Is Putin “blinding” civilian aircraft with an electronic warfare system in Kaliningrad?

Initially, it was treated as a “mystery”. In the Baltic region, during the two days of March 24-25, 1,614 planes, most of them civil, reported interference with their GPS signal. Since 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, this was a phenomenon that was not uncommon. However, the phenomenon intensified to such an extent recently that the pilots flying in the area were closing the GPS their.

For these interferences that spread throughout Eastern Europe, an electronic warfare system – jammers – that Russia maintains in its region is “blamed” Kaliningradwhere there is one of the country’s largest and most important naval bases.

Using public flight log files, researchers from GPSJAM.org and the British newspaper The Sun they found that 46,000 aircraft reported satellite navigation problems while in the Baltic region between August 2023 and March 2024. Problems were also reported in the south-eastern Mediterranean, but also in the Middle East. Authorities in a number of countries are confident that Russia is using systems to jam and spoof the aircraft’s geolocation systems. This, in addition to creating an atmosphere of fear for the civil aviation crews who experience it, also causes… confusion, as the GPS shows incorrect coordinates. In short, crews may think they are somewhere else than their actual location. They may see themselves flying in a different location, at a different height and at a different speed than their actual figures. And this may also hide other risks: For example, a civilian aircraft entering Russian airspace… It seems that more flights carrying British tourists to and from their vacation spots. In total, at least 2,309 Ryanair, 1,368 Wizz Air, 82 British Airways, seven Jet2, 4 easyJet and 7 Tui were affected. And this did not happen by accident. The OPS Group, a union of pilots and air traffic controllers, said that “aircraft are being targeted with false GPS signals, quickly driving them to a complete loss of navigational ability” in the area.

OPS Group states that “this is not traditional GPS interference. These recent reports are GPS spoofing – and even then, it’s not something we’ve seen before.”

But what is jamming and what is spoofing? All modern airplanes carry equipment that continuously sends and receives signals from Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), such as the US Global Positioning System (GPS) and Europe’s Galileo. This information shows the exact position of the aircraft and helps the pilot to navigate during a flight.

GPS jamming is when someone deliberately tries to overload an aircraft’s signal equipment with constant interference so that it can no longer send or receive GNSS information. This means that the plane’s positioning system will stop working and neither the pilot nor the flight detectors – which may be used by a nearby aircraft or air traffic controllers – will know where the plane is, increasing the chance of accidents.

Jamming is different from GPS spoofing, where someone uses signals to trick the plane’s equipment into thinking they are somewhere else.

The rear admiral Ewa Skoog Haslum she is the head of her Navy Sweden. She is the first female head of Sweden’s Defense Ministry and she is the one who urges with intensity – being in Washington, in the context of an international conference – that NATO “do something” about the case of interference. “The months-long Russian GPS spoofing in the Baltic Sea is not just dangerous. Interference with aircraft and ships is hurting the regional economy – and it’s time for NATO to act,” Haslum said, adding: “For military purposes, we’re actually not affected as much because we’re not as dependent on GPS. But of course this makes it an unsafe area. And when there’s uncertainty in an area, premiums go up.”

Polish Defense Ministry sources earlier told US Newsweek that Russian jamming and spoofing around the Baltic Sea is intended to create an “atmosphere of threats and a feeling in society that it is helpless”.

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