Persistent interference with navigational signals in eastern Europe impacted more than 1,600 airplanes—including civilian aircraft—in less than two days, according to open-source analysis, as jamming plagues the airspace around the Baltic Sea.
Jamming lasting just under 48 hours affected 1,614 airplanes, many of which were civilian aircraft flying around the Baltic region in eastern Europe, according to an open-source intelligence account that regularly tracks GPS interference.
An initial map, posted by the account, shows extensive jamming across Poland and southern Sweden early on Saturday. A later map appears to show interference limited to swathes of northern Poland.
Aircraft flying close to the Baltic region, and several NATO nations in eastern Europe, have reported interference with their GPS signals. Interfering with or spoofing Global Positioning System (GPS) and broader Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) signals can confuse manned or unmanned aircraft, or make their navigation systems believe they are in a different location.
An uptick in GPS interference in eastern Europe in recent months has been blamed on jammers in Russia's Kaliningrad region, the exclave sandwiched between NATO members Poland and Lithuania that serves as a base for one of Russia's major naval fleets.
Publicly available GPS jamming and interference tracking data high levels of interference concentrated almost exclusively across northeastern and northwestern Poland on Monday.
Russia is believed to have significant electronic warfare (EW) resources in Kaliningrad. "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.
Russia's skill at using electronic warfare is "quite strong," General Martin Herem, who heads Estonia's Defense Forces, told Bloomberg in late January. Sweden's Lieutenant Colonel Joakim Paasikivi told Swedish media the same month that he considered the GPS interference the result of "Russian influence activities or so-called hybrid warfare."
Unnamed pilots told Forbes earlier this year that they had started to switch off GPS navigation when passing close to the Baltic Sea and its surrounding countries in favor of other systems, such as inertial navigation.
Incidents have also been registered in the Middle East. OPS Group, a collective of pilots and dispatchers, has said "aircraft are being targeted with fake GPS signals, quickly leading to complete loss of navigational capability" in the region.
"This not traditional GPS jamming," the group said. "These recent reports are GPS spoofing—and even then, not like anything we've seen before."
A Polish Defense Ministry official previously told Newsweek that Russian jamming and spoofing around the Baltic Sea was intended to sow an "atmosphere of threat and a sense of helplessness in society."
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Ellie Cook is a Newsweek security and defense reporter based in London, U.K. Her work focuses largely on the Russia-Ukraine ... Read more
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