Bribes, betrayal ... and Reform’s Nathan Gill: inside Russia’s operation to drive a wedge between Ukraine and Europe

I decided to write my new book, Betrayal, after two big events. One was the return of Donald Trump and his second imperial presidency: his threats to annex Greenland, Canada and other chunks of the globe. The other was the decision by North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, to send thousands of his elite troops to Russia. There they took part in Moscow’s murderous war against Ukraine.

The idea that North Korean soldiers could join the biggest conflict in Europe since 1945 seems astonishing. It was a sign of a world turned upside down, as if colourful pieces from the board game Risk, representing infantry, had been tossed across a map. The old international rules that nations don’t invade each other or take territory by force – sanctified by the UN and the Atlantic Charter – appear broken. Instead, we have returned to a brutal age of Great Power politics.

Our post-second-world-war international system is under challenge, not only from an alliance of dictator-run states including China and Iran but from a rogue America too. In Betrayal, I try to make sense of our precarious times. I visit villages in eastern Ukraine under Russian bombardment, talk to Greenlanders about a US takeover, tour the divided Korean peninsula and sit down with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

I also explore a story which Nerve readers have followed closely: Russia’s campaign to undermine and sabotage the UK. The extract below tells the story of Nathan Gill, a Ukip member of the European parliament, who betrayed his country and his electors in Wales. Gill accepted thousands of pounds of under-the-table Kremlin payments. He was a close ally of Nigel Farage. Their offices in Brussels were next door.  

In 2008, I met the Ukrainian diplomat and journalist who would go on to bribe Gill: Oleh Voloshyn. At the time he was working as press attache at the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow, where I was based as the bureau chief for the Guardian. Voloshyn made no secret of his pro-Kremlin views. He was clever, chatty and spoke impeccable English. He later went back to Kyiv to work for the Putin-backed administration of Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych. 

In the years that followed – wittingly or not, paid or not – Farage and his political colleagues repeated Russian government talking points. Famously, Farage has said he admires Putin as an operator; as recently as this week one of his supporters expressed sympathy with Moscow as it continues to pound Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities with drones and ballistic missiles. In May, newly elected Reform county councils took down Ukrainian flags.

Meanwhile, questions over the sources of the Reform party’s cash have grown. In April,  the Guardian’s City editor, Anna Isaac, revealed that Farage had received £5m from the cryptobillionaire Christopher Harborne, shortly before announcing that he would stand in the 2024 British general election. Farage has given different explanations for the gift. None are convincing. To pre-empt parliamentary scrutiny, he called a byelection in his Clacton constituency, last week defeating a man dressed as a bin in an empty victory.

Farage denies wrongdoing. He has dismissed Gill as a bad apple. And yet it seems certain that more scandal will engulf the Kremlin-friendly right of British politics, whose allegiances remain murky. There are further betrayals to come.  

Luke Harding

In a large, ellipse-shaped glass building a debate was under way. It was mid-evening, and the European parliament was in plenary session in the pleasant French city of Strasbourg. Discussions spill out beyond the chamber into canalside bars and restaurants scattered around Strasbourg’s square and Gothic cathedral. 

The date was 11 December 2018. Members from across the 28-state bloc sat in a giant semicircular chamber known as the Hemicycle, with a podium at the front for the parliament’s president. Topic for discussion that Tuesday: the EU-Ukraine association agreement, signed a year earlier. Most MEPs supported Ukraine’s goal of EU membership; few thought it would happen any time soon. In the meantime, the EU was shrinking, with the UK on its way out after Brexit.

One obstacle to Ukraine’s integration with the EU was Moscow, a bitter opponent of its neighbour’s parallel attempts to join Nato. Two weeks earlier, tensions had boiled over in the Sea of Azov. Russian sailors had fired on and seized three Ukrainian naval boats as they tried to cross the narrow Kerch strait on their way from the port of Mariupol to the Black Sea. Ukrainian crew members were hurt. The incident, as it turned out, was the precursor to something much bloodier.

Addressing her colleagues, the German Green MEP Rebecca Harms condemned Russia’s escalatory tactics, urging it to lift its maritime blockade. British representatives from the United Kingdom Independence party (Ukip) listened. They were easy to identify: on the right-hand side of the chamber was a union jack, next to desk 279. 

