Nigel Farage and Nathan Gill pictured together, clockwise from top left: at the European Parliament, 2019; at EU headquarters in Brussels, 2016; in Brussels after a key vote on the Brexit agreement, 2020; at a vape shop in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, 2019 and at the Senedd, Cardiff Bay, 2019. Photographs: Getty Images
Two weeks ago, Nathan Gill, an ex-MEP and former leader of Nigel Farage’s Reform party in Wales, pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery.
Gill has admitted to taking financial inducements to make speeches and statements that advanced Putin’s interests in Ukraine from Oleh Voloshyn, a man the US government describes as an “FSB pawn”. Gill will be sentenced in November.
On Friday, campaigning in Caerphilly, where Reform is hoping to win a seat in a Senedd (Welsh national assembly) byelection later this month, Farage was faced with an unusual scenario: uncomfortable questions. In response to BBC reporters, he said he was “shocked”. Gill was, as far as he knew, a “God-fearing Christian”.
The BBC’s report continues: “Asked if he knew about Gill making pro-Russian statements, Farage said: ‘I didn't know anything about it.’”
To be fair to Farage, you can understand his confusion. Gill’s pro-Kremlin speeches are almost indistinguishable from those made by any number of other Ukip, Brexit party or now Reform politicians, including Nigel Farage. In the EU parliament in 2014, for example, Farage described Ukraine’s popular uprising against a pro-Russian government as “a coup d’etat”. And even after Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he was spouting off about the EU’s responsibility for “poking the Russian bear”.
There’s no suggestion that Farage has taken any money from Russian sources; the intention here is to point out that there has been a lack of journalistic curiosity about a longstanding ideological alignment between Reform / Ukip and Putin’s government. And this lack of media curiosity continues even now there is cold, hard evidence of a financial channel from the Kremlin to a British politician, Gill, all while the UK government has repeatedly refused to act on evidence of Russia’s years-long campaign to infiltrate and influence UK politics.
Even the most cursory review of the facts reveals that Gill was part of a much bigger network – one responsible for subverting and destabilising democracies on two continents. I came home late on the day that the news about the charges against Gill broke in February, and it was a matter of minutes’ online research at my kitchen table to see how intimately connected he was to Russian intelligence operations against the US government and across Europe.
At that point, Gill had been charged and reporting restrictions were in place. I posted one photo of Farage with Ukrainian politician Oleh Voloshyn's wife online and left it at that.
Now, however, these facts can be reported. Facts about the man who was charged alongside Gill: Voloshyn, who Gill now admits paid him to make pro-Russian statements.
Voloshyn is not some small-time two-bit player. WhatsApp messages disclosed in court revealed Gill’s role in promoting a Ukraine “peace plan” advanced by one of Putin’s closest allies. Last week, Byline Times mapped these connections and Farage’s meetings with Voloshyn’s wife in the European parliament.
In 2022, the US government sanctioned Voloshyn. The charge sheet states that he “worked with Russian actors to undermine Ukrainian government officials and advocate on behalf of Russia”. But it then goes beyond that, stating: “Voloshyn also worked with … Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian national with ties to Russian intelligence who was sanctioned for attempts to influence the US 2020 presidential election, to coordinate passing on information to influence US elections at the behest of Russia.”
Ukrainian opposition MP Oleh Voloshyn casts his vote at a sitting of parliament in Kyiv, September 2020. Photograph: Hennadii Minchenko/ Ukrinform/Getty Images
Since 2016, when I began investigating Russia’s links to key political figures in the US and UK, I have carried an entire Marvel-like universe of interconnected characters in my head. Yet it’s amazing how often some of them keep popping back up. Konstantin Kilimnik is one of those.
After sanctioning Kilimnik in 2021, the US government offered a $250,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. At that point he had returned to Moscow. And yet here he is again, in 2025. This time, two degrees of separation from my hometown, Cardiff, in Wales, in apparent ideological lockstep with the man now known to have bribed a British politician.
