The glamorous TV host, the web of influence and a mysterious trip to Moscow – inside the downfall of Reform’s disgraced MEP

The photo shows a scene that looks like any other TV political show: a blonde host in a sharp white suit is pictured alongside three male politician guests. So far, so ordinary. 

But six years after Nathan Gill, the former leader of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party in Wales, stepped in front of those studio cameras, that photo seems anything but ordinary. 

In February this year, Gill pleaded guilty to eight charges of accepting bribes and the photo offers a clue into the operations of the Kremlin spy ring that recruited him – a spy ring that spread its tentacles across Europe and into Britain. In particular, it shines a light on the role of the TV host seated next to Gill, a woman who usually goes by the name of Nadia Sass. 

Last week, the Nerve reported how Sass’s husband – Oleh Voloshyn, the man who bribed Gill – was linked to an FSB intelligence officer who attempted to subvert two US presidential elections.

This week, in part two of our investigation, we can reveal more about how the pair operated as a husband-and-wife team in contact not just with Gill but politicians across Europe, including two other MEPs, a member of the House of Lords and the Reform party’s leader, Nigel Farage. 

We also reveal – simultaneously with Byline Times – that Gill’s pro-Kremlin influencing didn’t end when he took the final bribe in 2019. When counter-terrorism officers intercepted Gill at Manchester airport in 2021, he was due the next day in Moscow and was apparently en route.

On Wednesday, the Gill affair was raised in parliament at prime minister’s questions, with Keir Starmer claiming that Nigel Farage had “serious questions to answer”. And Farage does. It is undeniable that Farage is entwined in the Gill affair. He was Gill’s boss for many years and his closest political ally. Though he is categorical that Gill was one “bad apple”. “I believe, 100 per cent, with all my heart, there’s nobody else,” he has said.

But Farage is not the only one who faces questions. So does the UK government, about the inexplicable delay it took the authorities to act against Gill given how much has been known about the Europe-wide ring and his involvement in it since at least 2021. 

Among those asking why it took the UK government so long to act is Anton Shekhovtsov, a political scientist and visiting professor at Central European University in Austria. Shekhovtsov published a comprehensive investigation into the spy ring back in 2021 and it’s thanks to this report that we know that Gill was not a lone actor or “bad apple”, as Farage called him. He was part of a network. The ring operated across Europe and was well known to intelligence services across multiple European countries. 

“I published my report, which included Gill and named two other Ukip MEPs, in 2021,” Shekhovtsov says. He did not include evidence of money changing hands but he did include comprehensive details of how Gill, alongside two other MEPs, had been courted and groomed by Kremlin agents of influence, including Nadia Sass. 

“All this information has been out there since 2021,” he says. “And, separately, the Polish authorities did their own investigation, and they charged Niedźwiecki in early 2021.” 

That’s Janusz Niedźwiecki, a Polish spy who is the main focus of the report and who was part of the network that groomed Gill, inviting him to dinner and on a trip (which Gill went on) to Ukraine. Niedźwiecki was charged with espionage by Polish authorities in May 2021. 

And even after arresting Gill and seizing the WhatsApp messages that show Voloshyn offered him bribes, the UK authorities took another three years to charge him. Three years in which the public knew none of this. Three years in which the UK government continued to refuse the parliamentary intelligence and security committee’s demand for an inquiry into Russian interference. Why?

In less than a week, Nathan Gill’s former assistant Llŷr Powell will be standing as a Reform candidate in a Welsh parliament byelection in the south Wales seat of Caerphilly.

Veteran Welsh political commentator Martin Shipton describes the election as a bellwether for the Reform party. Shipton is associate editor of the independent news site Nation Cymru, which in 2023 broke the story – based on Shekhovtsov’s report – of Gill’s relationship with the European spy ring.

Caerphilly matters, Shipton explains, because Wales is Reform’s next big target. “If Reform wins, it’s going to boost their chances of winning the Senedd next May.” And if they do, it will make the national Reform party flush with taxpayers’ cash, Shipton says. He also believes that it’s “farcical” to suggest that Powell doesn’t know “far more than he’s letting on”, and describes the campaign he’s running, which is targeting Ukrainian refugees in the community, as “disgraceful”. 