The party was pretty much a one-man band. Its leader, Nigel Farage, was one of the most flamboyant and consequential figures in European politics. He was also the most prominent British supporter of Donald Trump. Farage relished publicity and portrayed himself as a plucky insurgent. He liked nothing better than to bash pantomime “Eurocrats”, once telling Herman van Rompuy, the European Council’s Belgian president, that he had the “charisma of a damp rag” and resembled a “low-grade bank clerk”.

At 8.21pm, it was the turn of one of Farage’s party colleagues to speak. His name was Nathan Gill. Gill was the leader of Ukip in Wales. He stood up and made a two-minute speech, reading from a piece of paper. First, he declared his support for Ukraine’s sovereignty. Then he moved on to his actual theme: that freedom of the press in Ukraine was under threat. Kyiv, he said, had recently clamped down on two Ukrainian media outlets, 112 Ukraine and News One. This was bad and un-European, he argued, adding: “I have every sympathy with Ukraine when it comes to Russian aggression and interference. But as surely as you can’t fight fire with fire, it is wrong to fight repression with repression. We’ve seen activists and journalists alike being violently attacked by radicals, with little if any reaction or protection from the Ukrainian government.” Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, should support the “sacrosanct” principles of freedom and democracy. “That means allowing TV stations to broadcast whether you like the message or not,” he told the assembly.

For six years, Gill had served as a Mormon bishop. Despite giving quite a few sermons, he was no orator: the politician’s manner was uninspiring and wooden. Evidently, he lacked Farage’s dubious man-of-the-people charm and ability to stir a crowd. 

Beyond that, the speech itself was rather weird. Some of its phrases seemed out of place. The MEP referred to “the Ukraine”, rather than simply “Ukraine”. It was an old-fashioned formulation dating from before Ukraine’s independence and taken from the Russian phrase Na Ukraine. It suggests Ukraine perches on the edge of a Russian imperium. Then there was the word “radicals”. This was a bogeyman Kremlin term. It equated support for the Ukrainian nation with dangerous extremism.

Another oddity was the choice of topic. There was no obvious reason for Gill’s passionate interest in the domestic affairs of an eastern European country. Media pluralism in Ukraine was scarcely a burning issue for the farmers back in Wales, nor a subject of which Gill might claim expert knowledge. He lived in Anglesey, a small island off the coast of north Wales. He and his American wife, Jana, were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and had five children. Previously, he had run a family care home business that collapsed during the 2008 financial crisis, with £116,000 in debts. He then failed to win a seat as a local councillor, before in 2014 topping the list of Ukip European candidates and becoming an MEP.

Farage’s tabloid-dubbed “Kippers” did not add much to the serious policy work of the parliament. The EU, after all, was an institution they wished to destroy. Their main task was to applaud and cheer whenever their leader spoke, as a sort of Brexit-supporting Greek chorus, so that video clips of Farage looked good on social media. 

Gill’s intervention made no impression on the Strasbourg chamber. Two of his Ukip MEP colleagues – David Coburn (the leader of Ukip in Scotland) and Jonathan Arnott – followed up with pithy speeches on the same theme, asking if Ukraine was really ready for EU membership. The trio’s contributions were forgettable, but they delighted one person who had travelled from Kyiv to Strasbourg for the occasion: a Ukrainian journalist and one-time diplomat called Oleh Voloshyn. Immediately afterwards, Gill pinged Voloshyn a recording of his speech, as well as Coburn’s, filmed side-on with a camera phone. Voloshyn was thrilled, telling Gill: “Impressive … You are the perfect orator.” Gill messaged back, alluding to a mysterious person, V: “V should be pleased with this 3x what he thought.” Voloshyn agreed. “Exactly!!! Thank you so much,” he wrote.

The exchanges were part of a conspiracy. It involved Kremlin propaganda, Russian operatives and corruptible public servants. There were cash bribes, delivered in white envelopes over dinners in Strasbourg and Brussels. Gill accepted money on at least eight occasions. He was one head in a hydra-like influence network whose scale was unknown. There were connections to party representatives inside multiple EU states, among them Poland, Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, Slovakia and Bulgaria.

There were numerous players on the Russian side. Volosyhn was, London alleged, an undercover Kremlin asset. He had close ties with Putin’s old spy agency, US officials added, labelling him an FSB “pawn”. (Voloshyn denies the allegations.)

According to Czech intelligence, members of his immediate circle were close to the FSB’s Fifth Directorate, the organisation’s “foreign division”, responsible for Ukraine and other former Soviet states.

