In a 2016 BBC interview, Farage declared that Gill had “never, ever let me down,” calling him “as honest as the day is long.”
More footage showed Farage campaigning with Gill during the 2019 general election, when Gill ran as a candidate for the Brexit Party — Farage’s successor to UKIP — in Merthyr Tydfil, as Channel 4 News’ Matt Frei questioned Farage about his campaign’s financing.
Clearly, Nathan Gill was not merely one of the countless people Farage encountered annually.
In fact during the very period Gill was working directly with one of Vladimir Putin’s top allies in Ukraine, he remained one of Farage’s most trusted confidants.
No Bit-Part Player
Gill’s guilty plea at the Old Bailey followed his detention by counterterrorism officers at Manchester Airport in September 2021.
Investigators discovered WhatsApp messages showing that from December 2018 to July 2019, Gill had accepted bribes from Oleh Voloshyn, a Ukrainian MP with strong pro-Russian ties.
Only months earlier, in May 2021, Gill’s close collaborator — Polish activist and lobbyist Janusz Gabriel Niedźwiecki — had been arrested by Poland’s Internal Security Agency on charges of espionage for Russia.
In 2018, Gill made at least four trips to Ukraine and Moldova, attending parades and conferences hosted by Russian businessmen and separatist groups, all organized through a Moscow-based travel agency under Niedźwiecki’s direction.
According to prosecutors, these activities formed part of a broader operation: Gill was secretly lobbying for Viktor Medvedchuk, one of Putin’s most powerful political allies in Ukraine.
Medvedchuk, often referred to as “Moscow’s Man in Ukraine,” is a personal friend of Putin — the Russian president is even godfather to his daughter, Nadia.
Sanctioned by the US and EU in 2014 for supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Medvedchuk faced ongoing treason charges in Ukraine by 2019.
Just two weeks after Gill’s return to the European Parliament as a Brexit Party MEP, he hosted a roundtable meeting featuring Medvedchuk — broadcast on the latter’s television networks, News One and 112 Ukraine — where the oligarch unveiled a supposed “peace plan” for Ukraine. The proposal aimed to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine — on Moscow’s terms, ensuring Ukrainian dependency on the Kremlin.
The following day, Putin met Medvedchuk in Moscow, where the latter boasted of presenting his “peace plan to newly elected European deputies from Great Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Bulgaria, and Slovakia.”
Although the plan failed and Russia later launched a full-scale invasion in 2022, Medvedchuk’s value to Putin was proven when 215 Ukrainian prisoners of war were exchanged for his release after his capture by Ukrainian forces.
Far from being a peripheral figure, Gill had been operating at a strategic international level, deeply enmeshed in the network shaping Europe’s most explosive conflict since World War II.
This raises an unavoidable question: how much did Nigel Farage know?
“Honest as the Day Is Long”
Multiple former UKIP and Brexit Party insiders — all speaking anonymously to Byline Times — described a dynamic in which Farage’s influence remained omnipresent, even as he drifted from day-to-day European Parliament activity following the 2016 referendum.
Farage, they said, was often physically absent in Strasbourg but still ruled from his spacious seventh-floor office, increasingly preoccupied with his transatlantic ties to Steve Bannon, then a key figure in Donald Trump’s political rise.
Despite Farage’s growing detachment, Nathan Gill was among the few MEPs who retained his full confidence. One former colleague described them as “thick as thieves”, deeply intertwined as they plotted their exit from UKIP and the EU institutions.
Their alliance persisted even during the period between 2018 and 2019 — when Gill was secretly taking Russian money.
When Farage quit UKIP in December 2018, Gill followed within 48 hours. By February 2019, when Farage launched the Brexit Party, Gill was one of the first seven MEPs to sign up.
They campaigned together across the UK that year, serving side by side in Brussels until Britain’s official EU withdrawal in January 2020.
Of the 24 UKIP MEPs elected in 2014, Gill was the only one who remained with Farage through to his next reincarnation — Reform UK — where Gill became Leader in Wales in March 2021, the party’s most senior post after Farage himself.
He resigned later that year after failing to win a seat in the Welsh Parliament.
Insiders recall that Gill’s repeated trips to Ukraine and Moldova had caused murmurs of concern — activities that appeared far removed from the party’s stated focus on Brexit and EU reform.
One former MEP said it was “inconceivable” that Farage didn’t know where his colleague was traveling, given his reputation for micromanaging foreign trips and expenses.
The Russian Embassy Pattern
This was not the first time someone close to Farage had been linked to Russian influence efforts.
As Byline Times revealed years earlier, Sharon Ellul Bonici, a Maltese Labour member and long-standing associate of Farage since 2003, had deep Kremlin connections. Her then-husband Kevin Ellul Bonici, fluent in Russian and educated in Moscow, managed UKIP’s European communications until he was dismissed for distributing Russian propaganda around Parliament.
By 2017, the Guardian reported that Kevin Ellul Bonici had been liaising with Russian embassy officials in Brussels to spread Kremlin smear material targeting Putin’s opponents.
That same year, the Arron Banks–Andy Wigmore story broke.
Emails later revealed by journalist Isabel Oakeshott, ghostwriter of Banks’ book The Bad Boys of Brexit, showed multiple meetings between Banks, Wigmore, and Russian diplomats in London — discussions involving potential gold and diamond deals as well as political coordination in the months surrounding the EU referendum.