Powell was close to Gill, he says, though not as close as Gill was to Farage. “Gill was a total sycophant to Farage. He stood by Farage through thick and thin because, frankly, he’s not very bright.”

Shipton has followed Gill’s career for years, including his scandals – one involving a migrant hostel he owned in Hull – and his activities with the Mormon church, in which Gill was a bishop. It’s his view that Gill simply lacked the wits to have concocted the scheme alone. 

Farage has denied any knowledge of Gill’s pro-Russian influence activities, as has Powell. 

On the streets of Caerphilly, none of this is known because most of the UK media has turned a blind eye to the story – even though, in any other circumstance, it would be catnip to the tabloid press. Not least because of Voloshyn’s wife, who has been photographed with both Gill and Farage.

The arrest of Anna Chapman in 2010, a Russian agent who operated in the US and UK, led to weeks of salacious press coverage. And though Sass is a different sort of operator, she is as striking as Chapman.

The question is whether the UK press will finally take greater interest in this story now that the Nerve can reveal her Instagram account: @nadia_sass. It has remained under the radar until now, but she is a public figure, and it’s a smorgasbord of plunging bikini shots and tradwife stylings smattered with snaps of Sass and Voloshyn at glitzy events or on holiday. 

Sass has been described by a German news site as a Kremlin “agent of influence”, not a spy, but she is at least as important as her husband, Shekhovtsov says. “It would be wrong to call her a honeytrap. She was far more important than that.”

Sass is Mrs Oleh Voloshyn but she was born Nadia Borodi. Sass is the professional name she’s used in her career as a TV host and broadcast journalist working for think tanks and for channels including the pro-Kremlin Voice of Europe and Ukraine’s Channel 112. 

But then she is a woman wearing a number of different hats: wife, mother, broadcaster, social media influencer, and apparently key liaison in her husband’s mission to target and recruit politicians across Europe into the Kremlin’s information operations. 

It’s her husband, Voloshyn, whom the UK authorities charged alongside Gill. But Shekhovtsov says that she was equally significant to the Kremlin operation. “They were both equally involved and equally important.” 

It is from Voloshyn that Gill accepted eight bribes. According to the Crown Prosecution Service, the last of these was transferred by Voloshyn on 18 July 2019. That was the day after Sass posted the photo on her Instagram of her interviewing Gill for her politics show in the EU parliament. But her social accounts also reveal details of her relationships with politicians across Europe, apparently part of her tradecraft.

In one post, she messages back and forth with a far-right Italian politician, Stefano Valdegamberi (who was caught up in another Russian influence scandal), calling him a “dear friend”.

And she’s tagged in other politicians’ posts too. Maximilian Krah, a member of Germany’s far-right AfD, has a shot of himself posing with her in a formal gown with Voloshyn in black tie. Krah continued to meet Voloshyn and Sass right up to last November, dining with them shortly before meeting the former Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, in Sochi, Russia.

The only reason we know that she had some sort of relationship with Farage is because she herself posted photos of them together on X: the first in April 2024 and the second two weeks later, when Farage attended the NatCon conference in Brussels with pro-Russian politicians including Viktor Orbán. Farage was tagged into the posts and Shekhovtsov suggests she may have been showing off to her superiors. “They need to do this, you know: they need to report so they need to show that they are somehow important.”

A source we spoke to who worked with Ukip MEPs in Strasbourg revealed information that suggests Sass may have been of interest to the UK authorities. When the source was asked when he had last heard from Gill, he said that Gill had got in touch in 2021, shortly after his arrest. Gill told the source that the Metropolitan police would be coming to ask him questions. 

The police did pay the source a visit. He was shown a series of photos and asked if he recognised any of the individuals. He did. One of them was Sass. He’d seen her several times going in and out of Gill’s office. 

Shekhovtsov describes Sass as “very active” in Strasbourg, gaining access to politicians in her role as a broadcaster. One of her employers – Ukraine’s Channel 112 - was owned by Putin’s closest ally in Ukraine, Viktor Medvedchuk. Putin is godfather to Medvedchuk’s child and when Medvedchuk was caught trying to flee Ukraine and imprisoned for treason, Putin traded 215 prisoners in order to get him back. 