Voloshyn’s wife, Nadia Borodi, who went under the pseudo­nym Sass, was also a TV journalist. Both of them worked at 112 Ukraine and News One, stations that were owned by an associate of Viktor Medvedchuk – the V of Gill’s messages. Medvedchuk was a long-time Kremlin agent and Ukraine’s leading pro-Russian figure; Putin is a friend of his and god­father to Medvedchuk’s younger daughter. In 2014 the Kremlin gifted Medvedchuk a Russian oil refinery, used to fund his media empire inside Ukraine.

It was true that Medvedchuk’s TV channels were under sustained government pressure, as Gill claimed. But this was unsurprising: they functioned as Moscow mouthpieces, at a time when Ukraine was under existential attack. Medvedchuk provided funds for covert Russian activity; Voloshyn organised things. He would become a deputy in Ukraine’s parliament, the rada, for Medvedchuk’s political party, the Opposition Bloc, a role that made his European trips official.

Voloshyn cultivated Gill using KGB methods. There was flattery and expressions of friendship, similar to the techniques used on Trump in the 1980s by the Soviet ambassador. Gill was invited to visit Kyiv and the Moldovan capital, Chişinău. On top of expenses-paid foreign tours, there were bungs in euros and dollars – an incentive for someone with Gill’s troubled financial history. Voloshyn typically handed over €5,000. In total Gill appears to have received £40,000. In his messages, Voloshyn hints at these transactions. He presents himself as a benevolent Santa, bringing “gift cards”, “small grants” and “souvenirs”.

voloshyn: I’ve received as promised x-mas gifts and requested five more postcards for your kind help in the debate. I will later right [sic] you desirable messages we would like to hear there. For example it is advisable you directly called upon our president to defend TV stations from unacceptable political pressures.

gill: Excellent. That’s a great angle.

voloshyn: The budget and project is confirmed by V … I will get promised gift cards after the debate and your speech. V always delivers if he promises.

As the conversation shows, Voloshyn was writing Gill’s speeches. The relationship was that of ghostwriter and “author”, ventriloquist and dummy. It was Voloshyn who typed the text in which Gill complained – ironically enough – of undemocratic practices. On 7 December 2018, Voloshyn sent over a draft. At lunchtime on the day of the plenary session he WhatsApped an updated version that included the telltale reference to “radicals”.

The scheme was ingenious. Voloshyn surreptitiously paid Gill to parrot Russian narratives in the European parliament; Gill then repeated the same scripted points to a TV crew from 112 Ukraine who had been sent to Strasbourg and Brussels. Voloshyn’s partner, Sass, conducted the interviews outside the media wall of the Louise Weiss building, and the channel then broadcast Gill’s “concerns” to a Ukrainian and Russian audience. It was a neat little validation loop, helmed by a husband-­and-­wife team, which gave Russian disinformation a sheen of democratic legitimacy.

The speeches were chameleonic. Voloshyn used the language of human rights and European values to advance anti-democratic, imperial Russian objectives. In reality, the Ukrainian government’s response was understandable. It had nothing to do with freedom of speech; rather, it was a national security measure to combat hostile propaganda.

In May 2018, Gill travelled to Ukraine to attend a Victory Day parade in the city of Dnipro, led by the Opposition Bloc’s candidate for mayor. Five months later, ahead of the Strasbourg session, he returned to Kyiv, with Voloshyn booking his tickets and collecting him at 1 am from the capital’s Boryspil airport. Coburn and Arnott came too, and the three Ukip MEPs toured 112’s studios and gave interviews to Sass. Gill and Coburn agreed to join 112’s new “international board”, alongside Voloshyn.

Thereafter, Gill acted as Voloshyn’s accomplice and fixer. In February 2019, criminal proceedings were launched against Medvedchuk for treason. Voloshyn asked Gill for a “pointed” comment that referred to the case as “political persecution”. Could Gill find two other MEPs who would say the same thing? Reporters from 112 could be sent at short notice with a camera. There would be a fee, naturally.

voloshyn: I will get you a certain reward for it.

gill: No problem. Let me know where and when. Also give me a bit of background as to what to say.

voloshyn: Definitely. I will write everything.

Gill met the journalists and took them into the parliament building.

voloshyn: Thank you so much. It is really important!!! 5k is confirmed.

gill: [an hour later] All done.

voloshyn: You are a really great friend!!! Sorry for burdening you with that on an already very busy day.

Throughout the cold war, the KGB looked for secret sources inside European far-left groups, particularly in Italy and France, where the communists enjoyed support. 

