Ping! An email arrives. It’s from Nadia Sass, the woman I wrote about last week who’s at the centre of a Russian spy scandal that should be rocking Britain but has so far been largely brushed under the carpet by our right-wing and/or indifferent media.
That may be about to change. This weekend saw the first major piece on the story behind the case in the Guardian (more on that below).
But to re-cap: Nadia Sass is the other half of Oleh Voloshyn, a Russian agent, sanctioned by the US, UK and EU, who the UK police charged earlier this year with bribery. He was accused of paying a UK politician undisclosed sums of money to make pro-Kremlin statements in the European parliament.
The politician – Nathan Gill – has now pleaded guilty to eight separate counts of bribery and is awaiting sentencing. And yet beyond court reports, there has been no coverage of the story despite Voloshyn’s seniority and network. US government documents state Voloshyn “acted at the direction of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB)”
I’ve written two pieces here and here for the new outlet I’ve set up with my former colleages, the Nerve, that investigated some of these links including to individuals centrally involved in attempting to subvert the 2016 and 2020 US elections. Last week, I focussed in on Voloshyn’s wife, Nadia Sass, and how she appeared to have worked with him as a husband-and-wife team to target and groom high-level politicians across Europe.
As a matter of course, I emailed Sass, to offer her a right to reply. And a few days later I got a response.
“Dear Carole,” she writes.
”When a student I used to believe in high standards of British media and the UK as a bulwark of freedom of expression and press. Since then this once well deserved fame has dramatically faded away. But it totally evaporated with UK media inventing a ridiculously artificial conspiracy theory involving your humble servant.
She then goes on to discuss – at length – a photo that we’d included in the article. This one:
“I hardly know Nigel Farage having exchanged a couple of phrases with him when I asked him for a photo at the EP entrance as thousands of other ladies do. Just because he is a celebrity and a handsome and stylish English gentleman.”
In fairness, Sass may have a point about the press. Nigel Farage rarely gets called a “handsome and stylish English gentleman” here and while I’d agree about the challenge to freedom of expression in this country, a case in point: my £1m libel trial for writing about the funder of Nigel Farage’s Brexit campaign and his relationship with Russian government officials. Still, though, we are some way ahead of Nadia Sass’s current home: Belarus.
She and Voloshyn fled to Minsk in early 2022 when he was charged with high treason and Sass now has a job on a Belarusian TV channel. (Belarus currently ranks 166th in the world for press freedom just ahead of close ally Russia at 171.)
But what’s most curious about this response is that I didn’t actually ask her about Nigel Farage.
My question to Sass was whether she had any response to being described as a “Kremlin agent of influence” in the European press. She didn’t respond to that allegation at all.
Instead, the second half of her email goes into another long explanation. Again, about Nigel Farage and specifically the second photo of him that she’d posted on social media.
“…Then having launched a small business trying to sell T-shirts with politically inspired cartoons I dared ask an assistant of one of British MEPs to pass Nigel a specially designed T-shirt for one simple reason: I wanted to use photo with him to promote my business in Facebook.”
(There’s no ready evidence of Sass’s t-shirt business on the internet but the t-shirt is still available via a US website that appears to have no connection to Sass.)
“That’s the whole story. What a crooked or perverted mind could have created out of it a large-scale conspiracy involving me, Kremlin and Reform UK that hardly existed even the moment that T-shirt was presented by a middleman to Nigel?! Only liberal media out of touch with reality and any professional or moral standards could have invented that.”
There’s no mention of Nathan Gill, no denial of being a “Kremlin agent of influence”, no mention of her husband’s activities. She ends by addressing my request for a telephone call:
“Given my disgust of any left-leaning media in the West that spares no efforts to stop the inevitable historic collapse of its globalist sponsors I have to reject any offer of interview. But definitely you are free to use my explanation of my extremely humble (if any at all) role in this story. Hopefully my name would not be anymore used in connection with Mr Farage whom I really don’t know personally.
Best regards, Nadia”
The timing
Last week, I wrote about the timing of Gill’s arrest in 2021 and the long long time it took the UK police to charge him – four years. Sass’s email to me and her singular focus on Nigel Farage has made me ponder some other questions of timing.
Namely, why she posted the photos of Farage in April 2024? This was long after Nathan Gill had been arrested. Was it a warning? A threat? A shot across the bows? Or just a friendly bit of nostalgia between people who are definitely not in any way friends?
The kraken awakes
My former employer, The Guardian, finally covered the story yesterday. It’s a solid account with some interesting snippets including from Oleh Voloshyn himself who claims that Gill just failed to declare his expenses properly, something that not even Gill is claiming, having already pleaded guilty.
‘Speaking to the Guardian via email, Voloshyn denied allegations made by the US and UK that he had acted at the direction of Russia’s FSB spy agency.
He insisted the payments – typically £4,000 or £5,000 each – were merely media appearance fees, rather than bribes. He described Gill as a “humble” father of five who was “definitely not rich” and was the “victim of a geopolitical conspiracy”.’
Journalism is additive. The more journalists working on a story, the more leads chased, the more facts surfaced, the more attention paid, the more, eventually, the truth will out. It’s a relief, frankly, that the Guardian is finally on the case.
But even now, it appears to have buried the lede. Back in 2018, during the period in which we know now that Voloshyn was making payments to Nathan Gill, he and Nadia made a trip to London, and among the usual tourist sites visited was also this one:
I don’t want to teach my former bosses how to suck eggs, but guys, this feels like a story! One that walked in through your actual fecking front door.