Medvedchuk is the man that Sass worked for and Voloshyn allegedly reported to. And it seems on at least one occasion they worked together on arrangements for Gill. The Nerve has seen multiple invitations that Gill received from pro-Kremlin officials and individuals in 2018, including airline tickets and travel plans that Gill disclosed and are on the EU parliament’s website. In one, Voloshyn emailed a member of Gill’s team to coordinate travel plans and the chain shows Sass forwarding Gill’s hotel details for his upcoming trip to Kyiv, including his Booking.com details.

In 2022 Voloshyn was sanctioned by both the UK and US government and in 2023 charged with high treason in Ukraine. Shortly afterwards the couple fled to Belarus.

Gill’s activities came to an end when he was charged with those eight counts of bribery. But his role in the Kremlin’s influencing operation continued long past the date of the last payment.

On 13 September 2021, he travelled from his home in north Wales to Manchester airport. It was a journey that Gill had done many times before. Manchester is the nearest international airport to his home in Anglesey and for years he’d commuted to Strasbourg in his role as an MEP.

But in September 2021, Gill was no longer an MEP. He had failed to win back a seat in the Welsh parliament and on this occasion, he was trying to fly out of the country. But counter-terrorism officers had other ideas. They were waiting for him. 

They stopped Gill under schedule 3 of the Counter-Terrorism and Borders Security Act – a section that requires suspicion of “hostile activity” on behalf of a foreign state or a threat to national security – and seized his mobile phone. They subsequently searched his home and removed other electronic devices.

According to the CPS charge sheet, it was on these that they found the evidence to charge him. And yet they didn’t. And that is one of the crucial questions that the government must now answer: why? 

We know that he was interviewed under caution in March 2022, but he was not charged until February of this year, a time lag that is part of the reason why the Great British public – including the voters of Caerphilly – know almost nothing about any of this.

The information being kept from the British public – and, given Gill’s guilty plea, that will no longer be aired in court – includes any detail of the involvement of other politicians, even though, as Shekhovtsov has detailed in his 2021 report, we know that at least two other MEPs were targeted and a member of the House of Lords. They travelled to Ukraine with Gill and Sass. 

We now know that when counter-terrorist officers intercepted him, Gill was scheduled to arrive in Moscow the next day, and was, apparently, en route. 

It’s pretty remarkable timing. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was just six months away and tensions between Russia and Nato were already stretched to breaking point. On the day Gill travelled to the airport, Putin was mounting a joint war game with Belarus that saw 200,000 troops on manoeuvres, the largest military exercise seen in Europe for 40 years. 

And on the next day, Gill was scheduled to attend a conference at Lomonosov University in Moscow. It was grandly titled: “Role of civil society in ensuring democratic standards for the organisation and conduct of elections”. And if the timing of the war games was coincidental, this certainly was not. 

On the last day of the conference, Russia was going to the polls in a nationwide election that would prompt protesters to take to the street claiming widespread voting fraud – votes that had been disappeared through electronic voting machines.

The conference was a whitewash. The Kremlin had gathered far-right politicians from across Europe and Africa to lend legitimacy to its stage-managed sham elections. And Gill was meant to be among them.

Putin maintains the spectacle of free elections while ensuring that they are anything but.

Last week, Nigel Farage attended a high-profile crypto conference in London. One of Reform’s proposals is to allow untraceable political donations by cryptocurrency. It would enable foreign actors and criminals to flood UK elections with dark money. 

The title of the talk that Gill never got to give? “The Same Technology That Gives Us Crypto Currencies Also Will Change the Way That We Vote”.

Let’s hope not. But it’s why, now, we finally need sunlight. Russia’s interference in UK politics is one of the murkiest episodes of recent British history. The 2021 Russian war games that coincided with Gill’s scheduled visit to Moscow gave Putin cover to move his troops west ahead of his invasion of Ukraine. Last month, he held those same war games again. Europe is on edge. We should be too. 

Additional research by Charlie Young

Carole Cadwalladr is an award-winning investigative journalist and co-founder of the Nerve, a new platform for fearless, independent journalism. The best way to experience the Nerve’s journalism is to subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter. This is free but we rely on funding from our members. Please sign up or upgrade to paid membership here

Main image: Nadia Sass with Nigel Farage (Instagram) and with Nathan Gill (Facebook).