Russia’s modern spy agencies still used leftwing actors, but under Putin the main vector of political influence shifted to the populist, anti-EU and anti-migrant far right. Many of its supporters in Europe expressed sympathy towards Moscow and disliked Kyiv. As with Maga in the US, there was an ideological overlap between British Eurosceptics and the Russian government. Both wanted to undermine the EU, its institutions and its leadership. The Kremlin supported Brexit, seeing it as an instrument that would weaken Europe and divide British society.

Wittingly or not, paid or unpaid, Ukip appeared happy to do Moscow’s bidding. Between 2010 and 2014 Farage appeared at least 17 times on RT. He made no criticism of Russian authoritarianism and claimed Europe was governed not by elected democracies, but ‘“by the worst people we have seen in Europe since 1945”. Farage said he admired Putin, “not as a human being but an operator”, and repeated the claim that Nato’s “ever eastward expansion” had provoked Putin’s war. He qualified this by adding: “Of course it’s his fault.”  Gill was another RT guest.

It was in this context that eight British MEPs appeared on 112, spouting Voloshyn’s talking points. They were elected members of Ukip and its successor, the Brexit party. Among them were Coburn, Arnott and William Dartmouth, a British life peer and MEP for South West England. They were joined by German MEP Arne Gericke and French MEP Nicolas Bay, the latter a member of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally. (It is not suggested that the above committed criminal acts or knew that Gill was taking bribes.)

Farage says he knew nothing of Gill’s criminal activities or his ties with Moscow. Nevertheless, these were strange goings-on, with Russian emissaries warmly received at the doors of the Ukip delegation’s workplace. Gill would go on to lead Reform, Farage’s current political party, in Wales. The symbiosis between Reform and Russia raised a question: why would a pro-British, pro-independence organisation collaborate with the Russians?

Gill served as Russia’s loyal proxy, wooing fellow MEPs over dinner to give anti-Ukraine commentary. When someone fired a grenade at 112’s Kyiv office, Gill submitted an urgent question, demanding that Kyiv carry out a full investigation into the attack. At Voloshyn’s direction, he called for Medvedchuk to play a central role in negotiations with Russia and complained that Zelenskyy, the new president, was blocking peace talks.

In July 2019, Voloshyn messaged Gill with another ask: might he host a roundtable for Medvedchuk in Brussels? The Ukrainian politician was keen to present his “peace plan” to European deputies. Medvedchuk would hold a further conference in the French senate to promote his ideas, before travelling to see Putin in St Petersburg, with a later event in the Bundestag.

Voloshyn asked Gill to book a “big nice room” and to bring friends from the Brexit party. Gill promised to “drag a few in to attend”. As usual, there would be compensation. Voloshyn said he had failed to locate a “serious number” of British pounds in Kyiv and asked if $13,000 would be alright? Gill replied: “That should be fine – bring later.” The fee for the MEP’s assistance was “4K in Euro notes”.

Medvedchuk’s “peace plan” would see Ukraine returned to Russia – a restoration of how things once were. It envisaged a “political, cultural and economic union” between the two countries. The occupied areas of the Donbas would remain under Russian control. After visiting Brussels, Medvedchuk told Putin that European MEPs liked his proposal. “The involvement of European partners is a very positive thing,” Putin observed.

Voloshyn’s arrangement with Gill ended in January 2020, when the UK departed from the EU and he stopped being an MEP. There was a last payment of $5,000 and €5,000  after Gill visited Ukraine as an “election observer”, one of a roster of foreign politicians brought into the country by Voloshyn to support the Opposition Bloc.

The bribes would have stayed undetected were it not for the fact that Voloshyn made an uncharacteristic error. In July 2021 he went to America, landing at Dulles international airport in DC. The FBI pulled him from the arrivals queue. They interrogated him for three hours and confiscated his phone. The agency saw Voloshyn’s chats with Gill – many hundreds of messages – and passed them on to British counter-terrorism police.

Gill was stopped two months later at Manchester airport, where he was about to board a flight to Moscow. He was due to take part in a Kremlin forum on voting and cryptocurrency. Officers seized his phone. At his home in Anglesey they found around €5,000 and a similar amount in dollars, rolled up in rubber bands. The rest of the cash was never discovered. In police interviews Gill answered “no comment” to questions.

He refused to explain, then and subsequently, why he took Moscow’s gold. Was it simple greed? Or did he believe in the cause?

