Politico: Russia Jamming GPS Signals Over Baltic Region

Russia regularly attacks NATO aircraft.

Aircraft flying over the Baltic region face GPS jamming incidents. Russia is blamed for these problems. It is reported by RBC-Ukraine with reference to Politico.

“The blackout episodes, known as GPS jamming, have been occurring regularly since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022,” the newspaper writes.

Politico clarifies that the interference is concentrated in Russia's Kaliningrad exclave.

“Russia is regularly attacking the aircraft, passengers, and sovereign territory of NATO countries,” said Dana Howard, president of the U.S.-based Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation.

She called these cases real threats and recalled how, during an accidental jamming in 2019, a passenger plane almost crashed into a mountain.

The EU's aviation safety agency is looking into the matter, but so far regulators have said GPS problems do not pose a danger to flights.

The GPS problem seems to be getting worse.

Cases of interference reported by pilots have been steadily increasing since January 2022. This is stated by the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation, which receives reports from pilots through its EVAIR voluntary incident reporting system.

“During the first two months of 2024, EVAIR recorded high increases in GPS outages reports. In absolute figures we received 985 GPS outages compared with 1,371 for the whole of 2023,” Eurocontrol said.

They added that there were almost seven times more incidents in the first two months of this year compared to the first two months of 2023.

It is not the first time that the Russian Federation has been accused of jamming GPS signals

In January, the Institute for the Study of War wrote that large-scale failures in the operation of GPS systems were recorded in Poland and the Baltic region. At that time, it was not ruled out that this was a consequence of the work of Russian electronic warfare systems (EW) in the region.

Estonia later accused Russia of being behind an increase in jamming of satellite signals used by airlines, smartphones and weapons systems in Eastern Europe.

And recently, Russia jammed the satellite signal of the aircraft of British Defence Minister Grant Shapps as it flew past Russian Kaliningrad.