LONDON — Nathan Gill, 52, the former leader of Reform UK in Wales and a former Member of the European Parliament, was jailed for 10.5 years at the Old Bailey on Friday after pleading guilty to eight bribery offenses connected to pro-Russian messaging in Brussels and on Ukrainian television. The momentous sentence topped off a years-long investigation into cash-for-speech tactics linked to the Kremlin, Nov. 21, 2025.
Prosecutors said Nathan Gill had taken about £40,000 between December 2018 and July 2019 from former Ukrainian MP Oleg Voloshyn in return for pro-Russia speeches, parliamentary motions, and media appearances that portrayed Ukraine’s government as an opponent of free speech and a friend of “independent” broadcasters.
A Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command investigation seized on WhatsApp messages in which payments were referred to as “Xmas gifts” or “postcards”, and found eight instances where Gill agreed to parrot scripts almost verbatim that Voloshyn provided her in the European Parliament and on Ukrainian TV.
The material was discovered when he was stopped by officers at Manchester Airport in September 2021 while attempting to fly to Moscow, and they seized his phone, computers, and thousands of euros and dollars in cash. These items were later returned. The case sent “a clear message that any attempts by foreign authors to bribe individuals in the UK will not be tolerated,” Commander Dominic Murphy said.
During her sentencing remarks, Mrs Justice Bobbie Cheema-Grubb told the former MEP that he had “undermined” the European Parliament and made “a gross betrayal of trust placed in you by that electorate”, receiving money to further Russia’s interests while he was supposed to be acting as their elected representative.
Evidence presented in court heard that Nathan Gill had not only made his own interventions but also recruited fellow Eurosceptic MEPs to conduct coordinated interviews with Kyiv-based channel 112 Ukraine, for which he was paid €5,000 for one set of appearances and for repeating the amplification on sister station NewsOne.
Both channels later became the cornerstone of Viktor Medvedchuk’s media empire. Long before Russia’s full-scale invasion, several journalists documented that the pro-Russian politician was in essence hijacking 112 Ukraine and NewsOne via fronts like Taras Kozak, according to a 2018 investigation by The Kyiv Post.
Early in 2021, the Ukrainian authorities began to cut off the channels, saying they were tools of Russian information warfare. Zelensky’s administration slapped sanctions on 112 Ukraine, NewsOne, and ZIK as supposedly Kremlin-tied broadcasters, in an Atlantic Council brief and analyzed in a 2021 Human Rights Watch report, which marked a free speech dilemma.
Medvedchuk himself was later charged with treason in Ukraine and exchanged for Ukrainian captives in Russia. Money from his business and media networks eventually helped finance payments to Gill, officials said, connecting the London bribery case directly to a propaganda machine assembled around those television channels.
Nathan Gill, who was elected to the European Parliament with the UK Independence Party in 2014 before joining Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party and then leading Reform UK in Wales, had previously pleaded guilty in September. An October analysis in The Moscow Times contended that his case illustrated how Russian interlocutors were targeting fringe European politicians long before the full-scale invasion.
Reform UK said Gill’s action had been “reprehensible, treasonous and unforgivable” and welcomed the sentence, with Labour figures calling on Farage to hold an independent inquiry into any continuing Russian links within his party. Police say that other MEPs who regurgitated similar talking points were not believed to have taken bribes, but cautioned that the playbook could be recycled.
For Ukraine, the conviction illustrates how long-festering influence operations linked to Medvedchuk penetrated Western politics and sought to legitimize Kremlin talking points. The imprisonment of Nathan Gill is a clear warning that there are still serious consequences for selling access and speeches to foreign paymasters – in Britain, or in the European Parliament – not just exclusion from public service but double-digit prison sentences.”