After his Washington pull-aside, Voloshyn became more cautious about travelling abroad, describing his encounter with the FBI as unpleasant. In autumn 2021, as Russia began its military build-up on Ukraine’s borders, Sass made plans to visit London. The occasion was an event at the Frontline Club on – what else? – freedom of speech in Ukraine. MI5 had acquired Voloshyn’s WhatsApp chats with Gill and refused her a visa.

Before the invasion, Voloshyn left Ukraine with his family, telling me he was in Belgrade, "consulting with Serbian parliamentarians". The city is well known as a Russian intelligence hub.

The same month, his public activities came to an end. The US Treasury sanctioned him for working with Russian actors “to undermine Ukrainian government officials and advocate on behalf of Russia”. In London, a note was circulated to MPs. It warned that Voloshyn was targeting them in support of “Russian state objectives”. The aim was to “gather information, exert influence and disseminate disinformation”.

The Kremlin’s plan for Ukraine could be imagined. According to the Biden administration, Voloshyn was at the heart of an operation to bring it to fruition, working with Russian intelligence on efforts to “take over the Ukrainian government” and control critical infrastructure. After occupying Kyiv, it said, a new pro-Russian “peace party” would emerge, and Medvedchuk would become president. In this scenario, Voloshyn might run the foreign ministry, a spokesperson for a puppet regime. Medvedchuk had privately assured Putin that Ukrainians would support a Russian takeover. They didn’t. The oligarch was arrested while trying to flee and charged with high treason.

A group of protesters holding blue and yellow Ukrainian flags stood outside the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court. A few reporters were chatting with them. Other scribes milled around the building’s entrance. 

Suddenly, a lanky figure wearing a long grey woollen coat appeared in the street. The hacks broke off their interviews and legged after him, with the BBC leading the way. The man was Nathan Gill. The demonstrators broke into a ragged chant of “What about Farage?” as Gill walked briskly into the Old Bailey.

It had taken three and a half years for his case to reach court. The delay was unexplained and coincided with Reform’s rapid political rise. In 2025 the Crown Prosecution Service finally charged him with eight counts of conspiracy to commit bribery. The indictment said he and Voloshyn had “conspired together and with other”’ for Gill “to accept financial advantage, namely quantities of money in cash”. These bribes had caused “improper performance” of his elected duties.

There was no sign of Gill’s co-accused. Voloshyn was beyond the reach of British justice, having relocated to Minsk and Moscow. Not that he could come back anyway: the UK had imposed a travel ban on Voloshyn and sanctioned him. At home in Ukraine, the authorities charged him with treason.

Voloshyn’s patron Medvedchuk, meanwhile, was in Russia, following a brief stint behind bars in Ukraine. In 2022, in a prisoner exchange, Putin swapped him for a number of Azov regiment commanders captured when Russia occupied Mariupol. The oligarch’s assets were sold: property, factories, a yacht and luxury watches, including one with the Kremlin embossed in gold on the dial.

Gill reappeared in court number one, seated inside a large wood-and-glass box. There was no trial; two months prior, Gill had changed his plea from not guilty to guilty. The hearing would determine his punishment. The judge, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb, walked into court, a solemn figure in a red robe and wig. Gill stood up and confirmed his name. The counter-terrorism detectives who had investigated the case, following the money from Kyiv to Strasbourg, sat behind him.

The judge was known for her brisk, no-nonsense style. And so it proved. Passing judgment, she reminded Gill of the European parliament’s code of conduct. It said that members must be guided by principles: disinterest, integrity, transparency, diligence, honesty, accountability, and respect for parliamentary dignity and reputation. Gill, she suggested, had trampled over all of these. His offences included utilising “scripted material presented as your own” and “orchestrating the involvement of other MEPs”. What made his crimes worse, she said, was the fact that they were persistent, rather than an isolated lapse of judgment. They did profound harm to the European parliament’s integrity, compromising its dealings with Russia, a “persistently hostile state”.

Gill listened, expressionless. The judge noted that he had betrayed a basic principle on which democracy relies: that those in public office exercise self-direction or honest, independent judgment. She concluded: “When you say what someone has paid you to say, you are not speaking with sincerity. If it were your genuine opinion, you would not need to be paid for saying it. Whether or not you believed any of what you said at the behest of Voloshyn and Medvedchuk, allowing money to corrupt your moral compass constitutes a grave betrayal of the trust vested in you by the electorate.”