Because before he was an MEP, Nathan Gill was a member of the Senedd, the Welsh national assembly. In 2016, Ukip recorded an unexpected success in the elections, gaining seven seats. And I paid a visit to Cardiff to investigate how a political party rooted in English nationalism had made such dramatic inroads in Wales.
I tried to interview Gill, but he refused to talk to me. He ignored multiple emails. Just months later, I would embark on an investigation into Brexit, Trump and the data firm Cambridge Analytica. What I could never have predicted is that, nine years on, Gill and that story would crash directly into one other.
It’s hard to overstate Kilimnik’s importance in the various US investigations into Trump’s relationship to the Kremlin. This isn’t speculation: it’s all set down in a 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report. That report details how the Trump campaign passed sensitive campaign polling data to a Russian intelligence agent: Konstantin Kilimnik. And the data? It came from Cambridge Analytica.
It was data that would have been a vital asset for any online influence campaign. In 2019, I took part in a panel talk in Los Angeles with Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator from California who was then chair of the House Intelligence Committee. He called the passing of data from the Trump campaign to Kilimnik the closest evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
Schiff's efforts to expose Russia's role in destabilising US elections has now put him in Trump's sights. The Washington Post reported yesterday that he fears he may be indicted within a matter of weeks on trumped-up charges of mortgage fraud.The president views him as one of the main perpetrators of the “Russia hoax” – Trump’s term for the mountainous evidence of Russia’s interference in US politics.
Only slightly higher than him on the president's shitlist is James Comey, the former director of the FBI who was dismissed by Trump in 2017 while he was pursuing an investigation into Russia election interference. This week, America was shocked to see Comey appearing in court facing charges of lying to Congress and the obstruction of justice.
Comey is a public official who, with great integrity, tried to uphold the rule of law. Most of the facts that we know about Russia’s information warfare against the west we have discovered because the US government did what the UK government has failed to do: it spent years carrying out official investigations into the Russian intelligence networks that repeatedly sought to destabilise elections.
James Comey, New York City, May 20, 2025. Photograph: Patricia Schlein/Getty Images
Indicting Comey is one of the most blood-chilling acts of Trump’s administration so far. It’s proved what many people had feared: that the Department of Justice is seemingly being turned into a Trump-controlled weapon to use against his enemies and to settle historical debts.
For those who live in Britain, this may all seem a purely American problem. But it’s not. I feel it, perhaps more than most, because I haven’t just reported on alleged Russian links to UK politics, I’ve lived it, High Court trial and all.
American friends of mine, journalists and academics who published investigative articles about Trump’s Russian connections, are spooked. They’re making contingency flight plans in case they need to leave. Some have already left.
Those words – “Russia hoax” – aren’t confined to America. Like so much else, they’ve spread here too. In a platform speech at the Reform party conference last year, Farage mentioned me as “a Guardian journalist” and the “Russia hoax” in the same sentence.
I can’t overstate the urgency of the moment we are in. And the existential risk of not acting now. A fortnight ago, the former head of MI5 said that Britain may already be at war with Russia. Eliza Manningham-Buller, as sober and establishment a figure as you could ask for, describes it as “a different type of war” but a war nonetheless. “The hostility, the cyber-attacks, the physical attacks, the intelligence work is extensive.”
Nathan Gill isn’t some postscript to a minor episode of recent British history. He’s a key to understanding the scale and sophistication of the threat against us, a network of pro-Russian actors that stretches not only across the Atlantic but Europe too.
A network against which the UK government and intelligence services have wilfully turned a blind eye. That's what MPs from parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee said when they published the long-delayed 2020 Russia Report. The government had "actively avoided looking for evidence", committee member Stewart Hosie said.
Speaking up, taking action, not turning a blind eye. These may have consequences. Just look at James Comey. But he stood tall in court this week. Whatever happens, he knows that he did his job. And, however chilling the months and years to come may be, that’s all the rest of us can do.
We just need our government to do the same.
Carole Cadwalladr is an award-winning investigative journalist and co-founder of the Nerve, a new platform for fearless, independent journalism. Read her recent report on potential conflict of interest around the funding of the UK’s Tony Blair Institute here
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