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Strache, dressed casually in a slightly ratty T-shirt and jeans, seemed enthusiastic – mostly about the proposal, but also about the woman herself. "Are you kidding? She's hot," he said, with a Viennese lilt.

The party's affinity for Russia also played a decisive role in the Ibiza meeting. Johann "Joschi" Gudenus, who translated for the purported Russian, has taken courses at a university in Moscow. The son of a former FPÖ politician and a convicted Holocaust denier, he has been part of the right-wing camp since his youth. Indeed, Gudenus is considered one of the most important intermediaries between the FPÖ and Russia. He even accepted an invitation to visit Grozny from the violent Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, as well as one from the Russian occupiers of Crimea. In Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior, he railed against the EU, describing it as a refuge for the "homosexual lobby."
Strache sees "Joschi" as something of a right-hand man. The men have been close for years: In Vandalia, a Viennese student fraternity, Strache was Gudenus' pledge father. Now Strache views Gudenus as his man for Russia and he's the one who engineered the meeting with Strache in the villa.
The young FPÖ official had been hearing good things about the purported Russian for quite some time. She was supposedly interested in buying property in Austria and Gudenus' family owns farmland in Lower Austria. So they met in Vienna. In the Ibiza video, Gudenus could be heard saying that the woman had offered to pay five times what the property is worth. But it was during the conversation in Vienna that the plan for a bigger scheme apparently emerged.
In one of the videos, Strache said that Austria should orient itself toward the Visegrád Group in the future, referring to the informal alliance of Eastern European EU members, a group comprised of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. He said the country needs to "open itself very strongly towards the East," towards Russia. "We have decadence in the West," said Strache, "but in the East people are normal."
The FPÖ head said he had been in Moscow on many occasions, noting that he had met with Putin advisors over 10 years ago and made plans for "how we can work together strategically." He also said that Serbia is a fantastic country and that several of his friends had invested heavily there, and that he was almost as beloved in the polls there as Putin.
Beyond Strache's self-aggrandizing proclamations, the central topic of the meeting was money -- and how the FPÖ could be financially supported. Strache told the purported Russian how she could bypass legal hurdles to donate money to the FPÖ. If the model that Strache described actually exists, it would be a clear-cut case of illegal party financing.