She jailed him for 10 and a half years, which was at the upper end of what most observers had expected. He would be eligible for release after serving half of his term. Gill offered no reaction. A guard escorted him from the glass dock, down steps that led into the bowels of the Old Bailey. He would not emerge as a free man for some time.

It was a dramatic fall, one of the most spectacular in recent European politics. The proof of his guilt was extensive, and yet several persons were missing: the shadowy “others” from the indictment, some of them undoubtedly living abroad. How extensive was this spy ring? Were there other members of Gill’s hard-right outfit whose connections to Russia had not yet been fully exposed? And what about MEPs from other countries?

The academic and writer Anton Shekhovtsov stumbled across Gill while researching a Polish pro-Russian activist, Janusz Niedźwiecki, who was arrested in 2021 on charges of spying for Moscow. Niedźwiecki and Voloshyn had arranged Gill’s Ukraine trips. “I presume Gill is not the only politician who took bribes, but he is the one who got caught. The affair is only the tip of the iceberg in a broader web of influence operations,” Shekhovtsov said.

In the UK, the grubby Gill story was embarrassing for Reform, which has ambitions to replace Labour as the next party of government. Farage dismissed Gill as a single “bad apple”. He said he had no knowledge of his ex-colleague’s “shameful activities” and condemned them “in every possible way”. Gill’s conduct was treasonous and unforgivable, the party said, casting the former MEP as a marginal figure.

Sources, however, said that Gill had coordinated closely with Farage. There were photos of them together at campaign events in Wales, in the towns of Pontypool and Buckley, and on a battle bus. They had shared adjoining offices in Strasbourg. Gill was described as Farage’s “enforcer”. One former Ukip MEP from that time told the Guardian: “Gill was in the thick of organising. He was the right-hand version of Farage.”

The affair prompted calls for a wider investigation into Russian interference in British politics, something successive prime ministers, including Boris Johnson, had flatly refused to do. Keir Starmer, whose Labour party was 15 points behind Reform in the opinion polls when Gill was sentenced, urged Farage to examine the party’s Kremlin connections. 

Farage had questions to answer, Starmer said. How was it possible that one of his colleagues had been able to rise up the ranks while taking money to spout pro-Russian nonsense?

This was a handy attack line for Labour, at a time when the British government was seen to be struggling in many policy areas. It said Reform’s much-vaunted patriotism was a sham. In truth, Farage’s loyalties lay with outside powers, Downing Street alleged. One was the Russian Federation, whose cash Gill had taken; another was Trump’s America, a country that considered the Kremlin an ally and Europe an adversary.

The journalistic method when covering legal proceedings is to approach all sides for comment. Voloshyn’s Ukrainian mobile number no longer worked, so I wrote him an email. His reply, as I had expected, was furious and indignant. And full of denials. “That’s a very sad story of a decent and good man falling victim to the geopolitical rivalry. I assure you Nathan Gill committed nothing wrong. At least nothing deliberately targeted against the interests of the UK,” he replied.

Voloshyn accepted that Gill had acted on behalf of Medvedchuk’s channels, but the “very humble” payments he received were media appearance fees, not bribes, he said. I pointed out that the BBC typically pays £40 for an interview, considerably less than €5,000. And what about the “gift cards”? Voloshyn claimed these were actual Yuletide presents. “We were real friends with Nathan. He even met my mom once occasionally in Kiev,” he replied, using the Russian spelling of Kyiv.

It was unclear if Voloshyn believed his exculpating version of events. It was an implausible account, in which he, Gill and Russian intelligence had been falsely accused, the latest victims of MI6 and a sinister British state. He quoted a popular saying from a 1970s Soviet crime drama: don’t look for a black cat in a dark room. In other words, nothing to see here. “I am a man of convictions, not of shadow lucrative dealings,” he insisted.

Was he trying to convince me? Or were the emails composed knowing that the FSB and others in Moscow would surely read them? Voloshyn used his pen and his talent in the service of a regime that was murdering his fellow Ukrainians. There were no words of comfort for them.

This is an edited extract from Betrayal by Luke Harding to be published by Guardian Faber on 27 August (RRP £20; to order at a discount go to the Nerve Bookshop)

Luke will be in conversation with the Nerve’s Carole Cadwalladr at the Frontline Club, London W2, on 21 September. A limited number of tickets are available for Nerve members at a reduced price of £5. The discount code is available to members in the newsletter of Friday 21 August