Russia Accused of GPS Jamming in Baltic Region

Russia likely is to blame for airplanes being victimized by missing or fake GPS signals while flying over the Baltic Sea region, according to multiple reports.

The GPS jamming has been occurring since Russia invaded Ukraine in an unprovoked February 2022 attack.

Eurocontrol, an international organization focused on safe and seamless air travel across Europe, said there were almost seven times more GPS jamming incidents during the first two months of this year compared to the first two months of 2023.

The organization said it received 985 GPS outages during January and February this year compared with 1,371 for the whole of 2023, Politico reported Thursday.

The blackout episodes seem to be concentrated around Russia's Kaliningrad region, an exclave sandwiched between NATO members Poland and Lithuania that serves as a base for a Russian naval fleet.

"Russian armed forces have a wide spectrum of military equipment dedicated for GNSS interference, including jamming and spoofing, at varying distances, duration and intensity," a Lithuanian defense official told Newsweek earlier this month.

Civilian aircraft are being affected.

"Russia is regularly attacking the aircraft, passengers, and sovereign territory of NATO countries," said Dana Goward, president of the U.S.-based Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, Politico reported.

"It is a real threat. There is one instance of accidentally jamming we know of that almost resulted in a passenger aircraft impacting a mountain."

He was referring to a case reported by NASA in 2019.

Goward linked the recent jamming spike in the Baltic to "Sweden approaching and gaining membership in NATO, and more directly to a U.S. Aegis anti-missile system being installed and activated in northern Poland," Politico reported.

The EU Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) is probing the issue, but regulators say the GPS jamming is not a danger to flights, the outlet said.

It was reported two weeks ago that Russia is believed to have jammed the satellite signal on an aircraft used by defense minister Grant Shapps to travel from Poland back to Britain.

According to a government source and journalists, the GPS signal was interfered with for about 30 minutes while the plane flew close to Russia's Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad.

Earlier this week, Newsweek reported that persistent interference with navigational signals in eastern Europe impacted more than 1,600 airplanes in less than two days.

An open-source analysis posted on X showed extensive jamming across Poland and southern Sweden early Saturday.