Oakeshott’s unpublished statement to The Sunday Times (seen by Byline Times) said:
“The material clearly shows that they discussed Brexit and personal enrichment opportunities with senior Russian officials. They met several times with men they knew to be members of Russian intelligence services and passed them sensitive documents. They claim to be patriots, but when the UK and Russia had a political dispute, they publicly and privately supported the Russian position.”
She concluded she had “no doubt” Banks and Wigmore acted as agents of influence for the Russian state — though she emphasized that neither Farage nor Richard Tice were directly implicated.
Still, when Carole Cadwalladr and The Observer published the emails six months later, sources claimed Oakeshott privately apologised to Farage in tears.
This context makes it increasingly difficult to believe that Farage remained unaware of Gill’s pro-Putin activities between 2018 and 2019.
A Russian Intelligence Operation
Oakeshott’s rediscovery of those emails coincided with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election — a campaign largely orchestrated by Russia’s GRU military intelligence service.
Farage was intimately connected to several figures caught in Mueller’s web: Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, and Donald Trump himself, with whom Farage famously shared the stage on the “Make America Great Again” trail.
In June 2017, the Guardian’s Luke Harding reported that the FBI regarded Farage as a “person of interest” due to his ties to key subjects of the probe.
While Trump later pardoned Bannon (charged with fraud) and Stone (convicted of obstruction and false statements), another Trump ally — campaign manager Paul Manafort — wasn’t so fortunate.
He served prison time for bank fraud, tax evasion, conspiracy, and secret lobbying for Ukraine’s pro-Russian Party of Regions before receiving a presidential pardon in 2022.
That same Party of Regions was led by Viktor Yanukovych, the exiled Ukrainian president — and Gill’s paymaster, Oleh Voloshyn, was not only one of its MPs but also a business partner of Manafort, according to The Brussels Times.
Voloshyn wrote a 2017 Kyiv Post op-ed defending Manafort, a piece later revealed through court filings to have been edited by Manafort himself in breach of a gag order. Voloshyn later admitted to Reuters that he cleared it with Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime Manafort aide described by US intelligence as linked to the GRU.
In 2022, the US Treasury sanctioned Voloshyn for collaborating with Kilimnik and Manafort — evidence that the bribery operation paying Gill was part of a Russian intelligence-linked network rather than mere propaganda.
Voloshyn and his wife Nadia Borodi (also known as Nadia Sass) fled Ukraine for Belarus shortly before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
The Moscow Chorus
Farage’s proximity to Voloshyn’s circle became visible in a photograph outside the European Parliament, showing him with Nadia Borodi, Voloshyn’s wife — a presenter on Medvedchuk’s TV networks, described by French outlet Desk Russie as a “Russian propagandist.”
In April 2024, Borodi resurfaced on X (Twitter), posting the old photo from her Minsk hideout and writing:
“I will still miss @Nigel_Farage and his team there. No one has ever rattled the Brussels swamp as he did.”
Just two months later, Farage again repeated on the BBC his long-standing claim that “the West provoked Putin” — the first time he’d made that assertion since Russia’s 2022 invasion.
Did Farage know that his trusted MEP was being paid by Voloshyn?
Was he aware that Gill hosted Medvedchuk’s 2019 roundtable?
Did he grasp that these figures were intertwined with Trump’s disgraced campaign manager, Manafort — and by extension, Russian intelligence operations?
Reform UK and Farage declined to comment when approached.
A History of Kremlin Sympathies
This is not Farage’s first brush with Moscow-linked narratives.
Since 2013, when he first (and initially denied) meeting Russian ambassador Alexander Yakovenko — later identified by the UK Parliament’s Russia Report as a key Kremlin operative — Farage has maintained a consistent line sympathetic to Russia’s perspective.
Between 2013 and 2022, Farage regularly appeared on RT (Russia Today), where his European Parliament speeches were rebroadcast to audiences in Russia and abroad.
In a 2014 GQ interview, Farage named Vladimir Putin as the world leader he most admired “as an operator,” calling his handling of Syria “brilliant.”
Farage wasn’t alone.
During the Brexit campaign, his backers echoed similar talking points.
Arron Banks tweeted in July 2016 that “the Crimea was part of the Russian empire in the 1700s, no different to Gibraltar”.
By November, Banks claimed “Crimea is as Russian as the Isle of Wight is British,” blaming EU expansionism for Putin’s actions.
That same year, Nathan Gill took to the floor of the European Parliament, declaring ”Russia is not our enemy. The EU and NATO are to blame for provoking this conflict. Sanctions on Russia are wrong and hurt ordinary people far more than leaders. We should stop demonising Russia and instead work with them against real threats”.
The European Parliament has since concluded that Russian intelligence services systematically targeted far-right and Eurosceptic parties across Europe. While there’s no evidence Farage or Banks received illegal inducements, Gill’s case stands as a chilling example of where such sympathies can lead.
Calls for Inquiry
As Reform UK continues to climb in polls, its ideological alignment with Kremlin messaging invites renewed scrutiny.
Journalist Carole Cadwalladr, previously sued by Arron Banks for remarks about his Russian ties, told Byline Times that the Gill revelations demand a full-scale inquiry into foreign interference in British politics.
“It is outrageous that Rachel Reeves should allege this week that Farage is ‘in bed’ with Putin while her government is still refusing to launch an inquiry which parliament’s own Intelligence and Security Committee has said is the essential first step to protecting our elections.
Cadwalladr and her non-profit group, The Citizens, continue to pursue that inquiry through the High Court and now the European courts — arguing that until such questions are answered, Britain’s democratic process remains dangerously exposed.