The book Sass is holding outside the Guardian’s offices is by friend and former colleague, Luke Harding. I don’t want to steal Luke’s thunder because he’s obviously got a fascinating story to tell but this seems to be a classic case of looking a gift horse in the mouth, the gift being an actual Russian spy and his wife.
Not least because if there’s one thing that Luke knows how to do, it’s tell a story. He wrote the book that Nadia Sass is holding A Very Expensive Poison, an excellent account of brutal killing of the former FSB spy and whistleblower, Alexander Litvinenko (which incidentally was also turned into a brilliant play by Lucy Prebble).
And Voloshyn makes a pretty gripping appearance in another of Luke’s books ‘Collusion’ in his role working alongside Paul Manafort in Kyiv for the former Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych.
This was before Manafort became Trump’s campaign manager but having followed strands of this story for nearly a decade, there’s almost an inevitability to how things circle back around to Russia/Ukraine.
Luke played a big part in Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring, the (number 1 hit) podcast I made earlier this year with my friend (& eagle-eyed spotter of the above pic) journalist, Peter Jukes, and producer Ruth Abrahams. That project was a crowdfunded labour of love that we undertook to try to disentangle the story of Russian interference in UK politics and bring it to a new audience with light and tone and music and drama.
And watching the way this story simply isn’t playing out in real time reinforces why we need these other ways of doing journalism because with the best will in the world, it just doesn’t work in the way we think it does any more.
Not least because so much of this story is being researched and told outside mainstream journalism: not just via the Nerve and Peter’s outlet, Byline Times, but because the Twitter account, @ReformExposed was among the first on the case in collating the clips of other Brexit MEPs making the same Kremlin propaganda points. And it was Zack Polanski, the new leader of the Green Party, who lit up Twitter when he challenged a Reform spokesdude about the case on BBC’s Question Time.
Luke wrote this last night on social media:
“I’ve known Voloshyn from when he worked as press attache at the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow and met him and his wife Nadia Sass in 2018 when they visited London.’
Anyway, as light encouragement for someone to commission that story and for the rest of the press to belatedly join in, I’m posting, without comment, another pic from Sass’s Instagram.
Facing War
We are at war with Russia. Or at least Russia is at war with us. We just remain in denial, a dangerous state of ignorance. That’s why this story matters. And that’s why we’re on borrowed time to wake up and realise it.
I’m writing this because British politics went full horseshoe this week: the leader of the UK’s newest leftwing party spouted lines about Ukraine and NATO that could have been written by Nigel Farage. “Both siding” Russia and Ukraine is an obscenity and NATO is our best and only chance of containing Russia. It’s an alliance that’s already hanging by a thread given Trump’s views and what is definitely not needed right now are the left-wing tankies giving him cover.
This was brought home to me by a gripping new documentary that I saw a couple of weeks ago but has stayed with me. It’s called ‘Facing War’ and it follows Jens Stoltenberg in his final year as Secretary General of NATO. If that sounds dull but worthy, I’d have said exactly the same.
I dragged out a friend to come with me and as the lights went down, I whispered, “Don’t blame me if it’s shit.” “Think Ibsen,” he said. And then it began and I was immediately hooked.
A Norwegian filmmaker, Tommy Gulliksen, had managed to persuade NATO to let him have complete access to Stoltenberg and his team and to every single head of government whom Stoltenberg met during his momentous last year in office, from 2023 to 2024.
And somehow from hundreds of hours of indescribably boring meetings, Gulliksen has crafted an incredibly gripping narrative of what is revealed to be a high-stakes thriller.
Very few documentaries are made this way through intimate observation of their subjects and up-close real-time reportage and what’s incredible in Facing War is that you get to be in the room with Stoltenberg as he deals with the nail-biting minutiae of vast, consequential geopolitical hot potatoes.
It’s his job to persuade Viktor Orbán – aka Putin’s man in Europe – and Recep Tayyib Erdogan in Turkey to admit both Sweden and Finland into the alliance. And to ensure that Ukraine gets the weapons it needs even as the US Congress refuses to release funds.
Judging from the reactions of some of the filmmakers in the audience – some of whom are Academy Awards and BAFTA voters – ‘Facing War’ has a good chance of a nomination. But, like so many great films being made now, it hasn’t yet got distribution.
It’s on at London’s Bertha DocHouse for the next three nights but if you’re interested in why, in the US in particular, so many films simply aren’t finding buyers or in a special screening of this, do keep tabs on the Nerve’s website. We’ll have some news on that soon.
Anyway, as someone with notoriously underpowered “soft power” skills, I found myself mesmerised by Jens Stoltenberg’s negotiating tactics. His mastery of the dark arts of political flirtation and seduction would surely beat that of any Russian spy’s. I still don’t quite understand how he got Viktor Orbán over the line – witchcraft? – but my big takeaway is that you don’t need a ‘yes’, you just have to do everything you can to avoid a ‘no. A lesson for life and thank you for your service, Jens.
A note on what I’m doing and why. I’m an investigative journalist who worked for the Guardian for 20 years latterly investigating the intersection of politics and technology that included 2018’s exposé of the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal. The opaque and unaccountable Silicon Valley companies that facilitated both Brexit and Trump are now key players in an accelerating global axis of autocracy. I believe this is a new form and type of power that I’m committed to keep on exposing: Broligarchy.
This post has been syndicated from How to Survive the Broligarchy, where it was published under this address.